Baby burnt in clothes dryer | The Courier-Mail

What kind of idiot do you need to be to think it’s a good idea to put your kid in the dryer?

Terri and I generally enjoy our horror movies and sci-fi. With the exceptions of The Phantom of the Opera and The Rocky Horror Picture Show we just aren’t terribly interested in musicals. So, when I insisted we rent The Producers the other night, Terri was a bit skeptical.

I’ve been hearing enough about the Broadway production for the last few years that I was very curious about it, and I was in the mood for something light and silly.

I have to say that I was very impressed with it. I wasn’t really expecting a whole lot… My family used to go see musicals at the Chanhassen Dinner Theaters fairly often back in Minnesota - and while it was certainly fun, I just never really got into the whole musical thing. I expected a few chuckles from this movie, but that’s about it. Instead, I don’t think I stopped laughing until the final credits rolled. It was absolutely hilarious.

I finally got a Linux install up and running to play with. You may remember all the difficulties I had installing Gentoo in a virtual machine. Well, I recently saw some stuff about Ubuntu on Slashdot and decided to give it a try again…

I downloaded Microsoft Virtual PC 2004, Ubuntu 5.10, and gave it a try… The install process ran fine, but when I tried to boot into the virtual machine it crapped out. Then I decided to try Microsoft Virtual Server…but that didn’t work either. I downloaded the VMWare Player, and tried to load up the virtual machines that I’d created in the Microsoft products, but it still didn’t work! Finally, I gave VMWare’s Virtual Server a try…and it worked!

The VMWare virtual machine doesn’t seem quite as responsive as the Microsoft one did… But I’m actually able to run Ubuntu through it, so I’m absolutely thrilled. I just wish I had a bigger hard disk, so I could install even more virtual machines. I really enjoy toying around with different operating systems, seeing what they can do… I’d love to try installing Gentoo through VMWare, see if it’ll run or not.

So far, I’m fairly impressed with Ubuntu. It was a very easy install and looks like a very clean OS. I didn’t have any trouble finding all the utilities and programs I was looking for. There is a good selection of software, everything is where it ought to be, and works reasonably well. I think I’d even go so far as to say that my son could probably get away with using it as his desktop OS, if it wasn’t for the games he plays. Of course, 6.06 is coming out very soon and I’m quite curious to see what changes have been made in it…

We just got back from seeing The DaVinci code. I was rather pleasantly surprised. I haven’t read the book yet, but there’s been more than enough press to give me a fairly good idea what I was in for, and I really wasn’t expecting to like it much. Actually though, it was pretty good.

The first half-hour or so was fairly slow paced… I was starting to get rather bored. But once they started running away from people it got much more interesting. The mixture of fact and fiction, intrigue and action was quite entertaining.

More entertaining, however, is the reaction people are having to this movie. I actually saw someone on CNN the other night claiming that the book was “full of lies”. Since when has it been possible for a work of fiction to be full of lies? Does that even make sense?

Obviously a work of fiction isn’t truth…it’s all made up…but how can you call it a lie when the story is being created from someone’s imaginiation?

Slashdot | The Future of Digital Books

I think this is a great thing. Sure, new authors should get paid… There’s no reason why everything should be available free or anything like that. I have no problem paying for new content.

But the old stuff… The classics… And things that are published into the public domain - like Government press releases… That should all be available to pretty much everyone in the world, free.

I love sites like MemoWare, Project Gutenberg, and the Baen Free Library because I can get all sorts of books there completely free. All kinds of older titles that are out of print or have passed into the public domain. Stuff like Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, and Honor Harrington. It’s terrific that these titles are now available to a wider audience. Tons of folks who’d never be able to read these titles can now, for free.

Sure, libraries have always provided free access to older books… But you’re then dependant on the library’s inventory and lending policies. Yes, retail bookstores often have reprints of popular classics, but you have to pay for those.