I almost died today

Ok, that may be a bit of an overstatement, but it was close!

Some background information. I don't have air conditioning in my car, so I leave my windows down pretty much all the time, unless it is going to rain. Because of this, I have found some really interesting (and living) thing in my car when I get to it in the morning. Among these being raccoons, cats, and birds. It doesn't happen enough to warrant a change of habit though.

This morning, I was driving to work. About halfway there, I got stopped at a rather long red light. At about the time I I came to a full stop, I started hearing this really low buzzing sound behind me. All of my windows are rolled down except one, the one behind the passenger seat. It only works about half the time, so I generally leave it rolled up. As I look behind me, I see what I think is a small humming bird flying around in the back of my car. That is, until it landed on the one window that I couldn't roll down. It was a huge wasp. Like 2-3 inches long. The thorax was oval-shaped (this comes up later on) and very round and shiny. The wasp itself was black, brown, and yellow. Right now, I am pretty much paralyzed.

What I think happened is I have some bottles and stuff in my back seat. The wasp had crawled up under my seat last night. As I was stopping, a bottle hit the wasp or disturbed it or something and it starting flying around.

Anyway, I am at a red light. I have to figure out a way to get the wasp out of the car before the light turns green. Since all the windows are down but one, once I start moving, all this wind change will probably freak the wasp out and it will kill me. I a slowly move my hand over to the window button and start pressing down on it. It doesn't work, I press and depress about 5-6 times. As soon as the light turns green, the window starts to move down. By this time, the wasp is literally headbutting the window. It is loud, too. I can see the lady in the car behind pointing at it with a "WTF" expression on her face (it was that big, you could see it from the car behind me). Once the window is down about halfway, the wasp flies away.

Seriously, I don't know if I have been that scared in my life. As soon as I got to work, I started looking up giant wasps. There are some here in Texas, but they don't match the description of what I saw (the Cicada Killer wasp has an elongated and pointed stinger, the one I saw was round). The closest I found to what I saw was this.

Has anyone ever seen a wasp like this in Texas or have a better idea of what was in my car this morning?

I will be getting an iMac

Within the next month (at least the beginning of next month, after QuakeCon), I will be getting an iMac. I will be getting the 24" model with 2.8 ghz processor. With Parallels, I will keep OS X, but my other OS is a toss up between openSUSE 11 and Ubuntu 8.04 (I am leaning towards openSUSE). It is quite an expensive toy, but I think it will be worth it. I hope it will be worth it :-).

I also need a computer around the house that I am not afraid will freeze up or something on friends or relatives considering I keep everything pretty bleeding edge (SVN, git, etc...) and bugs tend to pop up :-). That is the main reason for keeping OS X on there.

I am sure there are a few more kinks I have to work out, which is why I am posting this on the Planet. If anyone out there has SUSE or Ubuntu on an iMac, any tips would be appreciated. I will be getting the wireless mouse and keyboard upgrades, if that makes any difference.

Other news, the Ubuntu Texas Logo contest has ended and it looks like jegHegy won :-). Congrats! A big thanks to the other entries. It was a great contest.

Just a few more hours

There is just a few more hours left the Ubuntu Texas Logo Contest, so if you haven't voted yet and want to, better hurry up!

EDIT: We have a winner for the Logo Contest. jeghegy has taken the most votes. Check out the poll for more details.

Mr. Stedfast, I feel your pain

J Stedfast has been having a lot of problems with Pulse Audio. People have been saying it is just him, his configurations, etc...

Well, I am having the same problems he is, as is my dad and sister (they use the same computer). I can handle going and fixing it every time I want to listen to something, or watch a flash video. My dad is starting to become very annoyed with having to switch between ALSA and Pulse Audio so that he can use Skype, then listen to his music, then watch a video on MSN. I am pretty sure all the sound problems have turned my sister completely off on Ubuntu, to the point to where she may never come back.

My dad used to even brag to people about how he doesn't have to deal with all the crap on Windows, but is still just as productive. Now, when he talks about it, there is obvious agitation and reluctance in his voice. All because of this Pulse Audio crap. My sister will call me up asking to fix the sound. My dad will call me up asking to fix the sound. Before Hardy, they _never_ had a problem with anything sound related. They hardly had any problems at all.

Now, don't get me wrong, I think the ideas behind Pulse Audio are great. But I also think that they currently are not implemented well enough, especially for an LTS release. In my book, that just isn't acceptable. It could have waited 6 more months. It should have waited 6 more months (at least).

Bricks would be shat -- Trent DeGray

Supposedly, many years ago, Mars was "awash with water". The article says that there is a pretty good chance that it could have supported life as well (while now there is a fairly slim chance).

My question of the day: What if in the (hopefully near) future, we excavate and find dinosaur-like (or even humanoid-like...think mermaids :-)) remains? What kind of impact would it have on a religious level? Would we want to keep excavating?

New office building

Our lease is up for our office at the end of September. This couldn't come at a better time seeing as how we have no more room to hire people. We are moving to a more central location in downtown Fort Worth. It is right next to Trinity river and across the river is Trinity Park.

The building we are moving into has 6 stories, and we will be on the 5th. Apparently, there is a bakery in the building with us, as well as many healthcare company things above and below us (well, one above us :-)).

Also, there a bunch of nice restaurants (so lunch is about start being more expensive), but we won't have to drive, so it might even out.

The Google Map is wrong, if you go north along the river, our new building is the triangular one.

Ubuntu Texas Logo Poll Open

The Logo Poll for the Ubuntu Texas team is now open. Register and vote for your favorite (if you live in Texas)!