(This is in memory of Ken Robertson, a very close friend of mine, who was killed in a car accident in Ottawa on Friday, August 27, 2004. The letter I wrote in 2005 is in limbo at the moment, and I don't recall where 2007's letter went, but my 2006 letter can be found at http://iandouglas.com/news/letter-to-ken)

Hey Buddy,

I can't believe it's only 4 months until Christmas! 2008 has flown by.

It's been a while since I've posted anything on a 'personal' level in a while, but after coming home from work with a migraine induced by stress, lack of sleep and lack of a quiet workplace these days, I found myself quite unable to sleep with everything going on around me. One of the things I hate most about myself is my complete inability to fall asleep with something on my mind. I could run a marathon (figuratively speaking) and be utterly physically exhausted, but lie awake for hours if something haunts me.

Direct from Sean Moss-Pultz, leader of OpenMoko:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.handhelds.openmoko.community/15738

3rd last paragraph:
Thousands of FreeRunners have been loaded into planes and fired around
the world. Many of our distributors have already begun shipping. In
about another week, Steve and Harry will announce the opening of our own
webshop.

Georgia Lab Rescue is back online, complete with forums to help those in the state of Georgia to find homes for their dogs (or dogs for their homes). We'll see what Kim has up her sleeve next for GLR.

I've also reinstalled their Labradays 2005 Calendar Contest Fund-Raiser software; while registration and voting is long over, you can still check out the winning results. If you're interested in licensing a copy of the software, contact me for details.

After a lot of digging and some tweaking, I *finally* have Ubuntu playing nicely on my work laptop, so wanted to post my findings here in hopes it can help someone else.

My video chipset:
$ lspci | grep Graphics
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)

Online advertising was something that used to really get under my skin. Why on earth would I want to see blinky flashy ads on web sites when all I want to do is read some content? The first plugin I'd install with Firefox on any computer was Adblock Plus.

Hey all,

Spent the weekend migrating my Blackjack 2 information, hacks, app reviews, etc., to a new site where we'll have forums to discuss topics, and so on. Thus was born: http://blackjack2.info/

If you've already registered a username at iandouglas.com, your username will still exist at the new site, and you'll need a user account to post messages in the forums.

Ubuntu, you have let me down in a most heinous way.

For months, your update manager has been telling me to upgrade from 7.04 to 7.10. When 8.04 came out, you didn't offer me a direct upgrade path to the very latest, I had to upgrade one version at a time.

The upgrade from 7.04 to 7.10 took about 5 hours and a handful of prompts about keeping configuration changes.

I figured I might as well open the update manager and upgrade again to 8.04 LTS.