Planet Geek!

We've been hunting around for an inexpensive rider mower for Mosaic ever since we moved in. Since the playfield is getting close to mowing length, I was beginning to worry we wouldn't find something in time.

We found this little fellow at a roadside mechanics house up here in Maine. He always has snowblowers, mowers, and other small tractors out for sale. He finds, fixes, and rhen sells them out in front of his house.

I just used it to mow the small field up here at the Maine house, and it worked great. I'll be hauling it home on Sunday and, weather permitting, I'll start working on the grass that's out of range of our electric pushmower.

A recent series of changes at Yahoo have made the Yahoo Messenger portion of Pidgin misbehave. There have been various workarounds (such as using some of Yahoo's non-converted servers), but finally the 'proper' fix is in the pipeline.

I just did an Ubuntu update, and it included the patch that has been working through various versions. Thanks bigtime to the Pidgin team and the Ubuntu maintainers for backporting the fix into Ubuntu Jaunty.

For full details on the patch, see this page which discusses the issue and gives good suggestions.

During my brief stint in college, I was required to take a 'phys ed' credit every trimester. Not being a particularly sporty person at the time, I decided to try 'Juggling', and was immediately hooked.

With all the bruhaha going on about finding the 'lost' NASA moonlanding tapes, a conversation came up on a tech list I'm on regarding some of the misinformation floating around. Scott Dorsey, a man who has been involved in audio tech for many many years, sets the record straight:

Back from an awesome weekend in upstate New York with about 180 friends. Geek camping at it's best.

One of the the weekend was making in the neighborhood of 140 different flavors of ice cream using liquid nitrogen as the freezing agent.

Zach participated pretty freely this year, and much fun was had by all.

Edited on 7/1/2009 to correct poor english and iPhone-induced spelling artifacts.