You may remember my post on Ubuntu Netbook Remix and how to get it running on an Acer Aspire One with the now infamous GMA500 graphics adapter. It isn’t hard but isn’t easy either and it’s not for the beginner. With the price of GMA500 netbooks dropping there will be more people picking them up. From experience I can safely say that the Windows experience on the lower end netbooks is not that fun. The performance with Linux is much better and since the UNR interface is intuitive I can see folks wanting to run it but not wanting to go through the pain in the arse that it is to get UNR running. Top that off with the issues with the sound that haven’t been worked out yet UNR won’t be the choice of the masses no matter how good the interface is. In comes Jolicloud… The install was dead easy. After getting my invite I followed the instructions on the website and about an hour from start of the download to reboot after install I had a running system. I didn’t play with any drivers and have native resolution, didn’t have to reboot to get any weird sound issues sorted out, didn’t have to add any PPAs or download anything in order to get anything working. Out of the box Jolicloud installed on the Acer Aspire One 751h and just plain worked. The install consisted of less questions than a Windows install and never gave an error. It was so easy it was almost decadent. Under the hood Jolicloud is some sort of social/cloud/netbook OS based on Ubuntu. You can follow other Jolicloud users and get suggestions for applications. I don’t really get the social aspect just yet but I also haven’t really tried it out. The Jolicloud Dashboard has the best end user interface for installing applications that I have seen in a Linux based system at present. Most of the apps are Prism based which makes sense for a cloud based OS. For those that don’t know Prism is a system that allows web based apps to run on your desktop but isn’t a browser. I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense but it works pretty damn well. Dropbox is included for online storage and all the Google services your little heart desires are available along with a ton of web based apps I have never heard of. They even include Adobe Air in their list of Applications so getting Tweetdeck up and running was as easy as installing Air and running over to the Tweetdeck website. Everything was really that easy. Even Boxee is available out of the box and while it doesn’t work wGMA500 it worked without any weird steps involved. This is an OS I could give to my mom without worrying about tech support calls until the end of time. Now being who I am I did do some playing. I installed Ubuntu One which isn’t included in the apps list. I also installed terminator because it’s my favorite terminal application. Being based on Ubuntu you can get to Synaptic but it’s not in the menu. Jolicloud would prefer you used their applications list and rightfully so since they can vet the apps and make sure they work properly as well as offering more cloud based apps than local apps. But if you really want to play, and I always do, you can hit alt-f2 and run ‘gksudo synaptic’ and get the old familiar Ubuntu package installer. Once you are there anything you install does show up in the menu so it’s pretty easy to fiddle around with your netbook and the fact that everything works, out of the box, on what they are referring to as a pre-beta release makes this a pretty freaking nice choice for geeks and end users alike. My recommendation is to skip futzing around with UNR and get yourself a Jolicloud invite. Even if you don’t go in for the social aspect of the OS, and I still haven’t, it’s the real deal and it works very nicely at the moment. I want to play with Chrome OS if there is ever GMA500 support but trying to get me to wipe out Jolicloud on this box will be a wrestling match for sure.
23
Dec
I was talking about photos of the kids with TheOtherBrit today and realized I had never posted the pics of Aoghdan’s first show on here. I uploaded them to Facebook as I took them but I always meant to have them here as well. It’s an important event for a kid to go to their first show and I did right by my boy and took him to see Lucero. Now all I had with me was the phone on my camera so they aren’t the best quality in the world but at least I captured it!
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Until this year I had never done a top list of albums or songs. When the subject came up I thought this would be an easy task, after all I write for 9b and make mixes and intros on a regular basis. Music is basically my favorite thing in the world so coming up with my favorites for the year should be easy. Hell I probably wrote a review for most of the albums I would include on a top album list and then a top songs list would be even easier. Was I ever wrong! This took the better part of two weeks to fill out and I had to stop myself at 25 for the top albums of the year according to Romeo Sid Vicious. There was so much good music that came out this year that picking just 25 was hard and then I had to figure out in which order I would rank them. Suffice it to say this task was a labor of love but a lot harder than I imagined it would be. And then while writing it I realized it could be taken as arrogant after all who am I to tell you what the best albums of 2009 were? But I can answer that. I am Romeo-muthafuckin’-Sid-Vicious and here’s the list of what you should have been listening to in 2009 (if you weren’t already).
