What a year to be an Essendon supporter

What would most Essendon supporters remember of the seasons between 2002 and 2009?
I know I've been to my 11 games per season but I'm really struggling:

• I remember (missing) Jim's 2004 game where he hugged a fan.
  
• I remember Jim and Sheed's last game - both at the G and then at Subiaco.

Now, 2009 is a completely different story! There was the Anzac day game, after which my voice was ruined for a couple of days; both Carlton games, which just warmed the heart; I think the first Hawthorn game left supporters  feeling that maybe Essendon were finals worthy and not just lucky.

Then there were the last 3 weeks. The St Kilda game is one I will always remember. The feeling that Essendon were just unstoppable in the third quarter took me right back to 2000. Finally, there was Saturday's game against Hawthorn. Hawthorn were undermanned, probably younger (I've thrown out my Prospectus) but they were the reigning Premiers! Essondon were fitter, smarter and much more mature and composed when they needed to be (oh, and after the game).

Who knows what this week will bring with regard to suspensions, appeals, elimination and qualifying finals. All I know is that in 50 years time when I'm looking back on my life as an Essendon supporter I will remember with great pleasure the thrill of being a bomber in 2009.

Which linux distribution is right for you?

The one that works the best out-of-the-box.

I have spent a great deal of the week attempting to get openSUSE 11.1, 11.2 RC6, Fedora 12 Alpha, and then finally Kubuntu to run on my new laptop (Dell Inspiron 1545).

Firstly, the wireless chip on the 1545 is the wonderful broadcom 4312 for which no open source drivers exist. Thus a third party tool is required for all distros to get the chip working. (There goes 3 hours of research and experimentation)

Next, the intel graphics chip (945GM) is a stunner. It is one of a few that work very poorly with the intel graphics drivers that basically every distro runs as standard at the moment. New drivers fix the problems, but new drivers are only available on very new distros (which led me to 11.2 RC6).

As this is getting boring I will summarise with a chart:

So after 6 months of openSUSE (and a year of Mint prior to that) I've now switched to Kubuntu.

I use linux because I find that for every day computer use it is prettier, easier to use and more reliable. However, the install process can still be a pain for people who haven't mastered google.

So what should I have done? Find the distro that worked best on my laptop, or stick with openSUSE, get 11.1 or .2 to work and put back into the community with my knowledge on how to fix the problems.

Things I'm missing from KDE (and things I'm not)

I just bought a Dell Inspiron laptop, of course it came with Vista pre-installed. As I am yet to find my copy of openSUSE after moving house I am discovering what is/was actually good about Vista and what, after a year of KDE use, I had begun to take for granted.

Things I am Missing:
The ability to right click any window and say "Stay on Top".
Is there a better way to distract yourself whilst doing important work than watching an episode of Mad Men? Of course if the video is constantly ending up behind your word document you can miss all of the stylish clothing and wafting smoke. KDE (and GNOME I believe) allow the user to right-click and then select a "Keep This On Top" option. Meaning that despite your typing the movie stays as the uppermost window on the screen.

Of course whilst this is my most common use of the function I can imagine in the future I will want to reference an open window whilst typing into another (for instance transferring a small amount of data from a text file to excel), I can imagine that without the Keep On Top option this task will be tedious.

The ability to download practically anything ignoring the risk of viruses

Earlier I was about to download something (A freely available DJ mix) from a site that had a slightly dodgy name and was packaged as a .zip file but then I realised "Hang on, what if this is a virus?". Thanks to obscurity and what I'm lead to believe is a better permission and security system (I haven't done any thorough investigation into this though) I never had any problems downloading random zips and seeing what was inside on my linux system.

Workspaces

I have always wondered if I really did need 4 seperate desktops as is the KDE default. It turns out I did. Although I never had a well organised system for using them I did enjoy just dragging things such as media players off to the side, knowing that I wouldn't have to alt-tab through another window. However, when I was ready for it *BAM* it was back, already maximised and ready to be intereacted with (compared to something that has minimised to the system tray).

Things I'm enjoying on Windows:

The knowledge that I can run multiple programs that use the audio without all of them failing.

I'm pretty sick of playing something in Amarok only to find that flash video becomes audio-less until a browser restart. I had so many problems with audio on my previous system that I just got the feeling most of my fellow linux users felt that sound was a primitive sense.

Office 2007

Good looking documents and presentations are so much easier to make on 2007 than on Open Office.

The Future:

Probably a dual booted system with openSUSE for day-to-day operations and Vista for Office and some VB6 software development for work. Whether or not this will be possible (soon) is a post for another day.

The Tram Sessions

This is the Göteborgs Indie Choir covering Marble House by The Knife (on a tram).

Facebook Privacy

Ars has just posted a good guide to controlling your privacy on facebook.

It might just allow you to befriend your parents and colleagues yet still post photos of yourself drunken dancing on a Saturday night.

Also, the blog has ground to a halt as I don't really have a heap of computer time at the moment (or my own computer). I expect this will be rectified within a fortnight.

I wish

The Hives playing all of your favourites

The notes he sings in Hey Ya are the same I sing... not the right ones.