On some forums people are making fun of Ryan Seacrest’s “petite” nature. The guy is 1.73m. Is that really “petite”, even for a man though? I mean, at least for Mediterranean people, his height is just normal. What really pisses me off though is that Ryan himself tries to downplay his height by making jokes about it on the show. You see, the best way to not get completely hammered is to make fun about it. I think he is overreacting.

If there’s someone who’s petite, that’s me: 1.52m. Never grew a centimeter from the moment my period came when I was 11. I was the tallest person in class at the time. And then, that was it for me although there is a good reason why. I was born during the 8th month of the pregnancy, I was very small (1700 grams) and with few hopes to live. The doctor requested that for at least a year my parents should feed me a very special and expensive milk that was full in hormones. This drove my family almost broke back in 1973 because each of these cans was just too expensive. They had to switch to a cheaper one, although the doctor did warn them that the quality of that other product was seriously questionable. These “milks” made me grow very fast later in life too, even if I was only fed with them for a year. I had breasts like a cow when I was 10 already. And my period came long before than any of my cousins. And today, 33 years later, my hormones are still out of whack all too often.

But hey, I don’t mind my small build, I don’t mind my ugly tooth or my far and between hairline. I feel good and comfortable about myself so I won’t hide neither fact. And I am really happy that my JBQ loves me the way I am too.

When Apple introduced “sleep” especially on its laptops, it raised the bar in the industry because people loved the feature. The feature existed before but Apple really made it one of the reasons why someone would want a Mac laptop.

For the last few years Linux users are ranting about the sub-standard support of “sleep”. Compatibility is better these days, but still not great. Thing is, it will never be.

Apple only deals with a very specific set of hardware parts that has total control of most of the time, and Microsoft certifies most third party drivers. These two reasons are good enough to deliver a good suspend-to-RAM support. But Linux has no such certification program (if a driver is deemed “stable” it gets in the kernel without questions), it has to deal with vast amounts of hardware models and it doesn’t have good “workarounds” for buggy BIOSes either.

This will never change. There is never going to be good-enough “sleep” when using Linux — except if Intel creates a new BIOS/hardware standard that pushes developers to write drivers the right way.

On my new laptop, 1 out of 10 wake ups is screwed up: gfx can’t wake up, network card can’t be re-initialized, or if I leave it sleep for more than 3-4 hours it never wakes up again. Honestly, even if these weird cases get fixed in 3 years time, by then the same problems will be for newer laptops. So, I don’t keep my hopes high that sleep will work out of the box for any given hardware.

Update: Here’s a new one tonight: laptop comes back from sleep, regains network connection and everything, only to go back to sleep all by itself 10 seconds later.

My JBQ is coming back from France tonight. I can’t wait! I am so glad he had a great time there and he saw his extended family after almost 2 years!

One bad thing is that he might have temporarily lost his suitcase though, as he got his connection in Washington DC at the last moment and he is not sure that his baggage will arrive with him on the same plane in SFO. It might take up to 3 weeks to get it back if that’s the case. He was late for his connection just because immigration took 1.5 hours in DC. You gotta hate these dreadful immigration lines when you arrive in USA.

I want a world with no borders. A central government. Today’s “countries” should simply be “provinces”.

Update: Yup, suitcase didn’t arrive…

I wrote a UI article yesterday for Beryl on OSNews and it’s quite interesting to read the comments. Basically, the opinions were polarized although feedback was mostly positive. They either liked it because it was very “gnome-ish”, or the few who hated it was because they “prefer the KDE way of having choice”. I found this interesting because the disliking of the mockups was not a matter of their favorite feature not listed, but just because the mockups were “too simple” to even consider it as an alternative.

It really makes me wonder. Do people want to have a garabazilion of settings and asphyxiated sub-settings of a setting, or it is just that they are too young and they like to play with cool things all day long? I wonder if the KDE way is the young people’s way and Gnome’s the older, bored, just-works kind of people’s. What I am trying to say is that I am wondering if this polarization has to do with age and energy rather than real valid UI preference.

But then again, Havoc put it best once: “If cool was everything, we would all be hacking Enlightenment instead“.