I always liked the way 100m sprinter Zhanna Pintusevich (Tarnopolskaya) looked like. I love this kind (NSFW) of athletic body and I wish I looked like this too (that is, if I wasn’t a couch potato). Instead, I have to literally search hard to find and buy a 38D bra each time. I hate boobs. They get in my way. Thankfully there’s a reason to keep them: my JBQ loves them.

We must be one of the most unlucky people when it comes to immigration, visas and green cards (we already have 5-6 failed ones because of plain unluckiness). Our lawyers made a mistake in the filing of some papers and now we might have to leave US for 2 months — unpaid. Which means that we will lose double-digit thousands of dollars. Although 2 months sounds better than a year, which is another recent bureaucratic fuck-up that we might have to endure (we won’t know for sure until the last moment).

And then you are telling me why I support globalization and open borders? Well, that’s why. JBQ is one of the brightest engineers in the valley, and he fully deserves to work with best of the best — which right now this means Google, here, in the US.

I am in distress right now. This shit never ends. We are in this mess since the first day we got here.

Update: There is a way to not get stuck in Europe. We should be able to come out of this mess fine. Crossed fingers.

And this is the first property video I shot. I hope you like it. I had a blast.

Over a year ago I wrote a review at OSNews for the IBM T23 Thinkpad. Back then, Ubuntu had severe bugs with this (ultra popular in its time) laptop model. But as I have promised that laptop to my little brother, I cleanly upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 last night. The default Ubuntu installation is now better than ever, as I had to change very few things to make it more usable (e.g. font sizes always irked me as to how big they are by default).

Anyways, all the severe bugs I had found with 7.04 are now fixed: including two suspend bugs, ethernet and USB bugs, and four S3 Savage ones. The laptop works perfectly by default (except the Lucent Winmodem). Overall speed is good too. Within an hour I had setup and configured 5 user accounts for myself, JBQ, my brother, his wife and a guest one.

The trouble started when I needed to make my old Prism54 WG511 PCMCIA card to work with the laptop. Apparently Ubuntu has both the drivers and firmware for this old ISL3890 chipset, but it didn’t work. Following advice from UbuntuForums, I had to blacklist the default 4 related drivers, download the Windows firmware and use Ndiswrapper instead. It then worked, but it was a pain.

The Lucent winmodem worked for the first time on this laptop too (my bro uses mostly dial-up). It works after you download the “-full” version of the “martian” driver: compile and install as per instructions the driver and then do a “modprobe martian_dev” and then a “martian_modem --daemon --mode 0666“. I then put these two commands on the /etc/rc.local file to force the modem to get started on each reboot. If someone upgrades the kernel the driver will have to get recompiled, which is why I made my brother a normal user and not an admin. Unless Ubuntu adds the martian driver to their -restricted kernel modules package, no one should touch the Ubuntu update manager…

“Meet Dale Decker, 31. He lives in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, about an hour north of Milwaukee. On June 25, he decided to fly the American flag upside down on the patio of his apartment. Decker is upset about the Iraq War, he’s upset about the loss of civil liberties in the United States, he’s upset about the plans he says are under way for a North American Union with Canada and Mexico, and he’s upset about our economy,” writes Progressive.

It’s funny, I had a discussion about flags with JBQ last week. JBQ says that flags are symbols and need to be respected. I find flags (any flag, including my own) to be pieces of cloth. I don’t know, I don’t really believe in “symbols”, especially ethnicitistic symbols. But then again, I am for complete globalization, so flags and countries get in my way.

The bulk of the OSS-fan OSNews readers are the kind of people I just can’t stand. They will try everything to discredit valid arguments, just because they come from someone who uses profanity, like Linux Hater. I got a lot of shit for linking a Linux Hater post from an OSNews KDE article today (an article which actually had two more links to other KDE articles, but NO ONE actually took the time to comment on these articles).

Until Thom gets healthy again I thought I help out with the day to day posting, but really? I am not OSNews material anymore. How can I post software news when I hate software, and especially OSS desktop software? I do try to be as unbiased as possible (hence the multiple links per article to different opinions), but I won’t remove negative articles from the daily menu just because the freetards don’t like it. I don’t care what they like or what they don’t.

It was nice that this happened though today. It freed me. OSNews is not my thing anymore, it hasn’t been for a long time, and I don’t want it to be again. I’ve moved on.

* RMS writes FUD about the Gates Foundation. He should be ashamed of this. In my opinion, RMS has completely lost it.

* Went out on Thursday to shoot a property. I had a great time, there are some really nice places in Los Gatos (south Bay Area).

* My husband on his work at Android.

* There is still justice, some times.

* Good news for sci-fi lovers. The 25 minute footage of the original “Metropolis” 1927 movie that was lost for almost 80 years, has been found back. Now the movie will make more sense.

* And speaking of sci-fi. Last year I was whining that there are no space-based sci-fi movies anymore. Milos was quick to tell me that “Sunshine” was the only one (I did watch it a few months back and didn’t really like its second part). But this year? I really didn’t hear about any movie that uses spaceships and the like. No, WALL-E doesn’t count, I am talking real live action here.

* Lots of editorials lately discuss if it’s cheating to have sex with a human-looking robot or not. My opinion is that it’s simply pathetic. Cheating or not. Not different than these plastic dolls really. If you have to use a plastic doll, it’s just a pathetic state. It’s not about ethics, I don’t find it unethical to use sex toys or dolls/robots. But it’s more of “get out more you stupid couch potato, and get some real girlfriends” kind of thing rather than anything else.

* Some recent stuff about Obama on religion, telecom immunity, Israel and Iran has put thoughts on my mind about how beneficial this guy would really be as a president. We certainly don’t need a Bush 2.0.

* iTunes for Windows sucks ass. It just can’t rip my indie audio CDs without dropping the connection to the CD-ROM and lose the rip, and then retry, and rinse and repeat. I tried with two different CD drives, and many different audio CDs, same problem each time. Windows Media Player has no problem whatsoever ripping with the same CDs and drives.

* How Californians see the rest of the US. This is actually so true! I actually kinda feel the same too (with the exception of Boston which is actually a second Silicon Valley).

* If you are after a cheap full HD second monitor (1920×1200) for your previews during HD editing, get this one.

Linux Hater has a great post about the sad state of 3D under Linux — even if 10 years have passed since we first start bitching about it. It’s amazing how slower than Windows XP all graphics-related operations are on Linux. From 3D games, to video decoding, and most recently experienced, Flash 9 decoding of a 720/24p video from Vimeo (about twice slower on a 1.6 Ghz CoreDuo than on my much older and slower P4 3Ghz that runs XP). The Lunix users will always blame commercial companies for “not optimizing for Linux”, but when everything is slower than XP, including OSS apps, something else is going on. And Linux Hater only touched the surface on this one.

This is the kind of stuff that prompt me to think that Gnome should initiate a complete “reboot” of the Linux desktop, integrating and re-writing everything that a desktop needs: from a new 3D interface and driver hook-up, to new sound engine, to a new window server, and only run the old X apps via either a rootless X server or just virtualization.

I watched “Hitman” last night (based on the EIDOS video game). This was a movie that could have had a successful franchise (a’la Jason Bourne), if the script was better (e.g. more in-depth character and situation, less confusing plot, more info on the Organization).

Although for the ‘just’ $18 million it cost to create, it already did pretty well (grossed $96 million). Hopefully, there will be a sequel that will do better artistically. Timothy Olyphant said that he was contracted for 3 movies. He was super-sexy as the overly serious bald assassin known only as “Agent 47″. A great actor too who deserves more fame.