Where have we been? Lisa had a visitor (which either sounds excessively medical or somewhat naughty, but "visitation" sounds like she was abducted by aliens), and last week, Shoe... Well. If anyone would like to donate to the Northeast Pekingese Rescue in memory of the small, oinking, scratching  beast Shoe conveniently blamed those stray noises on, that would be awesome.

Yeah, on that note, if you've not received a return email to any requests or a Christmas card, it's pretty much because there are random brain outages. We've not forgot about our listeners. And viewers. And yes, Lisa... Readers too!

Stay tuned.  Soon, the nausea will stop. We promise!

        

You know, this podcasting thing is harder than it sounds. And considering, really, how difficult it can be to listen to us sometimes, you know... We have our work cut out for us, Lisa and I.

So here's the whole enchilada: Lisa is safely in and adjusting to her new castle, Shoe canceled the Verizon FIOS upgrade, and Skype continues to dance to the beat of its own drum. Instead of cheesy goodness on that enchilda, how about a good healthy serving of one microphone that doesn't want to record any part of the podcast, and one that wants to record all of it.

It's a recipe for a podcast that doesn't sound quite as technically lovely as the last few. We know, we know. There is some static. And yes, dears, no amount of leveling, normalizing, or surgery will ever make me sound like I'm not yelling into a windstorm with tampons shoved in my nostrils.

Oh yeah. We talked about open source stuff too. We've been known to do that.

We discuss Terra Soft's (Yellow Dog Linux) acquisition, and while it tugs our heartstrings a little, it's not the tear jerker Ol' Yeller is. I would also like to take the opportunity to mention that the old iMacs were pretty kick ass. They wouldn't die, ever, they were heavy and they were almost completely round. That means that they could be rolled from one location to another, if lifting was too tiring.  For real. Just avoid rolling them down staircases. They aren't quite as forgiving as Slinkys. Alone, or in pairs. Doesn't matter.

Lisa shares her love of open source, and space travel. She also prefers the taste of Tang over reclaimed urine. I can't taste the difference, really. She talks about how NASA also loves space travel, and open source software. They seem to have cooled on Second Life again. Probably because, like Lisa and I, they realized this first life isn't all it's cracked up to be, and pixellating it more isn't going to make the second one that much more attractive.

Hey, my FF3 problem has disappeared! Why? You don't know? You don't? I seriously was hoping you could let me in on why. I'm puzzled beyond words.  Lisa doesn't dig Opera so much, and it has little to do with large, buxom ladies in Viking hats.

Want to talk to us? (Oh, come on. Could you at least lie, say you really do, but you're on your way to your pedicure?) Drop us an email at sudowrestling (at) gmail.com. I think Lisa might check that account. I hope. Or... contact us by leaving a comment. Or Tweet to us.

Want some links? Sure!

Download | Duration: 00:28:38

        

Guys, sorry... Just, really, don't ask. No, shush it, don't ask. Just rest assured that today the stars aligned, and Shoe and Lisa managed to record, and edit, and upload successfully a... podcast. Get yer affairs in order, folks, the world as we know it is coming to a screaming stop.

Up this week: We have issues. Well, a lot of people have issues. In Lisa's case, the issue isn't her, it's Firefox. In Shoe's case, the issue is either her, or her hardware, or the operating system, or Firefox. All she knows is, Firefox seems to remember everywhere she's been, whether she's deleted her /.firefox folder, or reformatted her hard drive,  or cleared her cache. So she's either really going to get all self important, or freakin' paranoid. Or both, and god help us, won't we all be sorry then?

Any idea what's causing our FF3 issues? Do you too have FF3 issues? Do you have the dual diagnosis of FF3 issues with the Flash plugin condition? Talk to us. It's not always group therapy, it can be a misery loves company deal. Whatever makes you happy!

We also discuss cantankerous cows,  intrepid cliff dwelling goats, and the difference between an earth tone vs. poop brown vs. dried blood red. We get far too excited about Intrepid Ibex's USB image creator GUI. Fine, we know we could do this before, but this is just too damn easy. We like easy.

And we talk about Codeweavers, and why lame ducks sometimes reach a good stride, and we all win with free as in beer software! And hey, Twin Cities! Got milk?

Then it just devolves into (extremely scintillating!) talk with a cameo by the small dog in the embedded video:

FF3 getting creative with page displays
Intrepid Ibex -- Have you ever met a goat that wasn't intrepid?
Codeweavers ports Chromium
Monster is the new Rick Astley

Download | Duration: 00:28:07

        

This sums it up. We apologize to our listeners, readers, viewers, and William Shakespeare. Fine, I think Shakespeare might have enjoyed it, but I ain't one to kiss and tell.

        

It's been a fun week. Right? Right. Of course it has.

This week's  podcast covers Shoe's unnatural love of Gentoo.  We say the hell with your network adapter, people blaming the Intel driver error on Ubuntu alone makes our heads explode -- is that Ubuntu's fault too? And another conference! Yay!  We want to go to this one, though.

