Happy Leap Day!

Just a quick post to celebrate “Leap Day”, a day that only happens once every four years.  That alone merits a toast, or at least a post.  I feel for those that have birthdays on this day though.  On the other hand, when they are eighty years old, they can honestly say they’re celebrating their twentieth birthday? Saturday, I built this “log rack” to better stack all the wood (that we haven’t burned this winter due to the severe lack of cold weather this year) – See image below and my Flickr site for some pictures from this shoot.  I then went out with a friend and shot some more B&W around downtown Fort Worth, Texas and then went and hung out w/some friends in Denton for the evening. The next phase of my Linux upgrade – getting Audacious to work – was a royal BEATING.  Since I patched it, I had to recompile it and all the plugins too.  This meant having to go get all the development-versions of a bunch of libraries, some of which took a while to ascertain just what they were.  Building Audacious itself wasn’t that bad, but all the plugins was a pain, since each one needs different libraries.  One thing I learned was that OSS4 was NOT one of them.  After thinking I needed that for one of the plugins, it silently blacklisted all my sound modules and left me with a silent computer – not good!  This took a few hours to track down and fix.  Anyway, it’s all back working again, even after I again removed Pulseaudio and went back to Alsa.
Today’s Stack of Stuff:
Congress Turning FREEways into Toll Roads! me:This is just absolutely DESPICABLE! [Drive-by] Media Finally Paying Attention to Eligibility? Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff and Patriot Joe Arpaio is the first government agency to do a true official investigation into Obama’s constitutional fitness for the office of President of the United States! Imperial Government: The Food Police Are Here! “If I told you that government officials took away a preschooler’s turkey sandwich because it was ‘not nutritious’ and replaced it with fried food, you would think it was a made up story…” Letter From Young Conservative To Obama On His 16th Vacation. me:Wish I had the time off, and money for just ONE vacation like his this year! The IB Program is an Attempt to Indoctrinate our Children by Socialist Organizations. Can an Android phone run without Google? me:I prefer to avoid the all-prying eyes of Google as much as possible!

Stopping in Wells, Texas

I love the hand-made birdhouses on the walls. This is actually a home.Wells, Texas is a tiny town along US Highway 69 in “deep” East Texas. It is the last town you pass through traveling South down US 69 before you reach Lufkin. I’ve passed through it innumerable times since childhood on my way to and from Lufkin (“Aren’t we there YET?!”) to visit my many relatives that live there, but have never had an occasion to actually stop in Wells. This time, on the way, I noticed some beautiful old abandoned buildings semi-torn down glimmering in the setting sun and almost stopped to take a few pictures. I was kicking myself for the next week wishing that I had. So, on the return trip home I determined to stop and see for myself what was there.

This shell of a building is what originally got my attention.The sun was in a completely different part of the sky at noontime, but I still found a lot of good angles to shoot and ended up taking several photos! Wells is a tiny but charming town from another era with fewer than a thousand people and full of abandoned mom & pop shops along the main highway. I did not have time to really explore the town, to do it justice, so I instead concentrated on the main street and the many charming old buildings there. A single water-tower with the town’s name pokes up above the tall pine trees dead ahead on Hwy 69 as you approach the town from the North like a beacon leading you to a charming rural oasis in a lonely desert of thick, dark pine trees.

Then the road suddenly narrows to two lanes briefly like an hourglass as you slowly drive through the downtown feeling like you’ve gone back to a much slower, simpler, and quieter time! Just as you begin to really feel the town’s charm, the speed limit returns to a brisk, blurry 70mph and the road suddenly widens back into a 4 lane boulevard and continues winding on through the seemingly never-ending wilderness of pine trees and often-abandoned white-framed farmhouses. There are no fast-food establishments in Wells, except for the requisite Dairy Queen, which in Texas is traditionally the sure status symbol that a small town has indeed arrived as a town!

Shot this in my car while leaving (Someone actually out enjoying the beautiful weather!)The town appeared to be even more abandoned than it actually is because it was around noon on a Sunday and everyone must have either still been in church or at home with their families since I saw almost no one out on the street. Seems nearly everyone in East Texas does go to church on Sundays. I do see more people normally when I come through Wells at other times. I began to notice an awful lot of abandoned homes and businesses all along my route through East Texas this trip. I’m sad to confess that I have not paid that much attention before, usually being in a hurry to get from one end of this four hour journey to the other.

