Raymond Johnson @ downclimb.com

RAGBRAI 2022 I feel obligated to keep my 22-year blogging streak intact here, even if what I'm about to say isn't particularly meaningful to anyone. So here it goes. The year got off to a rough start. On New Year's Eve 2021, I came home after evacuating from the Marshall Fire. The fire destroyed over 1000 homes nearby, and the flames came within sight of my building. I spent that night at my sister's, sleeping in a recliner next to my ailing mother. Mom died less than two weeks later, finally succumbing to the stroke she had suffered the previous July. Really, nothing was great for mom after dad died in 2019, but it was nice to have her here in Colorado for a few years and I can't thank my sister and nephew enough for the care they gave her in those final months. It was hard for everyone. My work at the Department of Education kept me exceedingly busy. I felt like the whole year was a constant state of never getting caught up. The last time I took a Friday off, I wo...

About a week ago I replaced my well-worn installation of Kubntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" with the sleeker, newer, Kubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope." I hadn't made the jump to Kubuntu 8.10, the first to include KDE 4, because there were plenty of reports about bugs and incomplete features. After waiting through another release cycle, I figured it was time to stop falling behind the tech curve and upgrade. Surely I had been missing something. Instead of finding a bunch of new indispensable features and conveniences, I'm afraid KDE 4.2 is still not ready for my desktop. My biggest gripe? File management. It's not so much a debate between Konqueror and Dolphin, but frankly neither are doing what I want them to do. In KDE 3, I could hover over the icon of a picture, and a pop-up would give me all sorts of good information: date, owner, filesize, image dimensions, and a little bit of EXIF data. Neither Konqueror or Dolphin do that now, although I've read t...