Well deserved thanks.

Short and belated post: I wanted to give some sincere and heartfelt gratitude to the sysadmins for Fedora that keep our infrastructure in tip top condition daily. Sorry I missed saying this on SysAdmin day, but you guys just rock! Thanks for all you do for us, seen and unseen.

New goodie on the way.

My wife has been expressing some discontent with the fact that although we share Google calendars, we still have a standard paper calendar hanging on the kitchen wall. She dutifully replaces it every year, usually with an art nouveau themed version. But she’s been so happy with her new Droid X, her first smartphone which she got in the fall (a twin of mine), that she wants our kitchen calendar to share data with our cloud presence. You won’t find that in the 2012 art nouveau collection you pick up at the bookstore!

So today, a coworker at Red Hat pointed me at a $50 coupon for any tablet at Staples. I had been considering an Android tablet, with the intention of putting it on a removable mount in the kitchen right where our paper version lives today. Having seen the new Asus Eee Transformer, I felt like the price point was starting to get to the right point to try a tablet. So tonight I went over to Staples to pick one up.

So why not the Cadillac of tablets, the iPad? I know the iPad is a gorgeous interface and user experience; I had an iPhone for a couple years so I do respect that polish. However, with the amount of information I share with my wife via our Google accounts, my priority is the integration of services with the tablet platform, and I think the Android tablets really deliver in that respect. And of course it’s a huge benefit that Android tends to play extremely well with my Linux boxes, and we don’t run anything else in my house. Add to that the frustration and later contempt for Apple’s inability to do the same, and there’s no way I was going for an iPad.

At my local Staples store, unfortunately, you can only order the Asus, and it’s not carried on the floor of the store. It was imperative for me to be to put hands on this thing if I was going to pay hundreds of dollars for it, so I stopped by the local Best Buy store to see if they had it in stock. They did, and I really liked what I saw, so after giving Best Buy the chance to match the price, which they declined (surprise!), I went back over to Staples and ordered the Transformer for $349 for the 16GB version.

I also had an Amazon gift certificate hanging around, so I ordered the keyboard unit to go with it — which essentially turns the tablet into a really slick Android laptop with longer battery life, a ~1.2kg weight, and extra expansion capabilities with USB and SD slots. That works really well for my wife, because she can take the tablet off the wall and mount it in the keyboard, not far from the cooking portion of the kitchen where she can refer to recipes. She currently has an old Eee PC 701SD filling that role and the 10.1″ screen of the new tablet seems pretty luxurious by comparison!

I’m still considering replacing the display unit in my Dell XPS 1330M because the computer itself is in fine shape. I think I can get several more years of duty out of it, given the still-formidable CPU and memory in it. But the tablet seems so convenient and fun that I’m really looking forward to trying it. I’m hopeful that Google will also have ways to leverage the front and rear facing cameras for Hangouts on Google+ in the future, which should be great fun.

Doubling up.

So having been around the merry go round a few times, I might as well confess that I’ve embraced my share of basically harmless vices. Booze? Check. As in, check my liquor cabinet for the good stuff. Loud rock’n'roll? DUH. Did I tell you about my big Lyle Lovett hair that I grew out for the surf-punk power pop band I was in and the number of ladies’ undergarments that have ended up on the headstock of my bass over the years? (Worn by actual ladies, in case you were uncertain.) And yes, I have two kids, so… OK, let’s leave that one alone. But somehow for over forty years I managed to dodge the sin of them evil cards.

I’ve even been to Las Vegas a couple times, usually for business conferences. Stayed on the Strip, took in the shows, had the prime rib, saw the art collection in the Bellagio. But as for gambling? Never went past blowing $20 in sucker money on nickel slots. I just didn’t understand the lure of throwing money after a game of mainly chance. (Still don’t.) Pretty much the only card games I’d played were Uno and gin rummy. Certainly nothing like blackjack.

Or poker.

