Greatest band-aid solution to Global Warming?

The Greenbox! It captures greenhouse gases and releases water vapour, and the contained gases are in turn used to grow algae and produce biofuel.

It sounds so simple, almost too good to be true, but I hope it turns out to be something worthwhile.

This week's status report

The Internet is such an infuriating place. The number of vocal global-warming deniers seem to be at an all-time high. The coalition of libertarian global-warming deniers and fundamentalist creationists is making life rather grim and depressing, when all you see these days is people raising unnecessary arguments over hollow issues.

Anyhow, I don't particularly feel like ranting on that topic this time, so I'll give a little status report on my reading.

I took a sneak peek at the local bookstore earlier, and it seems Harry Potter manics are filling the place to the brim. They sold out of all adult-cover versions, though. I thought the children's version had an overly colourful cover that looked rather ugly.

I've yet to go past a hundred pages in The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens, but so far, it's a pretty promising novel. Simple and effective language, strong imagery, and involving history and narrative that evoke reactions. The story is proving rather grim, but I ought to have expected that when I knew it was in the middle of the Irish Potato Famine.

In place of Harry Potter book 7...

Even though I live under a rock, I did recently hear that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is coming out in just a week. I'm not a HP fan, but I do follow the series, albeit slowly. It's a good thing the franchise is coming to a conclusion; I'm no fan of long-winded series and sequels. That said, I hope to see this book at least before the corresponding film comes out.

Unfortunately, I've been forbidden to get my hands on the book for now, since my sibling, who lives out of province, is getting a copy first and will hand it down to me once they're done. Deprived of the book and soon to be catapulted into in a world of rabid HP readers, I stumbled across this article: Harry Potter and the Death of Reading.

The editorial caught my interest with a last-minute mention of The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens, and provides an interesting, if short, premise. After a bit of searching on my own, I've placed a request for the book in the local library. This will fill the HP vacuum for the week, so I hope it meets expectations.

By the way, these are some other novels I've been perusing: Dressed To Kill by Margaret Duffy, Stalker by Faye Kellerman, and The Night of the Twelfth by Michael Gilbert.

NYT article on Williams syndrome

Link: The Gregarious Brain

Interesting article on a cognitive disorder that causes, among other things, a lack of social fear. As a social phobic, I see great contrast and similarities. I'd love to meet one of these people myself.

Failed switch to Ubuntu...

Over the last few weeks, I got a hand-me-down laptop with a dead hard drive. After replacing the faulty hardware, I thought I might try installing a Linux distro on it, just to continue my adventures with open source. Naturally, I picked the distro with the strongest reputation for user-friendliness -- Ubuntu. Now, this system certainly isn't that buff. It's a Toshiba Satellite A50 import. It's about a year old and rather slow, but did its job well enough until the choking demise of its system drive.

The last time I fiddled with Linux on my own computer was back in maybe '01, when I tried Debian on my frail old PC. That wasn't a particularly attractive experience, with some major driver issues I never worked out. Then I tried Mandrake Linux (now Mandriva Linux), which didn't work out either. The added stress of those few days seemed to have (or not) quickened my old PC's death. After that, I stayed far, far away from Linux distros, only touching RedHat and FreeBSD briefly during my brief online stints as site admins. I'm not that much of a techie, so even then, my activity was pretty much restricted to the simpler tasks.

So I grabbed the latest Ubuntu distro ("Feisty Fawn", a name I really like, too), and burnt it to a CD. Installation went straight-forward enough, until I entered a beige screen, with a white rectangular box in the top-left corner. This persisted for quite a few minutes, until the beige screen was then populated with an Ubuntu banner. Another ten minutes ticked by, and I finally saw my first message.

"There was an error starting the GNOME Settings Daemon.

Some things, such as themes, sounds, or background settings may not work correctly.

Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.

GNOME will still try to restart the Settings Daemon next time you log in."

The system stopped reacting after then.

Googling GNOME Settings Daemon Ubuntu startup error proved fruitful, though perhaps not so helpful to myself, with my limited Linux expertise. There was a variety of advice, but nothing definite or particularly relevant came to me. A little frustrated, I checked the disc for errors (none, as the built-in tool indicated) and went for Kubuntu (opting also for Feisty Fawn, if just for the name). Perhaps KDesktop would work better if GNOME decided to act up on me.

The installation certainly went a bit smoother, and I liked the colour scheme better. But something similar happened.

KDesktop said, "The process for the file protocol died unexpectedly."

Again, the system hung. At least I got to see part of the GUI. Yay.

Hmm... Kubuntu KDesktop dead upon installation? I decided enough was enough, and dug out my XP CDs to see if the hardware was truly messed up. And the system booted up fine. Ugh.

Maybe if I feel more adventurous another day, I'll give it another shot. Maybe Gutsy Gibbon'll fix the mysterious issue for me. Maybe I just have a Linux/Ubuntu-hating machine. I suspect the last is probably the most probable explanation...