More information about the overall global jam can be found here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuGlobalJam

RSVP so we can get a decent head count here: http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/ubuntu-michigan/1526/detail

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Happy Birthday, JoDee! Hope you have a great day today!

That is all.

This morning, a spider was crawling up the wall. I dutifully got out our special trap for such occasions (a glass candle jar that smells like a melon blew up in it) and carefully moved it so the spider would fall in. Safely ensconced inside the melon-scented prison, I carefully flung the little critter outside where it can happily frollick amongst the lightly snow-covered grass.

Yesterday, a centipede decided to crawl into the bathroom while I was in there. After a brief “what the hell is that crawling on the floor, and is it still there?” episode, a wad of toilet paper dispatched the vile beast, where it was discarded via toilet to a watery grave.

Two not-so-different creatures, with two completely different results.

I was having a problem reflowing comments in vim. Whenever I reflowed something like:

# Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor ...

I would get something like this:

# Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod

tempor ...

Which was not what I wanted. I spent about an hour trying to figure out what the problem was, until I stumbled across this line in my .vimrc:

set formatoptions=l

After reading the vim help, it occurred to me why the default .vimrc was giving me the right result (formatted comments) while my .vimrc wasn’t. By default, vim sets format options to tcq. Here’s what each of those mean:

t Auto-wrap text using textwidth
c Auto-wrap comments using textwidth, inserting the current comment
 leader automatically.
q Allow formatting of comments with "gq".
 Note that formatting will not change blank lines or lines containing
 only the comment leader. A new paragraph starts after such a line,
 or when the comment leader changes.

And once I set the formatoptions line to ‘tcql’, now everything works perfectly.

And now you know.

So, here’s looking forward to 2012, and the challenges (and changes) it brings.

Good ol’ idiot-magnet CompUSA, how we miss thee and your 4 area stores. Now that you’re gone, Microcenter is the only place in the tri-county area to get a fan without waiting for shipping.

Funny enough, when I unplugged the one fan, it appears that the other fan didn’t feel like it needed to overcompensate for the other one. Machine is as quiet as ever. Hopefully it won’t overheat until I can get a new fan.

(just for the record, it was an Enermax fan; one of those fans that apparently has the lovely blue LEDs on it that thankfully has a switch to turn the blue LED-ness off. Unfortunately the one that was covering for it is an Antec, which has fan speed control, but no discernable way to turn off the blue LEDs off. And folks wonder why PCs get the bad rap in the design arena.)

So, come on out and learn something about our shared UNIX heritage. There will also be talks on some of the more interesting commands for determining how your Linux OS perceives the world and the hardware it’s running on. Definitely come and check it out!