25. Jackson Taylor & The Sinners – Aces ‘n’ Eights
24. Slow Rollin’ Lows – Erie Street
23. William Elliott Whitmore – Animals In The Dark
22. Jon Snodgrass – Visitors Band
21. Will Hoge – The Wreckage
20. Josh Grider – Sweet Road To Ride
19. The Fox Hunt – America’s Working So We Don’t Have To
18. The Takers – Taker Easy
17. Drag The River – Primer
16. Drag The River – Bad At Breaking Up
15. Band Of Heathens – One Foot In The Ether
14. Cory Branan/Jon Snodgrass – Self Titled
13. Michael Dean Damron – Father’s Day
12. Chris Knight – Trailer Tapes II
11. Truckstop Coffee – For Dear Life
See the top ten below the fold
Read more
15
Dec
The Bird List. A bird’s eye view of the combined top 20 lists of what we like to call a “loose confederation of like minded bloggers”. This is the inaugural year. It’s been a patchy one! But what we do have is decent idea, and what we feel is an interesting list. So Here it is. The best albums of the year as voted on by 30 of the web’s leading aficionados of twanglike music.
1. Justin Townes Earle – Midnight at the Movies
2. Lucero – 1372 Overton Park
3. Ryan Bingham & the Dead Horses – Roadhouse Sun
4. Buddy and Julie Miller – Written in Chalk
5. Dave Rawlings Machine – A Friend of a Friend
6. Slaid Cleaves – Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away
7. Todd Snider – The Excitement Plan
8. Avett Brothers – I and Love and You
9. Band of Heathens – One Foot In the Ether
10. Tom Russell – Blood & Candlesmoke
11. Jason Isbell & 400 Unit – Self Titled
12. Corb Lund – Losin’ Lately Gambler
13. Charlie Robison – Beautiful Day
14. Drive-By Truckers – The Fine Print
15. Steve Earle – Townes
16. Deer Tick – Born on Flag Day
17. Wrinkle Neck Mules – Let The Lead Fly
18. Magnolia Electric Co. – Josephine
19. Guy Clark – Somedays The Songs Write You
20. Those Darlins – S/T
20. Miranda Lambert – Revolution
Contributing Blogs: A Fifty Cent Lighter, A Truer Sound, Alt-512, Amber Waves of Twang, Americana Rock Mix, Americana Roots, Beat Surrender, Because Whit Happens, Country California, Country Music Pride, Farce The Music, For The Sake of The Song, Front Porch Musings, Heartworn Highways, High Noon Saloon, It’s Great To Be Alive, Kim Ruehl (No Depression), Juli Thanki, (The 9513), Romeo Sid Vicious, More Cowbelle, My Aimz Is True, Ninebullets, Sounds Country, The Gobbler’s Knob, There’s Always Someone Cooler Than You, This Mornin’ I Am Born Again, Twang Nation, Twangville, Freight Train Boogie, When You Awake
Special thanks to: Truersound, Sounds Country, Romeo Sid Vicious, and David Attaway
Well my number album of the year didn’t even make the overall top 20 and that makes me sad. Hell it was AIV‘s number one as well! If you want to see my personal list keeping checking 9b this week as I suspect it will pop up there sometime soon. As soon as it’s up there I’ll cross post it here as well and I am working on a top songs mix which, like the top albums, is turning out to be much harder than I thought.
11
Dec
And there are articles all over both sides of the spectrum about the so-called War on Christmas. You all know that I am stark raving conservative and there likely isn’t a liberal bone in my body. Sure there are Libertarian bones in there that may seem liberal to some at first glance but you can trust me when I say that morally I am not a liberal. So when it comes to this issue many folks who consider themselves to have the same values as I disagree with my stance. I also disagree with the liberals vies on this issue and I’ll touch on that first before tearing up the opinions of the so-called right wingers.
First and foremost the liberals need to realize that there is no freedom from religion anywhere in any document regarding the founding of this country. It doesn’t exist. What does exist is freedom of religion and by trying to force government entities to take down Nativity scenes you are stifling the expression of a religion. It happens to be my religion but it honestly doesn’t matter to me. I do not agree with forcing any entity attached to the government in some manner to not display Christmas/Nativity decorations. This harkens back to the idea that someone might be offended or feel like religion is being forced upon them. I couldn’t care less about anyone’s feelings on the matter. Feelings should be minded in most situations but when some bleeding heart with white guilt gets offended because someone else might be offended we have taken it too far. The answer is not to disallow Christmas decoration but rather to allow decorations for the other holidays celebrated around this time. My solution is to allow civic groups a portion of city property, for instance, to decorate in the manner in which they see fit and have it subsidized by the city in some manner. This way whatever group needs to feel all warm and fuzzy can display their holiday spirit. No-one’s freedom of religion is trampled, everyone gets to advertise their holiday, and all the white guilt is assuaged.
