Thanksgiving Pics

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Well, I used the “studio” Olivia and I setup to take more pics of our Thanksgiving guests and family. In many of these pictures, I know what I wanted to do, but I was limited by the lighting and maneauvering room. I really really wanted to narrow my aperture in many of these pics to get a larger depth of view and to get it sharper, but the lighting just wasn’t there and I think I was already maxing the output on my flash. An addition flash or two for more lighting and balance would really help a lot. Oh yeah, and if I could walk and take pictures through walls.

Edit: Oh yeah, the set is here.

Sister Sister!

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Added a bunch of pics of my sisters to my flickr. I learned I need more lights. Also, I highly doubt that we can turn one of the rooms in our apartment into a studio, there’s just plain not enough room. We’ll need to use a garage or something, lol.

Apartment Bible Study

Well we managed to sky rocket through Hebrews in three weeks which concludes our first book in the Adventures of the Apartment Bible Study Saga. Newcomers to the group were Kathy and Nathan. Kathy, especially, has a knack for diverting the current thread of conversation by throwing out seemingly random questions prefaced with “this has nothing to do with this but…” Given some of the topics we somehow stumbled upon, I believe next week, when we tackle John 1-3, we will also be addressing the issues of world hunger, world peace, why the USA is in Iraq, abortion, killing in self defense, capital punishment, swearing, and the definitions of marriage, love, and flocci­nauci­nihili­pilification. Hehe… j/k.

Roll call for Apartment Bible Study Stardate -318880.47 is: Oliver, Mark, Sam, Chad, Nancy, Kathy, Nathan, Van, Patrick, and Ochs. Kudos to Patrick for being there the last two times and being a good sport (and also providing good input). I feel this has been one of the best Bible study groups I’ve ever participated in because we’re all extremely open with our ideas and thoughts. Also, adding to it are the varying levels of “Bible study experience,” which is really great and provides lots of different view points. Like Van said, thanks everyone for making it a good productive evening.

OoOoooOoh Aaaaaaah

It’s quite amazing how the visual aspects of Linux desktop environments have improved since I first started playing with it. Here’s a page that has a review of Corel Linux (one of the first distros I tried out)… man was that ugly. I think I still have the squeezy pengiun that came with mine (though his head is falling off).

A modern Ubuntu system with GNOME 2.12 is now more akin to this. Man, five years can make a huge difference. =)

… Crap… it’s been five years?!

Not only does it look better but GNOME has improved quite a bit in usability as well. Things are automounting, there are more multimedia applications, it’s crazy! I haven’t really tried a recent build of KDE yet, but I’m sure I’ll get the itch to change soon and I’ll give that a spin as well.

Go OSS!

Done with Ubuntu Reinstall

Since I know I’ll be looking for this info again the next time I reinstall (maybe)… here goes some info dump:

/etc/inetd.conf:

netbios-ssn stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/sbin/smbd
swat stream tcp nowait.400 root /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/sbin/swat
vnc stream tcp nowait nobody /usr/bin/Xvnc Xvnc -inetd :10 -broadcast -desktop=Nibbler -once securitytypes=none -fp /usr/share/X11/fonts/misc -depth 24 -geometry 1024x768
cvspserver stream tcp nowait cvs /usr/bin/cvs cvs -f –allow-root=/cvs pserver

/etc/services:

vnc 5900/tcp #VNC & GDM
cvspserver 2401/tcp

Notes: Have both vncserver and vnc4server packages installed, but I think vnc4server overwrote the old version.

/etc/fstab:

/dev/hda3 /mnt/macosx hfsplus users,rw,auto,exec 0 0

Ummmm… that’s all for now. =)

OS X Woes

Gah, so I rebooted the Mac Mini to give OS X another go. After googling a whole ton, the only way I can figure out how to get multiple remote desktop sessions up and running is this ugly thing which requires all the users you want to allow VNC sessions for to ALWAYS be logged in, plus you have to specify different ports for each one… yuck. If anyone knows a better solutions, let me know. For the time being, I’ll stick with Ubuntu Linux.

Update: Uh oh, lol, I attempted to upgrade Ubuntu to the latest version and didn’t quite follow the instructions correctly so now some things are kinda ugly. Bah, I guess I’ll reinstall tonight… Mark, if you’ll be using it, YMMV. =)

Memory Lane

As requested, this is day two of memory lane…

aoushi: think destiny
aoushi: lol
Owiber: aha!
Owiber: someday
aoushi: she’ll be coming around the mountain when she comes…
Owiber: my wife will be the defender of the universe
aoushi: Whoa, I won’t go that far
Owiber: like Voltron
aoushi: ugh, you destroyed my romantic thoughts
aoushi: I’m going to bed

I found this guy… he’s goofy:

Hohoho, this was a good one (click image for more):

Ahhh… good times (perhaps the best in high school, again, click for more =):

Another little chat snippet:


aIl4Him16: what if france were in the cntinental united states?
Magestry03: lol
Magestry03: like
Magestry03: the whole city, as it is now?

And finally, our attempt to run the country (click for larger image):

Oh yeah, the cover for that CD is also pretty cool IMHO. =)