I feel a lot of pressure from all those Acidfree users who are just dying to have Acidfree-6.x released. But that is not the reason I am working on it. I am working on it because 1) I feel a sense of responsibility to do it, and 2) I like working on Acidfree. So I do have a start on the work. When I say start, I mean pre-alpha; not even finished enough to commit to the Drupal CVS repository. I have made commits that I am willing to share with the not-so-faint of heart.

Flu season is upon us. IBM sponsors a flu-shot drive every year, offering flu shots to all employees for free. They have some company come on site and you flash your badge, sign on the line and they shoot you. I got mine about four hours ago. My arm aches. I have a headache too. They said it was a "weakened virus." Weakened how? Did they take each virus and break both legs? Or soak them in acid like you might weaken an eggshell? Well, I tell you from first hand experience, a weak virus is still mean. Maybe it is like a wounded badger; more vicious than ever.

I was so happy to learn that the 2.6.26 kernel had a free as in speech alternative to the madwifi Atheros driver, ath5k. I have not been so happy that it has been crashing my machine periodically. Since diagnosis of a hung machine without a serial console that is running X is nigh on impossible, I had no choice but to fold and go back to madwifi. However, since then, I have moved on to 2.6.27, which has some changes to two wireless APIs, causing the madwifi driver to fail to build. I wanted to leave my desk with its hard-wired connection but didn't want my machine to hang again.

Finally a crust and crumb that I can brag about. This is a loaf that I started as part of a Toastmasters speech. The speech was about how to make the best pizza dough ever. Since for demonstration purposes, the pizza dough and the pain a l'ancienne dough are identical to start with, I figured nobody would notice. Really the only difference is that the pizza dough has slightly less water in it, which makes it less sticky to the point that you can handle it.

I saw this on a friend's blog and wondered where I fit in. I haven't taken an IQ test since I was in elementary school to get into the 'Gifted and Talented' program. I was a genius back then and I guess I still am. I always thought that the IQ tests were a lot of fun since they involved thinking puzzles and patterns, things I really enjoy.

As one of the free swag items that they handed out at the Linux Plumbers Conference, I received an Intel branded 1GB USB flash drive. Unless you are blind, it would have been impossible to notice the BRIGHT red, green and blue blinking LED that was activated any time the device was plugged in. If I was susceptible to epileptic fits, I am sure it would have caused a seizure. Anyway, not being one to tolerate annoying behavior from electronic devices, I decided to fix it. I popped it open at the seam to find that it came apart very nicely, without breaking anything.

In my five years at IBM I have not gone to a real Linux conference. I admit I am partially to blame. I keep telling myself that I will try harder to work on something cool so I can publish it and go to a conference, but I am not really one of the geeks that must be heard. In other words, I have an opinion, but you will most likely have to ask for it.

We have been getting warnings from the government that come February 17, 2009, the world as we know it will end as a new, crisp, digital world will come into focus. The apocalypse? I think not. If Nostradamus was unable to predict that, what makes you think a bunch of suits in Washington can? No, I am talking about the end of analog terrestrial television broadcasts. If you haven't heard about this yet, you may as well crawl back under your rock because it doesn't apply to you.

After four and a half years, I finally got around to changing the keys to our house. So all you who have a key to our house and figured you could copy it and sell it on eBay for lots of money, you lose. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I probably should have done this within the first week of moving in, but having never owned a house before, it never occurred to me. Fortunately, nobody has broken in and stolen anything, so it was a free lesson.

As I was reading my daily quota of SlashDot a few days ago, I stumbled across a very intriguing sci-fi story called Engineers's Dreams by George Dyson. The fact that he could not get it published in any science journals because it is fiction and that he could not get it published in any fiction venues because it was too technical just makes me laugh. In fact that is half the reason I was intrigued enough to read it. That and it is a story about Google.