Then came the Southeast Linux Fest, where Max and Greg decided my personal corruption cap was one feather short and introduced me to Texas Hold’em. Well, that’s one way to tell the story. Another way to tell it is that Robyn goaded me into playing because she knows an easy mark when she sees one. Yet another way to tell it is that I hung out at the table watching until curiosity got the better of me. So I sat down and learned that there’s more than a little bit of strategy involved in poker. I also learned that I had a LOT to learn.

I took a beating in both games I played, but it was well worth the entertainment — in fact, it cost me less per hour than a good movie. I got to hang out with friends and get schooled in some of the most elementary poker lessons you might have learned in high school (depending on who you hung out with in high school). I even discovered that some of those things actually fell neatly in line with common sense for living. Such as:

• Don’t fold when you can check. (I put it a little differently in this status post.)
• If you can’t spot the sucker at the table, rest assured it’s you.
• You sometimes have to risk a lot to win a lot.

So when I came home from SELF, I did a couple things. First I had a nice dinner with my family. Then I ordered three things from Amazon: two books by Phil Gordon, who strikes me as a fairly level headed and straight arrow kind of poker player; and a set of poker chips. I started to educate myself a little about the game — the terminology, the basic strategies, and also how much fun it is to play.

I even started casting a net with my DVR for poker tournaments on TV, to see how some of the great players do their thing. I’ve been watching the repeats of the 2010 World Series of Poker over the last week or so, and the 2011 WSOP is going on right now which I’m taping too. I think I’ve found a sporting event I actually enjoy watching at home. No Super Bowls or Stanley Cups for me, thanks, but I really get riled up by championship poker on TV. Who knew?

At night after I finish work, I might take twenty or thirty minutes to play online a little, although I simply won’t play for real money on sites, not just because I have better things to do with my money, but also (and especially) because many of them seem to be joined at the hip with crooks. Sorry, ALLEGED crooks. When your money’s not on the line, though, you don’t play as carefully, and that means the game as a whole suffers somewhat. According to most experts, though, you can go from rank novice to mediocre amateur through the experience of playing online even in no-money games such as those found on Facebook or a lot of smartphone marketplaces.

By the way, did you know you can download and install a free software Texas Hold’em app called PokerTH in Fedora? (See, there was a tie-in to Fedora waiting somewhere in this rum-sodden den of iniquity.) The computer engine is pretty awful, an opinion I’m basing purely on the fact that I beat it regularly. I hear that Wilson Software makes one of the best simulation/training programs on the market, although of course it’s only for proprietary operating systems. PokerTH does make it possible to get together with friends and have a network game, though, which is pretty cool. And there is an online server run by the project that has hundreds of games going on at a time too. I sometimes try those out although they tend to favor very fast play which puts novices at a great disadvantage! But still, it’s an experience.

Now granted, none of that has really made me a better player yet. And lest anyone worry, this is a fairly minor obsession for me which centers on exploring the strategy of a game that I totally missed out on in my 20s and 30s. So I’m only inching forward in progress — instead of getting beat all the time, I get beat most of the time.

Still, you have to start somewhere — even when it comes to picking up a new vice.

* By the way, it will be interesting to see if anyone is able to send a substantive comment to this post without it getting flagged by the spam filter.

Double plus GOOG.

Last night I was able to get into the Google+ trial and one of the pieces of the setup was a Talk plugin that includes audio and video chat support. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it works great on Fedora 15. The PackageKit browser integration pulls in other support you may need. After installation you’re able to join the “Hangout” feature which lets you chat live with multiple other users using your webcam and audio. It also plays well with PulseAudio so I was able to easily use my USB headset with no tinkering.

So far it looks like Google may have figured out a way to take the interesting parts of Wave, and build them into a framework that’s more friendly and less like an out of control email client. Within 24 hours I had a lot of people I know hooked up via the “Circles” feature for sharing. What this means for Facebook I don’t know — I sincerely hope G+ doesn’t become a cul-de-sac for geeks only.

My other hope is that there are GNOME folks out there looking into the Google+ API project, to see if there will be interesting and user-friendly ways to have the future desktop OS interact with this service.