Personal

As we move into a fully connected world there is a bigger expectation that we allow intrusions into our personal lives. While it may be a blackberry or a pager, in today’s world the expectation is that there is no more 9-5. This social contract is acceptable as long as the contract extends both directions. Studies show that employees that visit facebook or twitter are more productive than those that are expected 8 full hours of heads down work. The reason is simple, the brain is designed to process way more information than we can utilize. By pulling away from a problem the synapses can evaluate in a different vantage. ...

Lexmark provides subpar Linux drivers for any distro, but Ubuntu/Debian is horrible. At work we moved from HP Printers to Lexmark. The situation reminds me of ATI hardware in the late-90’s, great hardware and crappy drivers. I converted the Red Hat RPM for Debian based systems. Attached below: To install sudo dpkg -i drivers-lexprtdrv_552-2_i386.deb

If you are on a OpenSuSE or SuSE SLES/SLED machine and have recently mounted /var to a new parition, you might get the following error: “Error in service module” If it keeps you from logging in, boot single user and touch /var/log/lastlog as root

I am a quarter way through my life. Assuming of course that I live to 100 years old, but that doesn’t seem unreasonable considering the rate of life expectancy change the past century. When you break your time on earth into a dollar and realize you have spent a fourth of it, the feeling is bittersweet. It seems that every trip around the sun carries with it some benchmark the world establishes. “Your life will never be as good as your teens” is just as common to be heard as “Your life will never be as good as your twenties.” So which is it society? Looking back on the 25 thus spent I feel pretty well invested in the trip. God has blessed me beyond my wildest dreams and I am happy. Two things I have always provided myself for measuring progress. Where I leave myself wanting is what now, what now that I am a few years ahead of the life plan. I do not believe in establishing linear milestones for growth, but I simply never expected to be at this moment in time already. What troubles me is what the next 25 will look like! When I cash in that half-dollar will the progression of life compare to the quarter spent? ...

I love me some eye candy that is actually useful. Conky falls into this category for me. In the olden days it was either gkrellm or a WindowMaker plugin. I have spent some time getting the conky setup EXACTLY how I want it. The results are posted below: Install: sudo aptitude install conky lm-sensors hddtemp python-feedparser Extract this file to ~/.bin and make executable. Edit the files for weather.yahoo.com Conky Scripts ...