What is real and what is manipulation?

As I tie into the solar radiation I experienced 46 years ago (only one more revolution till the age of Aquarius) I keep wondering what is real. It has been almost 40 years since Nixon took the US off of the gold standard and the monies we use today to exchange services indicate more and more that we are using fiat currencies. Without the Canadian dollar as a medium for exchange, what can we do? (Please comment on buzz because it is nice to have a social discussion). To me reality is:

• food, water, air and shelter.
• Gold is real, but not easy obtainable or standardised.
• Land and buildings are real, but not easily transferable.

Having been a contrarian stock investor, the stock markets seem to have taken on the air of a gambling casino, and the pillars of greed and corruption go unchecked, virtually without bounds in our major financial institutions, and within the general fabric of society, but salt is real and more and more important.

Today I teach computers at the church in Hythe hoping more people will adopt open source because proprietary formats tend to lock people in. Even Microsoft's famous manipulation scheme -embrace -extend -extinguish hasn't allowed it to control the instant messaging market. In fact Microsoft 4 days ago adopted Jabber, but they will probably use it like facebook does --only allow instant messaging between their own domains so it is not much different from msn. Gmail with their open federation policy is the best instant messaging platform. I remember 6 years ago when I switch from hotmail to gmail wonder if Google was doing this as a manipulation scheme. I guess maybe because my heart is evil I have a hard time trusting the good people have to offer. So far, Google has been the best, biggest company promoting openness. They even offered up libvpx (webm) which I have been enjoying for it's video chat abilities. Even youtube which is own by Google allows for webm. I guess I want to thank the 100's that have taken the leap of faith with me into open software and open codecs and even those that just use the open encyclopaedia -- wikipedia. I do feel that when people get a taste for openness they will have a a hard time going back to vendor lock-in even with a 60 day trial or like Simply Accounting which now offers 1 year without payment (at least the student version I installed on Friday did) Moving data out of Simply into another accounting program can cost you a lot more. If my life becomes a conduit for truth and not just one companies version of how to manipulate people to make money, then I will die a happy man.  Information is meant to be free. Thanks for commenting / linking!

The Unity Interface in Ubuntu 10.10

My Nephew Mathew came over with his Dell Inspiron mini 10 so I thought I would upgrade him to Ubuntu 10.10. By default, the netbook edition installs the Unity interface, so I set about to teaching him and educating me on how to use the Unity interface.
The first thing you will notice is the Unity Launcher -- on the left side of your desktop.  It shows a stack of applications icons, one for every application that is running or the applications you want to have quick access to. It replaces the Start/Applications menu and the bottom panel / task manager. It seems to be easy to get used to, at least Matthew was up and running without an issue.

The Good:

• The Unity dash can be access using the Ubuntu button in the top left
• The Software Center recommends software you should buy or just get for free.
• You just need to install Mediubuntu and Flash and 99% of the Internet works.
• Google video chat works with just a couple of clicks (Matthew likes phoning with his laptop, I am hoping I didn't teach him a bad thing)

The Bad:

• Clicking on the "File Manager" doesn't launch Nautilus, but a rather a simple file browser which isn't as useful, but one more click on the top right side makes it okay by loading Nautilus.
• Firefox and OpenOffice don't put their menus in the top global menu bar (top panel)

The Ugly:

• I can't figure out how to add stuff to the Unity Launcher (I am trying to add the Educational submenu)
• The Broadcom wifi chipset crashes when I installed the B43 proprietary driver. It reminds me of 9.10 when the Huwai 3g radio didn't work.

Fanbox is learn from Facebook -- Web marketing 101 -- Spam

I got 3 emails this week that looked like this.  All had a name of a close friend in the from area.  Like this one has the name of Gerry Beckett.  But if you hover your mouse over the friend's name you will see that it is not from your friend at all in fact he doesn't even know that he has sent you this email. If you click reply it will not even go to him.  If you want your friend to know that www.fanbox.com has trick him in giving up his friends forward the email to him. I get upset with people when they intentionally do this to people who are just innocently clicking links to see what the computer will do next. This is how facebook got their user base not too long ago. Remember getting his email? Here is hoping you delete your facebook and your fanbox account.  Or better yet never click on the email you got from @yourfanbox.