At 2 PM PST, Dell will start selling desktops and laptops with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed.  I never actually thought I’d see this day to be honest.  Sure, Linux is more than ready for the desktop, but not quite ready for me to install it for Mom.  Still, this is huge and must have caused some serious riffs with the folks in Redmond.  Though I’ve used Linux on servers since late 1998, I’ve only been using it on my desktop for the past couple of years and never once thought of putting it on a laptop because if the lack of quality open source drivers for wireless cards.  That all changed with the release of Ubuntu 7.04, Feisty Fawn.  Prior to relocating to Colorado Springs, I purchased a laptop with Windows Vista Premium on it for the road trip and found that the laptop was not ready for Vista.  The drivers for the screen, keyboard and wireless card never worked properly and it was only out of a troubleshooting session that I decided to install Linux to see if the blank screen was the fault of the OS. 

Not only did Ubuntu install beautifully, but it recognized my wireless card and I only had to put in my WPA key to make it work.  Hibernation also works incredibly well whereas if I did that in Vista, I’d have to start in safe mode and reboot.   I’m incredibly excited about Dell’s move and it kills me to not buy one today to support the cause and reward a company for finally getting it.  But I don’t think the boss (Amy) really cares about the FOSS movement so it will have to wait for a few days.  Ok, weeks.  You’re right honey, years.

Pretty interesting and self-explanatory.

(via The BBC)

Despite my acute shyness, I consider myself a good public and group speaker. I often get asked for tips on how to speak more effectively or how to prevent debilitating pre-speak nervousness. Well, I think I can throw all that old advice away and provide one simple tip. Forget pretending you are talking to one person or concentrating on a single point in the audience because having sex is apparently the best way to calm your nerves shortly before giving a speech or presentation to a large group according to Stuart Brody, a psychologist at the University of Paisley, UK.

Stuart Brody, a psychologist at the University of Paisley, UK, compared the impact of different sexual activities on blood pressure when a person later experiences acute stress. For a fortnight, 24 women and 22 men kept diaries of how often they engaged in penile-vaginal intercourse (PVI), masturbation or partnered sexual activity excluding intercourse. After, the volunteers underwent a stress test involving public speaking and mental arithmetic out loud.

Volunteers who’d had PVI but none of the other kinds of sex were least stressed, and their blood pressure returned to normal faster than those who’d only masturbated or had non-coital sex. Those who abstained had the highest blood-pressure response to stress.

So if you want to kick ass at your next big corporate meeting, make sure it’s penetrative sex – the magic vanishes if you pursue other forms of sexual gratification.

I do have some problems with the testing methodology (more than just not participating as a test subject) but I thought it was interesting news anyway.

(via The New Scientist)

(Ok, I wouldn’t wake up that much but that’s not the point of this post…)

Now that I have the insomnia problem artificially and (most likely) temporarily, I’ve been thinking a lot about my sleep cycle and wake time. Waking up feeling refreshed is not a matter of how much you sleep, It’s about waking up in the correct stage of your sleep cycle. Here’s a good article explaining sleep cycle in detail. In short, if you want to wake up feeling refreshed, the aXbo Sleep Phase Alarm Clock claims it can help.

To use it, simply put on the wireless wristband, set the time you need to wake up no matter what, and the aXbo alarm clock will attempt to detect the right time to wake you up, within a specified time window (e.g. 30 minutes).

The obvious advantage over similar products like SleepTracker, is that the alarm won’t get muffled when you tuck your hands under the pillow. The aXbo also runs on mains and/or batteries, eliminating the problem of the alarm running out of juice in the middle of the night. And as a bonus, the aXbo also comes with 3 sleep-inducing melodies which automatically stop when aXbo notices that you’re asleep. I’d like a little more detail about how the device detects your sleep cycle accurately (it can’t do that measuring pulse or blood pressure) but it sounds like a kick ass idea and something I’d be willing to try.

(via Engadget)

Nothing makes my day like the story of a helpless animal enacting revenge on human beings:

A mouse got its revenge against a homeowner who tried to dispose of it in a pile of burning leaves. The blazing creature ran back to the man’s house and set it on fire.

Luciano Mares, 81, of Fort Sumner said he caught the mouse inside his house and wanted to get rid of it.

“I had some leaves burning outside, so I threw it in the fire, and the mouse was on fire and ran back at the house,” Mares said from a motel room Saturday.

Village Fire Chief Juan Chavez said the burning mouse ran to just beneath a window, and the flames spread up from there and throughout the house.

No was hurt inside, but the home and everything in it was destroyed.

Unseasonably dry and windy conditions have charred more than 53,000 acres and destroyed 10 homes in southeastern New Mexico in recent weeks.

“I’ve seen numerous house fires,” village Fire Department Capt. Jim Lyssy said, “but nothing as unique as this one.”

What kind of person would throw a live animal in a fire? I guess the kind of person that deserves to be thrown in himself. What a cruel dumbass.

(via The Seattle Times)