Time for my summary of what I posted on here a year ago, but with a twist. It was two years this month that I started using WordPress for upmykilt.net The site itself has been around for much longer, and before that I was using mnscraps.com – I think that started around 1998 or sooner..? Back when domains cost like $70 a year.

spam, truth, or ubran legend? My first real post was about an email circulating with a monologue attributed to Rush Limbaugh

Counter Protesting the RNC08- from Sep 1, 2008 when the RNC convention opened up here in town, along with a cartoon from xkcd.com

Frozen Tundra – adventures in defrosting my freezer. Reminds me, it’s about due again.

Urf – another web comic I read from time to time.

Enabling DVD Codecs in Ubuntu – a quick way to get DVDs to work.

and here’s my wish list… a couple of items for my geek filled wish list.

Smoking or Non-Smoking? – at the end of the month I was back down in VA to finish up the Ben & Jerry’s project. They don’t have a smoking ban in their restaurants like we do here in MN.

Down by the Old Mill Stream… photos from my drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway

That’s it for this month! Well, least as far as summaries of last year go.

Ok, I’m a week or so late, but here’s a summary of what I posted about in August of 2008….

This. Just. Sucks.
I got sick coming back from a trip out to VA and DC. Was laid up for bout a week.

Christmas in August
This is a recipe for my all time favorite holiday cookie. They can be made any time, but my family traditionally has them for Christmas. Gonna have to work on a WLS friendly version for this year.

Fan-Fiction: Copyright Versus Plagiarism
A bit of a discussion on the copyright issues around fan-fiction.

I never did get Tweeting – not sure I get Denting either.
I’ve been on Twitter for quite awhile.. last year I actually started using Identi.ca – I’ve posted over 3000 tweets/dents in the last year. Guess I kinda get it now…?

Bringing Ubuntu to the World, One PC at a Time
A bit about setting up a friend’s retired dad with Ubuntu instead of Windows after failing to get all the virus and crud off the computer for him.

Make someone smile
A rare link to another site for me… still a good read.

Adding a Tag Cloud Page to WordPress
Last year I was pushing 500 tags in my tag cloud, now it’s just under 800. That may not be a good thing.

Where’s Your Line?
My own look at cyber-bullying.

On a personal note, this time last year I was pushing 380 pounds. Today I’m under 235. That’s 145 pounds gone forever. More than my sister weighs… she says it’s like I lost a whole person. Unfortunately it isn’t her I lost… (just kidding!)

That’s it for this months round-up, see ya in a few weeks!

I’ve been using WordPress for my site for just shy of two years now… and lots of sites in order to blatently generate renewed interest in older content post “year ago” type posts… and since I’ve been too busy to come up with something original lately (cept for a few things over at my formerfatdudes.com site), I figured I’ld jump on this bandwagon. But, I won’t be doing this weekly, likely towards the beginning of each month I’ll go back and look at what I did last year.

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As I continue to re-build my system after a fresh install of Ubinutu 8.10 yesterday, I’ll also continue to document it here. I don’t plan on doing this again in six months, but least I have a record to help myself out (or others) if I do… and will also help in setting up other machines I’m working on I suppose.

The next couple programs I added all can be pulled from the Add/Remove Applications set up. Just click Applications, then click Add/Remove… I changed the Show option to All Open Source applications right off the bat.

First up, FileZilla. Hands down the best all around FTP Client for the money. If you don’t believe me, it was picked at the High Five Winner by Lifehacker readers. It’s multi-flavored as well, and also has a portable version which, like KeePass, I keep in a Dropbox folder so I don’t have to install it on both my laptop and work computers. I just need to find a way for my desktop here to read the same file that keeps track of my server list. For now, I just manually copy the data file once in awhile so I have the same list no mater what computer I’m on.

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Ok, I am a couple days late, but I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10, Inrepid Ibex today. Actually, I did one spare computer with the Edubuntu add-ons that is eventually going to my niece and nephew, added it to my Acer laptop using WUBI so I can use Ubuntu or Windows, and then did a fresh install on my Acer desktop. Been a busy day.

Since I did a fresh install, that means there’s a LOT of stuff I have to redo. The reason I chose to do a fresh install is that I have two hard drives in this computer, a 300GB and a 500GB. The 500GB I haven’t really used for anything. The 300GB had partitions from both version 8.04 and 7.10. So I figure I would put 8.10 on the 500GB drive, and once I’ve copied all my old stuff over that I need to keep, I’ll repartition the 300GB back in to one drive. And yes, I did back all the stuff in my Home folder up first.

In fact, if you want to do a basic backup of a folder, rsync is pretty much the best way to go. I may write up something basic about it at some point, but the point of this posting is some of the steps I’m going through as I put stuff back on this desktop computer.

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So I picked up a couple of DVDs the other week, Airplane and Jackie Chan’s Police Story. I wanted to watch Police Story while surfing, so I popped the DVD in the drive and…. nothing.

I couldn’t get it to work with Mplayer, not with Totem. I futzed around with a couple things and it was probably a good 15-20 minutes before I realized… hey dummy… you never installed the codec’s after you installed 8.04 on this box. duh!

Ubuntu really does word “right out of the box” for.. well.. 99% of what you’d need it to do I suppose. That last 1% they can’t do because of licensing issues – least not without charging fees and crud. But they do make it easy as heck to add the codecs you need. (For those that don’t know what a codec is, think of it like the driver software you need to get your computer and printer to talk to each other, but this allows your media player to read what’s on commercial DVDs.)

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