The Inflatable Soapbox

In a rare turnabout, I posted to my LiveJournal yesterday and will cross-post it here. I had a WP plug-in that automated the reverse, but I don’t use it anymore. I had only logged into LJ to wish a friend happy birthday. I found a nice suggestion for a blog post topic awaiting me, which I’ve used as the title of this post. My user name on LJ is meanirishtemper. Don’t ask. You don’t want to know. Without further ado, here is my LJ post from yesterday:

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I have used the name Rain King online since 1994. I took it from the Counting Crows song of the same name. It was only later that I learned of the Saul Bellow novel, also excellent. I use that name because I feel it describes me… my life. I’ve been blessed with the melancholy celtic spirit. It’s in my blood, the rain, and it calls to me wherever I may run to escape it, physically or emotionally. One day it will take me home; my elusive, dreamed-of home where I truly belong, where I fit in, no where to be found in this world.

So why am I meanirishtemper? Why else? Every variant of the name I wanted was taken, save bizarre numerically-tainted versions like 6969The_Rain_King_666999 or some such nonsense. And it has been pointed out that my temper could use some hmmmm… tempering? My business is Timbury Computer Services and you will find me online as timbury in many places, like http://www.cre8buzz.com a great social network.

Enough of this. I’mback off to IMVU where I am… TheRainKing, of course. Peace.

The Anthill is an OpenBlog – a new concept in blogging.  One blog with 100s or even 1000s of authors!  It is the official community blog of cr8Buzz! I love seeing how quickly people grow to love and rely on this blog to share their insights and knowledge with others and also bring traffic to their own sites.  Be seen… Be heard… Be found… check it out today!

The Inflatable Soapbox is moving to a new server today.  The URL http://timkissane.com will still work, but please check your blogroll links and bookmarks.  The IP-based address http://timkissane.com/ will no longer be valid.  I expect these changes to be complete by 17:00 EST today.  Any odd glitches should be ironed out by tomorrow.  I want to change the theme to something less graphics-intensive to improve load times.  That will come after the move, however.  Thank you for your patience.

 I’m one of those Linux fanatics who enjoy trying new distros almost constantly. Because of the freedom inherent in the GPL and other “open” licenses, there are always new flavors of my favorite OS springing up.  Early spring of last year, I found an Ubuntu-based distro called UbuntuSE.  I was attracted to the screenshots of the dark blood-red and black theme.  This was essentially Ubuntu with fresh artwork: splash screens, window themes, wallpapers, and amazing 3D screensavers.  The SE, it turned out, stood for Satanic Edition.

I consider myself a spiritual person, but I’m not a fan of organized religion.  One of the few things that offends me are people who are easily offended.  Especially those who  believe they somehow deserve to be protected from any speech, image or ideology which they find offensive (typically, anything not their own).  I found out there were two similar themed Ubuntus, the Christian Edition and the Muslim Edition.  With a few hearty chuckles during installation, Ubuntu Satanic Edition became my desktop for a few months.

Recently, I followed a link which took me to Distrowatch, a well-known and respected site which offers reviews and news of Linux distributions.  It is run by Ladislav Bodnar (distro AT distrowatch DOT com).  Mr. Bodnar is an intelligent man with an interesting and impressive background.  I noticed he had included the Christian and Muslim versions of Ubuntu, but not the Satanic version.  I thought it unlikely that he was ignorant of it’s existence, but I sent him a short note just in case.

Hi, Ladislav!

I wanted to inform you of another “themed” Ubuntu distro,
Ubuntu Satanic Edition or UbuntuSE. The site is
http://ubuntusatanic.org/ and it has been around since
2006. I see you have UbuntuCE and UbuntuME. I would
like to see UbuntuSE included on distrowatch. The artwork
and attention to detail are amazing. After all, Linux is a
“journey of freedom”. Thanks for a great Linux site!

Peace,
Tim

I quoted the phrase “journey of freedom” from Mr. Bodnar’s description of his experience with Linux. I received this response a few hours later:

I don’t feel comfortable with listing this distro on DistroWatch. I am not
religious or anything, but I think there are some limits of what is an
acceptable name for a Linux distribution. Sorry

Ladislav

I ask you to tell me the unvarnished truth.  Is this in keeping with the spirit of Linux, open source and freedom?  Is this arbitrary dictation of what distro shall be included based on the acceptability of it’s name to the maintainer offensive to anyone else?  I think Mr. Bodnar is not telling me the whole story  Perhaps he fears some expression of outrage by Christian and Islamic fanatics if he lists the UbuntuSE distro.  I can’t really speculate further on his true motivations.  I only post this to express my belief in freedom of expression, religious and otherwise.  That is one of the reasons I love Linux: the devotion of the community to freedom.

Mr. Bodnar is using his freedom as the site maintainer to censor the Linux community.  I don’t think he’s right to do so.  I think he needs to re-read his tagline on distrowatch: “Put the fun back into computing.”  What do you think?

I’d like to offer a weekly spot on the Inflatable Soapbox for a guest post. Anyone who’d like to share his or her views on an Open Source topic (Linux, WordPress, GIMP, MySQL, GPL, distro review, etc.) is welcome to submit a post. You must register first to gain contributor status.

Since I don’t have a guest lined up for today, I’ll tell you a little bit about the Inflatable Soapbox.

My friends and family have come to accept tolerate my style of communication: lecture. I don’t actually discuss an issue, I pontificate. I can frequently be seen standing at the virtual podium, left arm raised, index finger pointing skyward, “…and furthermore…”. You get the picture. I grew weary of lugging my soapbox around, so I did what any other pompous, didactic ass would do: I invented the Inflatable Soapbox. I carry it with me everywhere and can inflate it faster than Microsoft can pervert an open standard.

I’m currently running this on a ten year old Compaq DeskPro with a 500MHz Celeron, 384MB RAM, 10GB IDE HDD, from my home office on a Comcast high speed (1.5M down, 20M up) connection. This is far less expensive than a co-located setup, although my power situation leaves much to be desired. Thankfully, the ext3 file system and Ubuntu Linux (7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, LAMP server) recover nicely from the inevitable outages here at the shore. The second drawback is redirecting the domain from my hosted space at Hostway’s Chicago data center to my static IP (six month lease) on Comcast. That is why you see http://timkissane.com/ in your address bar instead of http://timkissane.com/.

Finally, as an experiment in traffic generation, I’ll be posting a photo of Lindsay Lohan nude (don’t worry, as you can see, it’s safe for work, the kids, whoever) that I found on Alexa while checking site rankings. Do you think this will help?

Don’t forget to submit posts in time for next Wednesday’s guest spot!

Peace.