June 2008 archive

Outside South Station

Finally! Let’s start looking at some pictures from my trip to Boston. I’m not much of a city-dweller, but I enjoy visiting cities and wandering around like a tourist with my camera. This was taken outside of South Station, where the Silver Line meets up with the Red Line.

2816 x 2112

Self service: 1600×1200 1280×1024 1280×960 1152×864 1024×768 800×600 640×480

Shot with: 6 mega-pixel Canon SD600

Shared with: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License

I’m Losing It

Where it equals weight. I’m losing some weight and it feels great. More on that below, but first:

Hi, readers! How have you been? You may have noticed I haven’t been especially communicative lately. There’s a lot I might write about free software and culture, but for some reason I hesitate. Maybe I don’t feel confident in what I want to say.

And also I’m keeping busy with other stuff. Enjoying the summer. Last year I made the big switch to Ubuntu right at the start of June and that drove a lot of activity and posts. It also led to some regret at my time allocation. This year I’m coasting along more and taking it easy, enjoying time away from the computer and with the family. No regrets there, although as always I’m itching to do something.

One project I started in …

Randy Pausch on the World Book Encyclopedia and Wikipedia

Some or many of you have probably heard about Randy’s Pauch’s “Last Lecture.” Randy is a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He gave a stirring and inspirational talk on September 18, 2007, titled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” I was emailed a link to a condensed version of this talk and I loved it, getting a bit choked up about somebody so enthusiastic and full of life and with a wife and young children, having to be “done too soon.”

However! Randy’s still hanging in there. He worked with Jeffrey Zaslow on a book version of the talk, which expands on the lecture. You can see the full talk for free …

Now Playing: Big Buck Bunny

It’s here! Big Buck Bunny is a free short movie created by the Peach open movie project. The animated movie is freely licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which means, according to their “about” page: “you can freely reuse and distribute this content, also commercially, for as long you provide a proper attribution.”

Big Buck Bunny was made primarily with the awesome free Blender 3D graphics software. As far as I know, all the software used was free software, so you can download software and project files all for free and use them however you wish. That’s cool.

I wrote about the project last year: Peach! (Free Software, Free Movies). I’ve been following their blog with interest since learning about the project and investing in it …