After a ridiculously long soap opera of a labour dispute it seems the NHL and its Players’ Association finally agreed to finish it. Now they just have to make it official with some votes next week, but at this point that’s clearly just a formality.
I have nothing really to add to the story. All of the folks who actually know what they are talking about vis a vis the NHL have already commented. However, I’m cautiously optimistic something good will come out of this (but admittedly there is still potential for silliness).
It was likely due to stupidity on my part, but recently I’ve been experiencing a mysterious sound problem with my Ubuntu install (Hoary Hedgehog). For some reason I had absolutely no sound output whatsoever on a machine where I’d been successfully using Totem and the Music Player (Rhythmbox). I tried all the tips I could find on the web (including killing esd: the esound daemon), but nothing worked.
At one point I even managed to lose my entire desktop, i.e. when I booted up there was no pretty login screen only the command line. I’m not entirely sure how I did that, but I think it must have been something I did in Synaptic. That freaked me out more than a little bit, but fortunately I thought to run apt-get install ubuntu-desktop which installed a lot of stuff I didn’t recall removing. After that I was able to login into Gnome, but I still didn’t have any sound.
Yesterday, I decided to take another stab at it. I started with the Volume Control window. I already had the main playback volume at the maximum level (it was the first thing I checked when my sound stopped working). But, this time I decided to fiddle with the other sliders to see if anything happened. I launched an MP3 in Totem, and started fiddling with sliders. The first slider I tried was PCM on the capture tab and suddenly I had sound. I still don’t quite understand the relationship there, but I’ve got sound again so I’m not complaining too loud.
I just finished listening to the address by Steve Jobs at Stanford University’s commencement ceremony on June 12, 2005. (I downloaded the wiredatom recording of the speech as broadcast via Stanford’s live stream.)
As I would expect from a person with Steve Jobs’ talent and experience at centre stage, the address was impeccably well delivered and inspirational. It was a bit odd for a commencement given that he extolled the virtues of dropping out and not following a mandatory program of courses. But, then again, it’s unlikely that many people will drop out merely because it worked out really well for Steve Jobs. As he himself pointed out, you can only connect the dots looking back.
It’s worth listening to if you’ve got some time to spare.
Today in my aggregator, I found a link from David S. Isenberg to this series about the bombing of Nagasaki. It was written by American reporter George Weller, but suppressed by the occupation authorities. I have not read the whole series yet, but I’m finding it to be a vivid, informative, and thought provoking read.