Missionary Talks 07: Larry Allred

This week’s missionary is a co-worker here in town. Bro. Larry Allred has been here in Mérida for 6 1/2 years and has started a church here.

This was a fun episode. The plan is that he will be interviewing me in a few weeks. His wife is scheduled to be on the show next week. She will be our first wife on the show.

In this show I did something different to make the audio shorter. I had 25 minutes of audio to cut down to 15. In the first run through I knocked out all the “ums” and “ahs.” Also there were some repeated phrases that got thrown out. That brought it down 22 minutes. Next edit I got it down to 18. Then I got down to 16 finally.

In Audacity, there is a way to speed up the audio without changing the pitch. I sped the whole thing up 4% to get me under the 15 minutes. Even knowing that, you won’t be able to tell it is not normal speed. Very cool.

Still running

I have not posted much about my running lately, but I am still hitting the streets. I did 3 miles this morning. I am really just in maintenance mode and keeping up my fitness. I would like to work on my 5K times. With my race a week or so ago, I was very happy to see the time drop to the 27 minute range. That has been a goal for some time.

Monday I went out to do some track work and did not feel that great, but still did the workout. I ran a mile and a half warm up and then ran a pretty quick mile. I cooled off by walking another mile. I was too worn out to run my cool down. I really did not feel well.

I don’t know how far I will run tomorrow, probably just make it a 40-60 minute run. Then Saturday I will do 8 miles. My goal is to do 60 miles this month to round out a nice 600 mile year. This is my first year running and I did not start at the beginning of the year. So I should be able to do much better than this next year. But it is a start.

Move to Slackware

I have been a Mandrake/Mandriva user since 2000 or so. It has been my only system since 2002 on my desktop.

I have been very pleased with how smoothly things have gone. Of course this is helped by my friends at the Pensacola Linux Users Group. I have been in their IRC channel to get help on a few of the technical issues.

Someone asked why I chose Slackware. Really that was not as important as why move from Mandriva. I was getting frustrated with Mandriva. It used to be a very mainstream distro of Linux. Every time you went to install software you were able to download a Mandriva specific RPM and install it. But, those days are gone. When Mandrake merged with Conectiva, things tanked quickly. The community love towards Mandrake seemed to change.

Mandrake was always flaky (for me) on the package management. Sometimes urpmi would work. Sometimes not. Keeping my sources up to date seemed to be more trouble than it was worth. Early on I religiously used only packages in the sources. This made sure everything was tracked by the package manager. But then there was always a piece of software I wanted that was not in the repositories. So I would either have to wait, install an old version, or install and hope that I did not hose anything. I got more and more lax on that the last couple of years. Things also got less and less stable.

I have been upgrading the OS on this hard drive since 2002 without ever really wiping it and installing fresh. That is a definite death knell in Windows. Should not matter in Linux unless the distribution providers move the locations of important files from one version to the next. Well…Mandrake and Mandriva have not stayed consistent.

So, why then did I move to Slackware? Here are just a few of the reasons. The biggest is that I am a fan of KDE. Slackware pushes KDE as it’s desktop environment. Many of the really popular distros at the moment use GNOME. While GNOME has improved greatly over the last several years, so has KDE. I am familiar with KDE and there are just a few niggly things about GNOME that I have trouble working around. Though, I have to admit I have run it on my notebook recently and it is a very good desktop environment. I could get used to it. I just don’t chose to.

The second reason is that Slackware seems to hold to more of a standard way of doing things. When you go looking for help online you will find a default way of configuring and setting up software. Then there will be an endless list of “If you are using this distro, then do this. And this distro do this.” With Slackware it seems to follow the default more often. To me, that means I can more easily get help on line. This is another area where Mandriva seemed be be getting left behind. They do things in less standard ways. And, with the community ignoring them more, you get less personalized Mandriva help.

Finally, and this is probably the biggest, I have several friends in the LUG that use it. I have been playing with it off and on for well over a year through either dual boot or on my 20th century notebook that I bought used last year. It has been pretty good to me. And with colleague help, that makes it much better for me. I ran Linux alone from 1997 to 2000. When I fell in with the P’cola LUG, that helped define my distro choices. For a while several of us were running Mandrake. I was finally the last man standing. Though there are very strong opinions as to which distro each member believes is the best, there are several Slackware devotees.

I have played with Ubuntu and really like it. But, it comes with GNOME. KUbuntu was so awful when I last used it, I swore off of it. I have used Gentoo in the past, but only for more of an embedded type environment. I don’t think I could stand it for desktop use. Suse was an option, but I feel they are too much like Mandriva. Though they currently have more community love going their direction. Fedora Core is not an option. I swore off of Red Hat (Fedora Core’s roots) at version 9. Though I never liked it going back to the days when Red Hat 2.something was popular. I kept trying it each new version until they hit 9 and that was the last of the jankyness I could take.

So, there we are. The move from Mandriva to Slackware and the why behind it. I must say, I have been using Slackware for about 24 hours and I have yet to have a program crash. Firefox in Mandriva would crash every few hours on me. With certain games the whole system would go down. I have yet to get the games installed, but that should happen later tonight. We shall see.

Orchestra

While sitting at the guitar concert (which my wife would have gone to had we had a baby sitter), I thought, “I should have brought our son.” When I was talking to the string quartet after the concert, they told me about the orchestra playing the next night. Their normal cellist was not with them because he was practicing a solo section for the orchestra.

I decided then to go hear the orchestra play Friday night. And, I took my son.

We heard music from Debussy, Dvorak and Fauré. Those were good, but what I was most excited about was when I saw that they had Aaron Copeland’s name on the program. And…it was the Billy the Kid suite. Ahh, my favorite Copeland music.

I have never heard Billy the Kid live before. If you have not had the opportunity, it is definitely worth the price of admission (at least for the $4 tickets I got). If you love percussion, then that is the piece to hear.

Wide dee big bus!

Early in the week our daughter (2 1/2 years old) got fascinated with the buses driving around us. She decided that she wanted to ride on the big buses.

Finally Thursday night we took an adventure trip. She, our son and I took a bus to the store just to satiate her desire to “wide dee big bus.” Going to the store the bus was packed. PACKED! I squatted down in the aisle by the front door and she sat on my leg.

Coming back there was only one other person on the bus with us.

Now every time we walk out the front door she asks if we are going to wide dee big bus again. I guess we will take a trip tomorrow.