I’m sure everyone by now has heard that Benoît Mandelbrot died over the weekend.  He basically invented/discovered fractal geometry.  Math was always one of my favorite subjects in school, but I had to work hard at it.  It didn’t really come natural to me.  I am always amazed by smart people, who think different.  Of course the only reason I even know of Benoît Mandelbrot is from the great Jonathan Coulton song.

I am also a big fan of smart songs.

I started blogging in late 2000 when I first got broadband internet.  Sometimes I wish I knew the exact date, or even had some of my old archives, but I didn’t bother taking that stuff with my when I switched to different platforms over the years.

It’s kind of amazing looking at all the different platforms out there now.  When I started blogging there was basically Blogger, or you ran blogging software on your own server.  I started with blogger, but it was a little limiting back then, and it didn’t even allow commenting.  Now with Twitter and Facebook is seems like people are blogging less and less, and probably commenting less too.  I rarely ever comment on blogs, and really couldn’t care less if I had commenting on my blog now.

Blogger has greatly improved since last time I used it, and there are many other blogging options now.  If I was to start blogging right now services like Posterous, Tumblr, or Squarespace would be very tempting.

Posterous has been trying to get people to switch to them these past couple weeks.  I really like Posterous, but I just use it to easily post things here.  It has made it much easier for me to quickly share stuff on my blog that I otherwise wouldn’t bother to spend the time.  That’s really the reason I blog anyway.  I don’t consider myself the best writer, or even like writing all that much, but I love sharing cool things I find in the interwebs.

I’m not going to switch blogging services though.  As tempting as it may be, I like the greater control I have running my own server.

I had a little free time this weekend, so I thought I would try to wrap my head around Final Cut Express. Video editing and photo editing are both things I want to learn to do better, but I don’t do it enough to learn. I am hoping to get a bunch of video from Hawaii and hopefully put together some good videos.

In the past iMovie was just fine for me, but the new version drives me crazy. It’s nice for quick and easy things, but it just feels much more limiting than the older version was. So it was time for me to upgrade to Final Cut Express.

When I first started playing around with Final Cut Express I was lost, but I found an incredible free tutorial online over at IzzyVideo.com. He has a free beginners guide course, and it was so good it made we want to be a subscriber to get his paid videos, but his prices are a little more then I want to spend on something I don’t do all that often.

With the help of the tutorial I feel I can use Final Cut Express as proficient has I did the old version of iMovie, but I still have a lot of learning and playing around with to do. I just need to get off my butt and make more videos so I have more to play around with.

I have been playing around with Google’s embeddable fonts for the last couple weeks. They give a site a little different look without having to worry about anybody else having the fonts installed. There is a fine line between looking different and being easy to read though. Some of the fonts seemed tough to read, and some were missing some special characters. The font selection is a little limited. I finally decided on Vollkorn, and after a few css tweaks, think it looks good. It seems to be working in all the browsers that I have tried. I even opened up IE for the first time in Windows 7 and was surprised that the fonts even worked in IE. If your browser isn’t supported it should fall back to my previous font, Helvetica.

For about three weeks or so I have been working on installing the latest version of Ubuntu, Lucid Lynx on one of my older computers. I have been playing around with Linux on and off for over 10 years, and for some reason this was the hardest install ever. Nothing against Ubuntu. Usually Ubuntu is easier that Windows to install, I just had hardware problems.

My first guess was I needed to upgrade my BIOS. I searched all around for an update, but could not fine one, so I started swapping out different parts of hardware. I pretty much swapped out everything, and could not get the install to finish. It would either lock up halfway through, or complete the install and not boot up.

Yesterday I finally found a BIOS upgrade — upgraded — and bingo, it worked. I am now typing this on my beautiful Ubuntu Lucid Lynx system.

So now I am going to post the BIOS update that worked for me. If someone else is having the same problem with an Asus K8V SE Deluxe motherboard here is the BIOS that allowed me to install Lucid Lynx with no problems.

Just unzip the file (K8VSEDX.007) and rename it K8VSEDX.ROM, then update your BIOS however you want. Either from a floppy drive, or the way I did with the Asus update software.

Thank you Google for reminding me that today is Pac-Man’s 30th birthday. Pac-Man was the game that got me into gaming and technology in general. 30 years ago I was only five, so I am not sure if I was playing it then or not, but I remember going to the local roller rink to play the arcade games, and Pac-Man was the best one. When I finally got my Atari 2600 I was in heaven being able to play Pac-Man whenever I wanted for free in my living room. I played that game for hours, and nobody could beat my high scores.

Today you can play Pac-Man right on Google. I got suckered in and played it for a half hour. It’s such an addicting game for me–maybe more so than Tetris even. If you missed playing Pac-Man on Google, you can play it here:

I have heard that some people don’t like reading on the iPad because of it’s backlit screen making their eyes sore. I have not experienced that at all. I have read on my iPad for several hours at a time and have had no eye problems. I have finished one book, and have started my second.

The thing that bugs me the most is the DRM on the different eBooks. You can buy books with the iBooks app, but you are stuck with watching them in that app. The same with the Kindle app. Both apps are very suitable for reading books on the iPad, but I much prefer the iBooks app. The iBooks app has page numbers, and tell you how many are left in the current chapter as you go. It’s much easier to track your process through a book. The problem is the iBooks store is currently very limited. Fortunately breaking the Kindle DRM was only a Google search away, making Kindle books readable in the iBooks app.

I despise DRM. I believe I should have the right to consume the media I buy in whatever way I prefer. I never bought DRMed music, and if it wasn’t so easy to break, I wouldn’t buy DRMed eBooks. Maybe someday eBooks will be DRM free and readable on any reader, but until then, I will just have to remove it.