Just saying.

How about taking someone along for the ride whose employer buys ink by the barrel or power by the megawatt/hour?

Hopefully, after carefully pointing out that there is no resident requirement for a Maryland Carry License, hopefully I’ve done just that. Hopefully. Not saying. Nope.

The only issue I see is it may be quite a boring story:

Week one: got the photos, fingerprints, references, paperwork, and the outrageous fee for exercising a core civil right all together. Mailed it in, return receipt requested.

Week two: Maryland failed in their plea to get a stay

Week three: The bank says my check was cashed

Week four: Nothing

Week five: Nothing

…

Week eleven: Nothing, and from my 1000+ other contacts, nothing either. MD state police says “there is a slight backlog”

…

Week twenty-six: Nothing. Except that Raymond Woollard (of Woollard v. Sheridan ) finally got his permit renewed. State Police say they are giving preference to renewals.

Week twenty-seven: Nothing.

…

Anyone with any ideas for “filler”, let’s hear them.

Oh, and credit for the “no residency requirement” goes to Patrick, who is (unverified) [see comments below] President of Maryland Shall Issue, in a comment left on this thread here.

6) It’s called “prepping” and it’s almost socially acceptable now if you at least make a few jokes about a zombie apocalypse, (and it has nothing at all to do with those crazy survivalist wackjob nut-cases, so stop looking at me like that…)

Hi SM,

According to our Advance Auto Parts garage records, your Toyota Camry may be due for its 45,000 mile scheduled service.  Learn More…[snip]

I got news for you guys, the 45k scheduled maintenance was due over a decade ago. Oh, and I distinctly remember unchecking the check-box that says I agree to you sending me spam (doesn’t matter of course, thanks to our congresscritters and the CAN-SPAM act, ordering parts online for quick local pickup just so you can save $10 with a coupon means we’ve established a “business relationship”, and the sleazy corporation can spam me until I beg them to stop.)

Thanks to sneakemail though, I can create a custom disposable email address just for this one transaction and then decide to cut off the email spam spigot after receiving the initial order conformation emails – all  on my terms, not theirs. I can also turn on the email address again if I ever want to initiate another transaction. Took longer to blog about it than do it too.

I don’t know if the average person will grok the user interface without a bit of effort on their part, but I’ve had no issues. There’s a free one month trial though, so you risk nothing. There are also features out the wahzoo that I’m sure you’ve never considered needing in a disposable email service, all for only $2 per month.

This has been another ad-free, payola free review from a happy 7 + year customer.

I test drove Arch, but I didn’t like the whole “rolling distro” idea to be a good idea. I want things to work, even if they are outdated. A rolling distro sounds like you are stuck in Beta all the time.

Then I tried Linux Mint, except the KDE flavor. This was almost right. There’s a default empty folder on the desktop for some reason with absolutely no explanation for why it’s there, except maybe it’s because they want to show off their “dare to be different” window controls. The “exciting” news is that they are on the side. This is obviously to show you that at KDE, they started with a blank sheet of paper. I can roll with the funky windowing system, but decided to ditch it when I could not make heads or tails out of the little icons and the KDE folk totally forgot to use “tool-tips”

I see no value in fighting my windowing manager. I have booted up recent versions of Puppy, BackTrack, and Parted Magic and had no issues moving around and trying all the widgets. Thus I’m not going to waste my time figuring out Unity or KDE. (If I _had_ to choose one or the other though, it would be KDE, but no praise for the second least sucky GUI.)

So now I’m giving Linux Mint 12 x64 with Gnome Classic the extended test drive. I’m dual booting with my older Ubuntu for the meanwhile.

I have a bad habit of not upgrading when things are working well for me, but Ubuntu 10.04 LTS was getting mighty long of tooth. So I decided to try 12.04 alpha release 2, because that is the next version with long term support. Let me tell you how much I hate getting comfortable again after I build myself a new machine. No way am I going to stay on the head of a 6 month release schedule.

I really like the 10.04 Ubuntu, as the GUI makes easy GUI stuff easy. Still, I do have a few grievances to air:

1. When I mount a resource using the GUI, I expect that I can also see them by issuing “mount” at the command line. In 10.04 at least, a USB stick will be shown, but a remote share won’t.
2. The Nautilus file browser won’t stick to a consistent interface. If I change the current working directory to another after setting “list view” from “icon view”, the file browser shouldn’t fscking jump back into the “icon view” again when I click on another folder.
3. When using  Nautilus, if I browse to a directory and suddenly find I need a command line, It should be easy peasy to open up a terminal window with the current working directory.  This was a feature of a version of Knoppix I was partial to, way back eight years ago or so. Advantage: KDE.
4. I also would prefer to deal with removable media (or anything in /etc/fstab but not currently mounted) the way Puppy (yes Puppy) Linux does. Namely if I plug the USB stick in, the OS detects it and puts an icon on my desktop, but does not mount it until and only until I tell it to. I know this is counter-intuitive to people who don’t grok mounting filesystems, but that’s how I roll.
5. Finally, if there was an easy way to change the desktop so it would NOT steal focus, unless I specifically approve of it beforehand for specific notifications, that would be awesome.

Anyway, as an anecdote, I booted up my work PC for the first time in months into XP, and walked out of the room. The damn thing then decided to take over and update elevendy  billion files before it would allow me to shut the thing back down cleanly. So maybe I just complain too much.  I am so glad work will be happy letting me run whatever I want on my desktop.

Blog about an upcoming uncomfortable medical procedure, the annoying and inconvenient pre-procedure preparations, and crack a few jokes in the meanwhile and then “bleg” for any advice.

Get back 68 comments, mostly all advice, all within 24 hours.

Update: …and we’re back. Updates later.