GeekLimit

This may sound strange, but does anyone else have a showgirl for their GMail logo today? Or maybe it’s an indian chief? I’ve restarted, and it’s still there…! Ubuntu 6.10 / Firefox 2.0
(click for full size)

update:

It appears to be some sort of Aztec…

I can’t believe I haven’t heard about this on any of my feeds. It seems like once again the RIAA has done its thing once again, except this time to eradicate internet-based radio. Keep in mind that the extreme rate hikes they’re implementing apply only to internet radio; five times higher than sattellite, and nothing for terrestrial.

I can’t even describe how ridiculous this is to the future of the entire music industry, so I’ll let the long history of educated posts at Techdirt do it for me. Here’s a link to Pandora’s founder on the subject, please digg it up on your way over if you’d like to see a level playing field in this industry. Completely ridiculous – I can’t stand industrial dirtbags putting an extinct business model over fairness, and these guys are reigning kings of that genre.

I’m in charge of purchasing for a large organization, and if you take a walk around any of our facilities, you won’t be able to find one Sony product. Not a CD-R, not an A/V cable, absolutely nothing. The same goes for my This list also holds the oil companies (to as great a degree as I can manage), but that’s a whole other story.

Welcome to #3, RIAA. Be ashamed.

In the meantime, those artists who have sold their souls to RIAA for a monetary profit canjoin the shame party. For everyone else, go ahead and fire up RIAA Radar to make sure you’re not responsible for funding this type of thing. In fact, RIAA Radar just found a new home in my blogroll.

(I’d like to note here that I really am a well-meaning, good-natured guy, but stuff like this really rubs me the wrong way, especially because I know what it’s like to work hard, get something going, and have someone kill it because they’re too lazy to compete at a higher level. [many stories, multiple times...])

So I’ve been happy with Ubuntu so far, but wanted to show those Vista guys a thing or two by installing Beryl. The Beryl/XGL-Ubuntu instructions over at the Beryl Wiki are great, but didn’t have information for an Intel graphics card (for people like me with Intel embedded graphics through the chipset).

I did some Googling and found a startup script for XGL that works with an Intel graphics chip like on my Dell 700m. I’ve added the information to the wiki, but if you’re looking to get Beryl up and running on an Ubuntu laptop with Intel graphics, here’s where to go. The Intel-specific startupxgl.sh script I’ve added is:

#!/bin/sh
beryl-manager
sleep 4
exec gnome-session

Apparently the biggest hit at South-by-Southwest yesterday is the announcement of a new music service like Pandora and Last.fm called Slacker centered around a device very close to what I described in the PandoraPod post I did about two months earlier.

I still believe the concept will be the next big thing, and a potential iPod killer, and apparently BoingBoing, TechDirt and others are starting to believe in it as well. Too bad I have to have a job, I wish I could work on a ubiquitous internet-connected device like the PandoraPod, but with the ability to connect to any of these services.

This brings up a good point. Ideas are cheap, that’s for sure, but what’s a guy to do when he’s got a dozen ideas but also a load of responsibility to be a provider for his household? It’s not too late for me to be an internet/technology revolutionary (I don’t have kids to take care of yet), so what to do?

I’ve started learning Ruby/Rails with a lot of help from Andrew at Teabass (check him out) and the NW Chicago Ruby Users Group.  I’ve even lowered my grad class load this semester to get more time to work on learning how to do Rails development.  I think that will cover the web-applications side of things, but I’ve been coming up with more and more hardware.  Short of flying to Malaysia and asking people at the airport where to go, how does one get a handheld device prototype / production model created?  I’m pretty anxious to work on the next generation of product, such as the PandoraPod or my WiMax/Skype RAZR phone.  Any ideas?

Anyway, it really is great to have some validation that yes, maybe I am tuned in properly to the way things are going, but in addition to my side project to try and get hired by Google as a future applications visioneer, where do I go from here?  Anyone have some good advice?