Left up to me I wouldn’t allow Kwanzaa because it’s a made up holiday less than 50 years old. It was made up by a black nationalist so his followers wouldn’t be celebrating a “white holiday”. The inventor, Karenga, was sent to prison only five years after creating this “holiday” after torturing two women with a soldering iron, a vise, and other implements. He tried to make it seem like a tradition with deep African roots but didn’t manage to be convincing. The official website for this holiday claims that it’s roots are in “the first harvest celebrations of Africa,” and are recorded in African history as far back as ancient Egypt and Nubia”. What they don’t manage to explain is why a harvest celebration would be held at the time of winter solstice or what crops would be harvested. The formula Karenga came up for celebrating involves two ears of maize which is entirely a new world crop and wasn’t found in Africa in ancient times. Even his choice for the official language of the holiday, Swahili, is insane. It’s only spoken by about 7% of the population of Africa and the regions he claims to have drawn the roots of this holiday from have been, and were, Arabic speaking regions. In fact Arabic is spoken by the majority of the African population today. So given my druthers I would tell any organization who wanted to put a Kinara on display that they could just pretend the Chanukah Menorah was theirs since the rest of their holiday is made up as well.
But things aren’t left up to and they shouldn’t be. If someone wants to put up decorations for a holiday created by a racist in order to segregate his own people from those with pigment in their skin then so be it. After all they have as much freedom to believe in Kwanzaa as those that celebrate the ancient religion Gerald Gardner made up in 1950s or the religion based on a secret decoder ring (glasses) whose syphilitic leader thought a fully enclosed body of salt water was the promised land. This is America after all and you are free to even make up your own religion if you want. You are not free to tell me I can’t practice mine in public. I am tolerant of other religions. I have many friends who are not Christians and there’s never any static between us. However tolerance doesn’t mean I have to hide my religion. It means I must accept that in a free country others are allowed to show their religion as well. The liberal idea that anything related to Christianity must be hidden in the bedroom while Muslims students are allowed to leave class to pray is just tripe. Chesterton said is best when he said “These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.” Those words are as true today as they were when he uttered them
And now for those who think Christianity is under attack! If you believe you are being oppressed in the US because of Christianity or that Christianity is under attack then you are a moron. End of statement. If you think you are under attack because some meanie head doesn’t want city hall to put out a plastic baby Jesus then you have too much damn time on your hands. In Jun of this year a Christian man was raped and murdered for refusing to convert to Islam, in Feb Islamic lawyers demand Christian convert be killed for apostasy, and more and more all over the world. If you think, for a minute, you are being persecuted because the Nativity scene won’t be a city hall this year, the one with special new lighted virgin May, then you have issues. Liberals are not trying to stomp out Christmas. They are not hostile towards us. They simply, and falsely believe, that since Christians are the majority in this country and have done bad things in the past we have to make up for everything bad any Christian has even done and hide our religion in shame. They truly believe in equality by force and are taking steps to make sure everyone feels equal. They are wrong simply because it doesn’t matter if every feels equal it only matters if they are, in reality, treated equally. So they treat Christians with disdain to try and make other religions feel more equal and in doing so violate their own claimed principles or justice and equality. They are not hostile, by and large, they are merely wrong.
Don’t bother citing some random whackjob who is actually hostile to Christianity. They do exist and I know they do. But they do not comprise the vast majority of the misled lefties who do things that get called persecution by American Christians. Hell the right has Michael Savage and he’s totally off his rocked. The left has their crazies as well. Bringing them up won’t prove Christians are persecuted in America. Until we have lawyers asking to have people put to death for being Christian, mobs burning Christians in the streets, Christians sent to re-education camps, and so on then shut your whining Western pie-holes. You are making the rest of us look like crybabies.
So ‘Tis the season and as such I encourage you to treat everyone equally. Say Merry Christmas if that’s your thing and accept a Blessed Be if you get one in return. Don’t try and not offend but try and love as we are commanded to do. Act as you want to be treated. If you want love and respect this season then show it in everything you do. Equality is a very loving goal this season when we celebrate the birth of a man who treated whores, tax collectors, pagans, and fishermen with the same respect he gave the high priests of his own religion. So whether you believe in the story or not treat everyone with the love showed by Christ even if they want to put baby Jesus on the courthouse lawn or want to keep Jesus out of city hall.
I may not write much the rest of the year as we are wrapping up projects at work, have household things to deal with, and it’s just pretty crazy right now. But I wanted to get this up because I saw another American Christian whining about persecution and I knew I couldn’t make it through the season without a little rant on the subject. Take this all with a grain of salt and go forth and do holiday type things…
