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2008 Straw Poll

I don’t blog politics much, though I’m a pretty passionate liberal (no, really).

DailyKos, one of the more liberal and bigger blogs out there, shared their November straw poll results for the Democratic primary.

Surprisingly enough, Russ Feingold is 2nd in the straw poll for the 3rd month in a row, after Gen. Clark.

Now granted, DailyKos readers are extremely progressive, but I’m still surprised. I had the honor of meeting Senator Feingold one Sunday when we bumped into each other at lunch at Dotty Dumplings Dowry (alas, one of the best burger places ever is gone from Madison now) when he was still a state senator. I’ve followed his career avidly (being from Wisconsin myself), and have great respect for him. Not only is he a maverick, but he votes his conscience. That, combined with how he listens to his voters – every year he visits every Wisconsin county and has a townhall in each one, Sen. Feingold is someone in the party I have great respect for.

Installing and Configuring Ubuntu on a Laptop

LinuxDevCenter.com: Installing and Configuring Ubuntu on a Laptop. Jeremy Jones of the Weather Channel purchases a Dell, and installs Ubuntu on it.

It’s a pretty good overview, and he runs into a couple quirky things that installing Linux on a laptop always seem to have, but no more than desktop installations now. Linux installs on laptops have come a long way in the last two years or so. While I had a similar experience with HP dv1000, it always comes down to the little things. The only big thing I’m still stuck on is suspend support.

Pretty good article if you’re looking to install Linux or Ubuntu on a laptop, especially a Dell.

Wikis as Websites

One of the latest trends in open-source development, is for the projects website to be created with MediaWiki.

This article on Acts of Volition lists a couple others, as well as one of my current favorite pieces of software, Banshee, a music management and player for GNOME. (I’ve been meaning to blog about Banshee for well over a month).

I still have to put a long term plan together on integrating silwenae .com/.net/.org, and MediaWiki might address it. I don’t need all of the power of a Drupal, WordPress is already running my blog, Jinzora will power my music, and Flickr does my photos. I just need something sticky enough to link it all together.

I went and installed MediaWiki on the Apatheia.org website to see if the guild had any interest in using it as a tool. I’ve long thought it might help facilitate guildmembers signing up for a raid, managing rosters, etc, as the guildmembers themselves could update it, and you’re not reliant on one webmaster or officer to step up.

I integrated this hack to use logins from the guild forums into the Wiki, which was quite helpful. And my lack of knowledge around PHP & CSS started to show as I spend two hours last night, just playing with the header image. There aren’t a lot of good tutorials on creating a skin – especially one with a Novell-type flavor that utilizes a Wiki as a normal website. I came across this one, but it was pretty darn high level, and didn’t even go into the PHP elements.

I’m going to tinker with it, especially the navigation pieces and see what happens. I’m also curious from a social networking experiment to see if any guildmembers latch on to it.

Random Football Thoughts

This week’s random football thoughts:

  1. The Chargers’ powder blue unis are the best in football
  2. Unless you are the San Diego Chargers, you should not wear alternate jerseys
  3. Dom Capers is sooo fired
  4. I really, really like Carson Palmer
  5. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s headline this morning was right on: Kick. Win. Repeat.
  6. I really do think the Colts will go undefeated.
  7. Even with Vick having 2 games in a row with a passing rating over 95, I still think he’s overrated
  8. Why are you not reading the best football article anywhere? Go read the Tuesday Morning Quarterback

MAME stuff

Speaking of building a MAME cabinet before, came across this at Digg.com today: Emucation.Com, download roms. They claim to be legal, but I’m not sure how (yet), unless they’re truly abandonware.

Linked off of their emulator page, is Advance Projects, which includes AdvancedMAME (an emulator), AdvanceMenu (a menu program for collating all your ROMs), and AdvanceCD, a LiveCD that only takes up 20 megs, so you can fill the rest of the CD with your ROMs, stick it in any PC, power it on and it’s a full blown MAME box.

Definitely adding that to my bookmarks for when I’m ready to build my cabinet.

The link of the day is Postsecret.

Extremely popular at Technorati, I had never heard of it, and it’s pretty interesting. What is it, you ask? From the site itself:

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail-in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.

And they put up the pictures of said postcards.

Projects to do after Basement is completed

Already looking past the present, things to do once the basement is done, and I consider building a HTPC part of doing the basement.

  1. Make a podcast
  2. Build a MAME cabinet
  3. Drywall the garage so Kelly has a work area
  4. Technorati Tags integration on this here blog
  5. Get Fuse running to manage all my computers / websites
  6. Hack my Buffalo TeraStation to use SSH so I can use the afore-mentioned Fuse
  7. Catalog (online!) my cd, movie and book collections
  8. Fix my server (silwenae.net) (Probably should do this sooner…)
  9. Get paulcutler.org /.com / and .net integrated somehow
  10. Inventory all my stuff (and send updated list to insurance company)

I’m sure I’ve left a bunch of stuff off this list – I always have more ideas than motivation. And this doesn’t include adding the 3rd kid to the family, enjoying my new home theater setup and whatever else pops up.

Flock Review

Newsforge has a pretty good review of Flock up.

I’ve downloaded the Linux client, and while stable, I haven’t really used enough of it to comment yet. It brings together a number of tools I use while browsing, including Flickr and blogging. Delicious bookmarks are definitely something I want to get into a lot more, especially since I share so many computers.

If you’re into Web 2.0 / social networking / insert buzzword here, and want to see read a review of a browser for Web 2.0, hit the link above.