Beach Feet

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Our friend Don and his girlfriend were visiting for a few days, and yesterday around noon we took them to a nearby beach. It was the first time that we’d been to one in several years… we remembered to use sunscreen, so I only got a very mild sunburn on one shoulder, and GoddessJ on one side of her back (I guess we didn’t quite use enough in those places).

But only GoddessJ thought to bring beach footwear. “No big deal,” thought I, “I’ll just grit my teeth and walk to the water barefoot. It’s just sun-warmed sand, it won’t be that hot.”

Well, that was the theory, anyway.

It’s a very deep beach, which made for a very long walk. You can usually burrow your feet in a little way and get to cooler sand, but that didn’t work here — that sand was HOT, as far as I could burrow. Hot enough to raise very large blisters on the bottoms of both of my feet. That made the requisite walk back to the car… interesting, to say the least.

Fortunately, the damage doesn’t seem to be as bad as the blisters would imply. Even last night, my feet only really hurt when I had to put pressure on them, and this morning most of the pain and awkwardness is because I’m trying not to walk on the blistered parts (which, of course, are the parts that I normally walk on). But it’s a good thing my job doesn’t require much standing or walking, because that’s not going to be high on my list of enjoyable things to do for the next few days.

“Suspended-animation cold sleep achieved in lab”

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This would be extremely useful, and not just for medical purposes — “cold sleep” is a common plot device in science fiction books and movies, for dealing with decades-long interstellar voyages, just as one example. And since humans obviously can do it, I think it’s inevitable that science will find a way to harness it, and likely sooner than later.

“State of Decay”

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I generally find Verity Stob pretty over-the-top, but she didn’t have to exaggerate this one much, if at all. It’s an old one, but it had me smiling and nodding because I’ve seen more than my fair share of Windows machines with nearly every one of the symptoms she mentions. Far too often they’ve been my machines, too.

And the problems aren’t completely fixed yet. Just a couple weeks ago, I had to deal with a relative’s Vista machine, which couldn’t open half of its Control Panel pages for some reason. It didn’t look like it had malware either, that was all Windows. Things have gotten better though… a decade ago, I used to have to reinstall Windows every six months or so, now it’s up to nearly a year and a half.

Linux, in my experience, has been a lot more stable.

“Protecting Cars with The Club”

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I’ve never had a car that invites theft, so I’ve never even considered buying The Club. It turns out that that’s a good thing… it’s not just useless against professional thieves, it can actually attract them.

(My preferred theft-deterrent? Drive a decent-looking older car. It has worked for me for a long time. 😉 )

“Ubuntu Lucid Lynx: free OS that Just Works”

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I started using Ubuntu three years ago, pushed to it by the advent of Windows Vista and Microsoft’s stated intention to force all Windows users to it. It was quite an effort to switch at that point, but it was a lot easier than it had been even a year earlier. And with every new version, I’ve watched it get better and easier. Several of my non-geek friends use it now too, at least part time. My sister-in-law asked me to put it on their family computer, after she literally watched a piece of malware (let in by one of her daughters, who wouldn’t stop downloading and installing things) steal her IM password. Even my mother-in-law uses it when she does her online banking.

Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author and one of the founders and editors of Boing Boing, switched to it about six months earlier than I did. He’s been promising a write-up about his adventures ever since, but it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that he finally got around to anything like it. The reason?

I know I once promised to document my Ubuntu Linux changeover in detail, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. To be honest, there just wasn’t much to write about. I bought a ThinkPad (currently using the X200, lusting after the X201), downloaded and burned a CD, stuck it in the drive, turned it on, clicked “Install.” […] Since then, it’s Just Worked.

I’ve had a lot more problems than that, but most of them were caused by me pushing the envelope, trying to do things that the OS just wasn’t designed for, like on-the-fly drive encryption (which is now built in!). With the exception of some hardware problems on my mother-in-law’s machine (caused by repeated brownouts and, more recently, a lightning strike), I’ve seen pretty much zero problems for anyone else.

As he says, it Just Works. It’s good enough now for pretty much anyone to use, and is getting better with every release. Its share of the market is still minuscule, but it’s on a pretty strong growth curve. It wouldn’t take much to convince a lot more people and companies to switch to it — a fact that Microsoft seems painfully aware of, and scared enough to pee its collective pants over. And that’s a good thing for the rest of us.

Now we just need someone to do the same to another tech company that’s gotten a little too arrogant recently, symbolized by a piece of half-eaten fruit… 😉