I've always used Macs as my primary computers for my design work (both on the job and on my own time), and for a few years now have been using Ubuntu (Linux) as an alternate system. I think open source software is important and will only grow in importance in the future, and I am amazed at the level of software that is available already. I use it at work and I find myself becoming conditioned to the benefits of it in ways that are sometimes only obvious at times when I'm on other computers (e.g. Anytime I'm on a computer that isn't running Firefox with Adblock Plus, I realize how ugly the internet can be with all those ads...) Not long ago, our old laptop gave signs that it was beginning to die: bogging down, taking forever to load, keys working sporadically. I reinstalled Windows and it helped briefly but it didn't last. Since Janel is at work on her dissertation, we decided we needed a trustworthy machine. We ended up getting a deal on a used Macbook and now I've reinstalled the old Dell with Ubuntu Studio (a remix of the regular Ubuntu with a few more graphics programs preinstalled and a different theme) so now we're essentially Windows free. 

It's been four years already? The time has gone quickly...and here is a transcription of the meditation Daryl gave at the ceremony to refresh our memories. He gave us an inkjet print-out of the sermon and I wanted to type it out for posterity because at some point over the last four years I spilled liquid on it and the ink is smearing. Maybe if I get it into Google's cache I can be certain of not losing or destroying it...

...The Scripture texts you chose are some of the most beautiful in the Bible. It adds to their beauty to know that you each have selected a text that was used in your parents' wedding. The problem, of course, is that, with such beautiful verses to work with, it is very difficult to limit a meditation to 10 minutes...

I just finished Slaughterhouse-Five, strangely appropriate on the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki since the story takes us into the firebombing of Dresden during WWII. (Vonnegut was a prisoner in Dresden during the firebombing and wrote this book over 20 years after the war...when the firebombing was still a relative secret from the general public).

It took me a little while to get used to the jumpy, disjointed style...a purposeful effect:

[The book] is so short and jumbled and jangled...because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.

I wrote previously about bottling our first batch of homebrewed beer, but I hadn't taken the camera out a few weeks before that to document the first steps, prior to the bottling. Here's the prequel. We started batch number two today. This time a wheat beer (last time was a light Belgian) so we had a bag of grains to soak...a step that we didn't have the first time. Another difference between the recipes was that last time the aroma hops were coriander seeds and this time it was just more of the same hops which we used as bittering hops. Other than that it was very similar. Click through to see some photos of the morning's work.