wide-mouthed jar

dear peanut butter jar makers,

i like your peanut butters very much.  i especially like the crunchy.  it is an important ingredient to my sandwiches which also can include yet are not limited to bananas, honey, jelly, jelly beans, chocolate chips, and bacon.



but i find the jars i need of one major improvement:  a wider mouth.  i realize technological advancements in jar designs haven’t changed in the past many centuries, but when it comes to the butter of the peanut i think something needs to change.  visualize if you will me trying to scrape out the last one-fifth of the contents of the jar on the left (see picture) with my hand holding a knife.  you can imagine the peanutty butter coating the back of my hand as i reach down for the main feature?  can you feel it coat you hand?  it lends itself to needing to scrape it off my hand.  if i choose not to be coated, good peanut butter goes to waste.  do you know how much is thrown away each year?  can you fathom all those peanuts dying in vain?

now, the jar on the right has a better design, although it too is not really wide enough.  i am able to extract more of the p.butter out with a simple knife with less coating of my hand.  but i don’t believe this to be the final design to eliminate peanut butter hands.  more work needs to be done!  i mean, you guys have laboratories set up for just this kind of testing, right?  guys in lab coats and clipboards watching people stick their hands into jars of peanut butter playing a game of “operation” to try to avoid touching the sides?  this is the twenty-first century!  i truly believe you can do better.  i have faith in you.  and i do believe that we will never have flying cars until we can solve this problem.

so, what do you say, guys?  jif?  peter pan?  skippy?  who’s gonna step up to this challenge?  you could be the trend-setting company to redefine peanut butter jars for the industry.

very sincerely,
mock

ohio + linux + fest = ohio linuxfest

i spent this weekend in ohio at ohio linuxfest (olf) 2010.  this was my first linux conference i’ve attended.  since i’ve signed on as a fedora ambassador, i donned the t-shirt and help with the promotion table.  i met Southern_Gentlem, SGS, spot, stickster, rbergeron, three-thirty, mchua, and kc8hfi.  (i though kc8hfi stood us up, but he had just found some college buddies working another table and was hanging out with them.)  it’s great to meet the people i’ve only ever really known on irc.



Southern_Gentlem, threethirty, SGS all instructing the world about fedora linux

i sat in on stormy’s opening keynote.  of the few points she made, the one about how much of our private data can be better controlled using firefox was surprising to me.  i was also intrigued about the tomboy notes app, something of which i have not made much use.

i sat in on stickster’s pyGtk talk.  it was a  good presentation.  i’ve fooled around with pyGtk before, so this was a refresher.  it was presented well.  i just wish he had more time available to expound on more of his examples.



john “maddog” hall – thanks for all the fish!

i had never heard john “maddog” hall speak before, but i was familiar with the name.  his closing session at the end of the day was an enlightening trip of his forty years of jobs which included his introduction and involvement with linux from the operating system’s beginning.

we handed out all the media, almost all the stickers, and the t-shirts went like hotcakes!  i wasn’t there for the t-shirt giveaway, but i heard it took only 15 minutes to unload the batch SouthernGentlem brought with him.  everyone wanted them!  and why not?  it is fedora, after all.



fedora media



threethirty and SGS waiting for the next question



two OLPCs and a netbook showing off the fedora (and stickster at the red hat table)

it’s been a while since i’d taken a road trip.  this weekend was pleasant.

oh, and the accommodations were very nice.  this was sunrise from my window on saturday morning.



sunrise

sony vaio

after many months of investigating and waiting, i finally purchased a laptop replacement back around july. my chose was sony’s vaio ea series with the intel core i5 processor, 4 gigs of ram, and a blu-ray drive.



my concern was making sure i had supported video since my last purchase proved to be an epic fail. i took a copy of fedora on a usb key into best buy and booted the sony laptop up to verify the video drivers. my testing was a definite win.

as with all my computers, i swiftly removed windows from the hard drive and replaced with linux, fedora flavored. i got my laptop up to speed rather quickly and was happy.

then one day, i was interacting with some people in the #fedora-social channel on irc and someone asked me if sound was working. i told him that i wasn’t sure. when i got home, i checked. it was not working. i never thought to check the sound as there’s not been problems with the sound working in the past. (at least, i’ve not had any difficulties.)

when i reported back that my sound was silent, i was given a few suggestions to try. after jumping through those hoops, what finally worked was to grab a koji kernel and install it. at the time, it was in release candidate 1 status, but it gave me sound. since then, that kernel was stabilized, and i am currently running 2.6.34.6-54.fc13.x86_64.)

since that’s been resolved, this laptop is has all the desired items on my list.