Recent Happenings

First things first, I found a belated entry to my "The good, the bad and the Ugly" blog, the Internet Five. As shown in the image (unless Vern Troyer is reading my blog now, better viewed in full-size, so click on it, the come back here to read the blog) you merely place your hand on the screen. similar to the self-five, yet individual in it's own right.

EDIT: Fixed. At all those reading the Crunchbang #! Planet, I apologise. In my blog post, the image is scaled to a reasonable size, but not on the planet. I'll try to be more aware in the future.


Anyway, on to other matters.


Terry Pratchett
I finally got around to watching "Terry Pratchett: Living with Alzheimers" on iPlayer and find that, even when he is talking about a matter so serious, and so close to home, he still gets his lovely wit through.
My favourite two quotes, one from each episode as it would happen, are thing's I Twittered when watching the show. The first one is when he is showing you his office in his house. He has a decent computer, and he has six (yes, 6) screens on his desk. Three large widescreen ones, with non-widescreen versions above. He tells the viewers "Some people ask why I have six screens. It's because I don't have enough room for eight." He is a man after my own heart, and the money to fund it. (I don't even OWN six screens just now, never mind the graphics cards to use them all.)

The quote from the second episode, he is starting to wonder about the future, and he says "I'm thinking will I end up lying somewhere as a vegetable. And part of me is wondering: What kind of vegetable shall I be?"

I'm going to contact his agent, Colin Smythe, and see if there is a chance for him to visit my club at Strathclyde Uni, "The Fanatical Guild of Terry Pratchett Fans" next time he happens to be in Glasgow, as I would love the chance to meet him again.

Crunchbang #!
Philip Newborough is hard at work on the new version of Crunchbang, 8.10.03 (the 3rd version based upon Ubuntu "Intrepid Ibex" aka Ubuntu 8.10) and this one shows many changes. The most important thing is that Crunchbang is now hosted on Launchpad, so anyone can now offer to help Philip with the new version.

The other major change is the introduction of Crunchbang's second supported architecture, though it is only 64-bit support, rather than adding in PowerPC or SPARC. (Or even Alpha ;)

Crunchbang is coming along nicely, and it is currently my Operating System of choice, being on 3 different computers, and soon to be my dad's EEE PC (a 701 4G if anybody cares.)

Final Note
My mum was doing a clear-out of her room, and she found my Primary 1 report card. It's something she has considered throwing out every time she clears out, but always kept it. This time she said either I could take it, or it could go in the bin, so I lifted it for now.

This report card showed I started as I intended to continue in that the teacher's main criticism was that I "Can be rather talkative during task times", a motif that was repeated throughout my time in Primary and Secondary School.

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!