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Tour de Cure – Sending Diabetes OTB

By Rich Johnson on Published: June 10, 2011 at 8:13 am

Tour de Cure - 20 Years Riding Strong

Cycling 100 miles for a cause and sending diabetes Off The Back!

On Sunday, June 12, 2011, I will ride for over 100 miles to help raise awareness and collect donations for the American Diabetes Association. As it currently stands I have $825 out of $1,000 in donations. A special thanks goes out to my fellow KDE hackers, Athletes By Design cycling team members, family, and friends. All I need to complete my donation campaign is raise another $175, and I am hoping any of you can help. The minimal donation allowed through the Tour de Cure is $5, however if you would like to donate just a $1 or less than $5, you can use the donate button to the right and I will move that money over. To donate directly to my Tour de Cure collection, please go to http://main.diabetes.org/goto/nixternal. Any and all donations are greatly appreciated!

A few years ago my mother was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, and I have other family and friends who are also battling either Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes. I see the pain they go through day in and day out living with this disease. Now before some of you say it is their fault, often with my family and friends it isn’t. Among friends is a professional cyclist riding for Team Type 1 who has had it since he was a kid. I am just trying to do my part in helping an organization that is all about teaching and finding a cure. I am riding for my mother as well as my family and friends.

I know that with your help I can reach my goal. Also check your local areas for the Tour de Cure ride and sign up, then let me know so I can donate to your goal. It is a very well-organized and fun ride. I will be riding with about 10 of my other cycling teammates as well as friends and colleagues. Thanks everyone!

Posted in Cycling, Personal | Tagged | 2 Responses

Canonical shut down Sounder?

By Rich Johnson on Published: April 22, 2011 at 9:40 am

NO THEY DIDN’T!

It seems a story is making its way around the various Linux news organizations that is blatantly misrepresented. THIS STORY is the one making its rounds. It claims that Canonical takes another step against the Community. This is totally wrong in every sense of the word wrong. Let me break it down for those of you who actually believe this on the shut-down of the Sounder Mailing List.

The Community Council voted, unanimously I might add, to close down the Sounder. Here are the current members of the Community Council:

  • Alan Pope
  • Benjamin Mako Hill
  • Daniel Holbach
  • Elizabeth Krumbach
  • Emmet Hikory
  • Mark Shuttleworth
  • Matthew East
  • Mike Basinger

Those names which are in BOLD LETTERS are members of the Community Council who are NOT employed by Canonical. So that is 6 out of 8 members, or 75%.

So, to make sure people like the Anthony Papillion, aka the Cajun Techie, understand this, CANONICAL DID NOT SHUT DOWN THE SOUNDER, THE COMMUNITY DID!. This was an issue back in 2009 when I was on the Community Council, and my opinion then is that it should have been shut down, as I never saw the service it provided or any good in it whatsoever. There are other channels of free speech, and I thought the Sounder was useless then. Good riddance it is finally gone.

EDIT: I just changed Emmet to a Canonical employee, so that is now 5 out of 8 members are not Canonical employees, or 62.5%.

EDIT: I changed Emmet back to a non-Canonical employee, so it is back to the original 6 out of 8, or 75%.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 35 Responses

My Kubuntu Natty Opinions

By Rich Johnson on Published: April 15, 2011 at 3:52 pm

Well, I finished up installing and setting up the latest Kubuntu release, Natty Beta 2. Everything went smooth, no hiccups at all. Seems a little peppier in its step, however the main reason for installing today was because I was tired of the slowness of my last install. Nothing like installing from scratch, only to realize you forgot to backup one directory, therefor losing a bunch of work. Seeing as I like pretty much everything about the latest Kubuntu, I will only address the things that are annoying to me or do not work at all.

Fonts
By default the fonts are awful looking. I am not well versed in all of the fontness, however I can say the fonts are blurry as hell after an install. First thing I did here was Enable Use anti-aliasing in System Settings, and then set the Hinting style to Full. After a quick restart the fonts are now nice and crisp looking.

Network Mangler
Jeesh, for 2 years now I have had to manually enter the MAC address of my wireless router because I utilize a hidden SSID. Looks like I will be spending another 2 years adding that address to ~/.kde/share/apps/networkmanagement/connections/{35570ccd-a656-491e-97d0-622d29ba020b} for seenbssids=. I will make sure I tag this post KDE so the Network Manager folks can yell at me and show me I am doing something wrong.

I seriously think those are my only 2 gripes, and both gripes are easily fixed in less than a minute each. There are a couple of new things too that finally work.

Printing
YAY! Huge hugs to the person who implemented the network printing stuff, or at least fixed it so now I don’t have to install the GNOME printer applet or whatever it is called just to install a shared network printer. Kudos to you my friend or friends, job well done!

Bluetooth
I can connect to my phone, I can send it a file! Haven’t been able to do this before. To be honest, I never used it, and after using it today it made me realize one thing. Bluetooth sucks, except for those little ear pieces we see all the wanna-be business people wearing. You know, the things where people look like they are talking to themselves but really aren’t, or they could the new school posers acting like they are important. I am choosing the latter there.

Like I said, overall I am really impressed with what I am seeing here. As some of you know, I have been a bit bummed over the past year with Kubuntu and Ubuntu and annoyed by so much. Seeing this release makes me cheer up a bit and realize just what I am missing by not sitting in IRC for 24 hours a day running pbuilder constantly. Damn, now that I put it that way, I don’t know if I was missing that 🙂

Kudos Ubuntu and Kubuntu hackers on a job well done!

Posted in Linux | Tagged , | 16 Responses

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