High Fives: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

We are all familiar with the common or garden high five, but there are many other ones out there. In this, I aim to enlighten you as to which to avoid, and which to covet.

The Good

Meme Five
Now don't mistake me, I love Internet Memes, but there are far too many of them. Over 9000 some might say. So when I say this, I mean more friend specific in-jokes, rather than full-blown memes. Having said all that, there IS the following:

Rick Astley/ RickRoll Five
Sometimes, this can come across as a bit of a jerk thing to do, but when rickrolls are properly executed (the best ones being ones IRL like this) They can actually be excellent, and in such cases generally deserve a Five.

The Bad

Self Five
The Self five is one of the most pitiable objects on the earth.


The Ugly

Torture Five
The Torture Five is when the Geneva Convention is pushed to its limits in order for one person to take an undeserved Five from another. The Torture Five is to be avoided at all costs, and it is often reccomended to give an undeserved Five, rather than be involved in someone taking a Five from you.

"Thats what she said" Five
Now it may seem that this is, in fact, a very positive thing, but under many occasions, the phrase gets overused, and you end up with needless Fives being given for things that, in retrospect, weren't very great at all.


Remember: only allow Fives when they have been earned.


In other, more serious news, I'd like to tell everyone about a great Linux Distrobution I have been using called #! Crunchbang Linux.

It uses the "Openbox" window manager, and has a cool resource monitor called Conky. Conky can be set up to tell you network usage, disk space, your rapidshare points, you could probably use it with twitter, you can have it tell you the weather, it's endlessly scriptable, and there is a large following of people who love to mess about with it.




That's one of my set-ups, though I did keep mine simple. Oh, and the standard theme is very minimalist, but I picked an even MORE minimalist theme. The thing entitled "Terminator" on the left is the standard terminal for the distrobution, but my theme means its top bar fades into the black of the wallpaper.



EDIT: Fixed all the superflous apostrophies. Sorry Al!

Windows 7: Now we're getting somewhere

Well, now that people have actually been allowed to get the Windows 7 Beta, I have to say it's looking good. Not the greatness that Microsoft needed right now, but good. it's what Vista wanted to be, basically.

As is normal for a Microsoft release, they have moved some of the advanced options further away from us. I spent a good half hour trying to find how to do something that takes 2 minutes in Xp and 5 in Vista, so not all is good.

There are various posts in the web talking about how you can fix any of the issues annoying you (most notably, having text on the "superbar", so you can see which have active windows, and which are quickstart buttons.)

Overall I'm happy enough with Seven, but it's just Vista SP2, and Microsoft needed mroe than that.

XP is dying on my machine, despite only being there for a few months, so I'm moving to Linux full-time. Seven's not there as a full-time OS, in my opinion, so I'll be wiping my computer when there's a final version of a Linux OS with ext 4 support (probably looking at kubuntu 9.04)

The "Adamo"

Dell have announced a range of laptops, the Adamo, which are targeted in the same way as the Macbook Air. Hit this link for pictures.

News is still slim, but as Neowin says, the first one is definitely under an inch thin, and will have a 13" screen, so it's still up a bit from a Netbook.

Before I consider anything else, not that there's much to consider given the sparse details at this point, but it has an Ethernet Port (something lacking from the Air which has always annoyed me) and it also appears to have an external SATA port, which is good for high speed external HDD's, though tbh, I'd wait until they release a version with USB3.0 if that's what you're worried about.

Micro$oft

I guess it was too good to be true.
Microsot appeared to be giving a good, well-finished piece of code. For free no less.

But, alas, the Windows 7 Public Beta is not with us yet.

As many have come to expect, Microsoft are no masters of the web. There were many ways they could have avoided their servers not coping with the demand (a queuing system to ensure only those 2.5mill that were there first got a key, using bittorrent protocols (even heavily managed ones like Akami) to allow people to DL the Beta. (As it is, there are already gonna be more than 2.5mill who download it, so surely it doesn;t matter then?)

I think we can all agree that Microsoft need to think more about large deployments, especially over the web. The beta, which is the same "Build 7000" that has been floating around for a few weeks on torrent, is apparently very polished. Microsoft knew the Beta was already on torrent, so surely it would have made sense to publish an official torrent, and just leave their servers to distribute the key to those lucky 2.5million users (whom I hope to be one of)? C'mon M$, the key is under 1Kb, you can do better than this!

All I can say is, a shout out to @brandonleblanc on Twitter for doing his best to keep us informed.

Anyway, I have Ben & Jerry's to go eat (Chunky munky as comfort food for no Windows 7 key =P) so I'll leave you all to it.

Well now... I've never heard such crap in all my life.... Where do I start on the Fox News team?

"You're an atheist, but let's use one of the ten commandments to prove your point."

There are two major things wrong with that sentiment.

The first is that stealing is illegal and that, while you go to say we are undermining civility, we aren't the ones who stole the sign (I think it's a fair assumption to make that this was no atheist who stole the sign, yes?)

The second point is that, if we surmise it was someone of faith, most likely the Christian Faith, who stole the sign, then that means a Christian broke the commandment, and the sign is to feature it as a reminder to those who would steal the sign again.

"People who can't leave well enough alone and enjoy the good cheer of the season."

Most atheists enjoy the "good cheer", and many still even celebrate christmas, as it is a good chance for the family to get together, and to show our appreciation for each other. Even Richard Dawkins, probably the most high-profile atheist of our time, has said that he celebrates christmas.

"Now atheists need their 15minutes of fame"

Seriously? We're just trying to make people think. To remind them there ARE alternatives. Most people believe in the religion most popular in their country, or the one their parents believe in. Many don't realise there are alternatives, and just blindly follow their faith without questioning if they are following the right one, or if they should follow one at all. If you read the original sign (the stolen one) then you would see that all we wanted was to make people think, to question.

She then goes on to call atheists "trolls", but has also said 10 seconds previously that some of her "best friends are atheists". Given the narrow mind she is showing, and the fact that she just called these people trolls, I would be surprised if those people are her friends for much longer.

"If you don't stand up and fight for it, it might just disappear"

It's now only right, according to this fox news anchor, for the christians to "stand up and fight" for what the believe in. All we atheists ask is the respect that we try and give you (or I certainly do) in return. At school, being an atheist was not sufficient reason to not pray, or not attend church at christmas and easter, and in my primary school, we had a prayer at most assemblies, as the local minister attended.

She has said, to the entirety of the United States of America live, and viewable the world over on youtube, that the best solutions to atheists are to either ignore us, or to make a mockery of us.

I'd like to actually use the topic of Rudoplh here to make an analogy: Atheists are currently Rudolph, and we need to prove to the world, or certainly Fox News, that we deserve to be let in out of the cold. That we are just as good as the other Reindeer.

"That's a complete insult" referring to what was said about "Thou shalt not steal", re-read my above points on that please.

Anyway, just a quick blog, because I had too many points I wanted to make about this.

- Michael

Sleep

This weekend I have slept about 24hrs. Yes, that's right, I've slept as much as I have been awake. Actually, more. I'd need to stay up till midnight to have been awake as long (which I might be).

There's something wrong with me. Probs a stomach bug or something, but my body has decided to sleep it off. Hopefully I'll be better this week, coz I need to knuckle down with my uni stuff.

Well now...

So, I've been suffering from ever-mounting levels of stress. So much so that I haven't been to classes properly in over a fortnight (a new someone in my life has helped the last fortnight be good tho.)

Everything just piles up, doesn't it? You get to needing a break quickly...


Any ideas for breaks?
Or income-sources? those might be nice too....