The All-Seeing Eye of Osiris

	The All-Seeing Eye of Osiris I am Ever-Watching!
	While visiting my mom last week, I found this really cool green wine bottle in her living room.  I vaguely remember it from childhood, but never paid it any mind before, but sat there staring at the green pyramid shape and the crystal prism stopper and then holding it up to my face and looking through the triangular prism.  I had one of my *rare*, artsy-creative moments when the repressed artsy side of my brain suddenly rares up in stubborn rebellion against the dominant and equally stubborn tech side.  The thought of the “All-seeing eye of Osiris” on the back of the dollar bill popped up as an image in my head.  Those of you who know me well know that I, when I get an image in my head, have to make it manifest so I can look at it, so I did a shoot requiring over a dozen takes, then created this image.  This is also one of my very rare self-portraits.  I’ve never been much into self-portraits and have always been a bit paranoid about posting high-quality images of myself on the open internet, so that was part of the reason I went for big time bokeh, to not only sharpen the image of the bottle and the eye but to blur my face out somewhat as well (for our mutual benefit)!
	Annuit Coeptis ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
	“One of the biggest roses in the Universe!“ Found ^this^ Cool Valentine’s Day image yesterday on io9! 55 Open Source Replacements for Photo and Graphics Tools

Ongoing Linux Upgrade, etc…

Two-toned Daffodil, backlit by the sun.I know it’s been a bit since I’ve posted, but I seem to be suffering a bit of “Bloggers’ Block” as of late.  I had a very politically charged opinion piece mostly written up after recently seeing several political Facebook posts that raised my hackles a bit, but my computer ate it in a very weird way that I think was Karma, so I’m convinced that it just wasn’t meant to be.  I don’t like to post much political/religious fare on my Facebook because I have Facebook friends of all religions and political stripes and I do not feel that that is the proper forum for such rants.  When I feel the occasional need to rant, I prefer to do it here where people who don’t wish to see it can simply ignore it. My Linux upgrade saga continues.  I would say I’m about 90 percent there at this point.  I got my window-manager problem fixed.  I ended up switching to GDM from Mint’s LightDM, then found this:  http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-906990.html.  Ended up only having to edit /usr/share/xsessions/Afterstep.desktop and change the “Type” parameter to “Application” and pound (comment) out the “NoDisplay=true” parameter line, then restarting X. I also got my browser (Firefox 10) set up and safely working under a separate user (see my previous article post on this subject). This is something I highly recommend to all Linux/Unix users since it’s not hard to do and greatly adds to your computer’s security, since the browser and any malicious code launched through it runs as a user with very weak privileges and thus can be prevented from altering, or even seeing other programs and data on your computer.  I do not know if this is feasible on Windows, but I do recommend working in Windows (if you insist) as a separate (non-Administrator) user. Got my fonts working on Tk/a2x by adding all the files from my old /usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont/ dir.  Then I added symlinks to atm3270.ttf, atmfull.ttf, and lucon.ttf to /usr/share/ghostscript/fonts/.  This makes them visible to ghostscript and Tk.  To get them visible in X/xfontsel, I looked in /var/log/Xorg.0.log, which told me it looked by default for fonts in various X-ish places and “/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType/”. There was nothing in there but empty fonts.dir, fonts.scale, fonts.alias, and encodings.dir.  So, I ended up renaming that directory and symlinking TrueType instead to /usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont.  That’s where all my cool truetype fonts live along with, the requisite (for X) apparently, the fonts.dir and friends files.  This seemed to work for a while, but has since stopped working.  I’ve yet to figure out why. Another old dockapp program that no longer worked was “wmpower“, which stops working somewhere after kernel 2.6.35 or something like that.  Problem is that it has the path to the kernel’s power management stuff hard-coded to “/proc/acpi/info”.  In newer kernels it’s now “/proc/acpi/wakeup”.  All I had to do was download the latest wmpower source (v. 0.4.3) and modify /src/power_management/acpi/libacpi.c, line 81 as follows (diff/patch): 81c81 < if (access("/proc/acpi/info", R_OK) != 0) return 0; --- > if (access("/proc/acpi/info", R_OK) != 0 && access("/proc/acpi/wakeup", R_OK) != 0) return 0; and follow the instructions to build (./configure; make; make install) and now it works like a champ! Anyway, this is what led me to a solition:  http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/no-acpi-support-in-kernel-890644/.
Love, Tears & Blood	Misc. Other Stuff:
	The Obamanation tries to use Jesus to Justify [Higher] Taxes “Perhaps he should not take Jesus out of context.  He [Jesus] was speaking of charity to your fellow man.  NOT of charity to [or by] your government.  It is the American people who are the MOST charitable people in the world.” me:I totally agree and wish to add this quote from II Thessalonians 3:10: “For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.” Justice Ginsburg: ‘I Would Not Look to the U.S. Constitution’ me:It is really sad that we apparently have appointed a justice to our highest court and who is sworn to “protect and defend”, and in the case of a justice, to interpret our constitution who feels this way about it. Weekend project: Zap Your Coworkers’ Minds with Multi-Pointer X! me:I keep meaning to try this!         I took this photo in a park area in my mom’s neighborhood while visiting this week.  Then in a rare moment of artistic inspiration, I decided to add the streaming teardrop of blood.  Also thought about bloodying the other dark streaks on his face but decided on just the single tear.  It seems to bring out a variety emotions on different levels that I can’t even begin to explain, much less express, so we’ll just leave it at that.