Joined The World Community Grid

I installed boinc through the gutsy repositories and the boinc manager with synaptic and used it to add a new project. I was first thinking of SETI@Home but then I ran across the World Community Grid project and I thought I would be more confortable with supporting their objectives. The agent runs well and doesn’t make my machine slugish in the slightest way. Now it’s time to put this on all the computer at home.

Thank You TGI Friday’s

We had been pretty shocked by the large number of obese americans we crossed in malls, restaurants or on the street during our visit to Maumee, OH in April.  I am glad to have learned through the Knowledge @ Wharton newsletter today that TGI Friday’s is giving consumers an option for smaller portions.   This is definitely a step in the right direction and should be supported by everyone concerned at TGI Friday’s but also in the US food industry in general.

Photo Credits :  Colin Gregory Palmer

Back From The Paris Barack Obama Meetup

It was great to meet some fellow Americans, a French lady interested in American politics and even a man from Birkina Faso, who were all either very supportive of Barack Obama’s campaign or interested in getting information to help them make a decision. It seems that it will be very difficult for American’s abroad to vote in the primaries because of the majority of them will take place between February and March, and it can take up to 6 weeks to receive an absentee ballot.  I’ll have to call the election board my daughter and I depend on to check this out.  Maybe there is a way to work something out.   It was also interesting to learn that the new French President Nicolas Sarkozy is an Obama supporter. If you are in Paris and interested in learning about Barack Obama’s position, it’s easy to sign up for the next meeting at the Barack Obama for America 2008 Meetup Group in Paris. or visit the Barack Obama website.

Learning the Hiragana and Katakana

I have been working on learning the Hiragana alphabet for about a month. Progress was slow initially, but I was getting up to speed, when I realized my method would probably not scale further. I had installed Kanatest previously, but somehow had not figured out how it could help me and had dropped using it. But I went back to it, and I must say after experimenting with Bryn Dyment’s excellent Real Kana website, I realized that I could do something similar with Kanatest. I must say that I have become a real fan, and improved in both the Hiragana and the Katakana set which I was not learning before, since I basically drew the characters on a sheet of paper over and over. You can install and run Kanatest easily on the Ubuntu operating system.

The coolest thing is that when doing a search on wiki’s, I ran across a group on Facebook named in Japanese and I picked up WIKI spelled in Katakana characters (I hope this displays right) !

WIKI – ウイキ

I wonder how I would spell XWiki ?