Category: General

I have installed Xubuntu 6.06 on my (and I use the term loosely) Fujitsu P1120. Actually, I’ve installed it about six times so far.

Xubuntu promises a lighter weight window manager for use on older or slower processors like the 800 MHz Crusoe in the P1120, but installation from a netboot is not at straightforward as installing the Ubuntu desktop. The instructions at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InstallingXubuntu help a lot.

The good news is that the display is automatically configured with the right 1024×600 resolution. The bad news is that the mouse freezes after a suspend-resume, the wireless doesn’t yet work though the Networking tool says that it’s enabled, and I can’t yet persuade it to use the preexisting encrypted filesystem that is happily used by multiple JDS installs on the same machine.

In the same month that I was told I was RIFed, I was given a bonus. I’m not complaining, I’m just bemused at how big companies operate.

For the last ten years, the first line on http://www.menteith.com/ has been “Forgive the spartan appearance, but w’re just moving in.”

It may have taken ten years and there are still a few rough edges, but we’ve, or I’ve, finally moved in.

The website uses Norm’s DocBook Website DTD and stylesheets. It was a learning experience to get it building correctly on Windows (since my Linux laptops will shortly no longer be mine). The best part of the whole exercise was finding the existence of the “hspacer” named template for adding space between the navigation bar and the body of a page. I’ve been wanting something like that for about the last five years, and the next thing I’ll do is update the xmlroff website at http://xmlroff.org/ to also use it. To give credit where credit is due, I found out about it from Bob Stayton’s “DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide” at http://sagehill.net/docbookxsl/WebsiteFormat.html.

When I was RIFed, several past colleagues (both RIFed and unRIFed) sent me their LinkedIn details. Since I hadn’t paid it any attention before, I asked around and was told variously that it was useful, that it was potentially useful, and by one person that he expected to do most of his job-hunting there.

So I joined.

When last I checked, my LinkedIn home page breathlessly informed me that I had over 88,200 connections and that my network had recently expanded to include the Fishery industry. I don’t know that I care. I do know that I’m not planning on doing anything involving the Fishery industry (though I make no promises that I won’t), and I also know that the 88,200+ includes, but is not limited to, an Independent Ranching Professional and at least one Railroad Manufacture Professional. The LinkedIn premise of building “a powerful network of trusted professionals” so that I can “[t]ap into inside connections and information” wears a bit thin when the vast majority of my “network” are that far outside my sphere.

LinkedIn may be a useful place to keep your contacts’ information (provided the information doesn’t go the way of 700GB of PlusNet emails), but you’d still want a local copy if you’re writing email while offline.

LinkedIn’s real use may be for catching up with people that I used to know, the “Find and reconnect with colleagues and classmates” part of their value proposition, but I have found that there’s many names for which I searched for which there is no match. I did discover Ikeda-san who I first met when I lived in Japan and did also find the name of someone who was RIFed from Sun Ireland last year. LinkedIn, however, doesn’t provide contact details until you have a “Connection”, so rather than issuing a LinkedIn “Invitation” and relying on the kindness of people in the USA to forward my invitation through multiple hops and back to Ireland, I used the old-fashioned technique of doing a web search to find him, and tomorrow I will use the old, old-fashioned technique of using the telephone to call him.

So LinkedIn mostly seems to me to be a large, multi-player computer game where you earn points in the game by making connections to increase the size of your network. My character in the game is a 15-contact Personal Account with 90% profile completeness, 33% network completion, 1 endorsement, and 88,200+ network points.

This is the first blog entry for http://tkg.menteith.com.

I have walked my shadow over from my previous, much neglected blog at http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/menteith (which may soon be heard no more).

The benighted template system for this blog software, which comes with the web hosting service, won’t let me put the complete quote from Shakespeare that I want in the tag line, so here it is:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5

Here’s hoping that you’ll walk with me as I strut and fret my hour upon the stage (which itself is four times as long as Andy Warhol would have credited me with).

Regards,

Tony.