All this and more awaits you if you just download the file, and take the blue pill. Or something. There is no spoon. Yeah, whatever.

Links, links, the musical hypertext stuff:
Gentoo -- If you can help them, do it. Please. Shoe will love you till the end of time.
Ohio LinuxFest-- not the conference in question, but we'd dig going here too.
LinuxCon-- The name isn't creative, but it does seem a bit different.

Download | Duration: 00:31:55

And, as always, we like when people talk to us. We're kind of like parrots that way. We're a lot like parrots, come to think of it. We repeat all the naughty words we hear. We like to put shiny objects in our mouths, and squawk loudly at random intervals.

Comments? Questions? Come on, let us know!

        

No kidding, Episode 10. That's seriously more episodes than Firefly was given -- and it's a damn shame (possibly on both accounts).

This week we talk about that thing that Google is doing... You know. That phone thing.  It's open, and it's inexpensive, and it's got these shortcomings that make Lisa and Shoe say, "And, you know, we've waited how long for this?" There are options though that don't come from Google. Or, hell, Yahoo! or Ask Jeeves or Dogpile. Heh. Dogpile. They are may be more expensive, but they are available now (or before October 22nd) and a ROKR can't look any more dorky than the Android Dream... which looks very little like a sheep. And isn't water resistant...

And if Mark Shuttleworth didn't feel much like getting out of bed last week we can't blame him. Okay, fine, Shoe battles with the bed's gravitational pull anyway... but Mark has a reason. Canonical had a pretty crappy week with codec stuff, and EULAs and Linux Plumbers bearing big, rusty wrenches. Lisa points out Mark might have felt like hiding, but community manager Jono Bacon probably felt like joining the Witness Protection Program and hiding on a very unconnected island. We would have. Then, we feel like that most days too.

Okay, Lisa and Shoe are in relationships. But you know, we weren't always. Still, none of our boyfriends experimented on us, at least... not with operating systems. In the long run, it was probably good thinking on their parts. Single guys, if you must experiment on your girlfriends, don't do the Linux experiment. If you do experiment with Linux on her, just like...  shut up about it, or submit it to the peer reviewed "Journal of Geek Guys Who Test Traditionally Geeky Guy Stuff on Their Girlfriends Who Play Along Just to Shut Them Up" and its pool of three or four subscribers. These subscribers are the same bunch who subscribe to the "Year of Linux Desktop Yearbook."

Open source is a huge field with lots of changes and innovations. We wish all of you in relationships much happiness, and love to see Linux used more and more on the desktop. We can talk about other stuff now. Really.

And the related links you've been waiting for:

Walt Mossburg is not an Android, but he writes about them
Crunchgear serves up some hot, steamy, ugly phone pr0n!
Canonical, Codecs, and the No Good, Horrible, Very Bad Week
Shoe's bit on the Linux Plumbers Conference with a good dose of Eastern philosophy.
Searching Linux "Girlfriend Experiment" on Google returns 3,250 hits. If we did mean Linux "Girlfreind Experiment" as Google suspects, there are only three, but one mentions grandmothers as well. A spell check experiment might be necessary.

And lest we forget (oh, if only we could...)
Charlie the Unicorn

Anything you want to hear? Singing? No. No. You don't. But we can talk about other stuff. Let us know. We like you guys. No kiddin'!

Download | Duration: 00:35:57

        

For real, you know what we like best about this episode? It was not vomitous experience the last one was, at least, from a technological standpoint. You may still want to make sure you're listening on an empty stomach.

This week we discuss tech support. If you switch a family member or friend to Linux, you'll need to offer support. Right? Right. At least to some degree. What happens when, say, they move... and the guys at the call center at Time Warner cable tell them that the reason they can't connect to the internet isn't that the cable connection is bad, or the modem and router are defective, but is because they use Linux? If the GeekSquad installs a new video card because the onboard GPU fried,  will they be able to troubleshoot (or configure) a Linux box?

Then again, does it seem like the only time your favorite aunt calls you is when she's having trouble getting her Vista machine to read her camera's SD card?

Ubuntu is told in the future that they will need to display the EULA for Firefox on the first run. We're confused by this. Well, we're confused by a whole lot of things -- but even in this relatively tiny part of computing -- a lot of things confuse us. Do the terms of the EULA tick people off?  If that's the case... doesn't that mean they shouldn't be using Firefox now? The EULA exists, just nobody sees it. It's kinda like that tree in the forest that falls and everyone is puzzled about whether it makes a sound. Does the actual act of clicking "I Agree" tick them off? And does anyone wonder why this seems to be an issue specifically with Ubuntu, and not... with openSUSE, or Fedora, or [insert distro with Firefox as a pre-installed browser option here]?

UPDATE BY DUMB SHOE: It appears that openSUSE did begin presenting the EULA for Firefox at installation with the 11.0 release. Shows how closely I read those things. Click, click, click. Though it makes me wonder if maybe the brouhaha was avoided because... it was just there, and wasn't presented as something I would think twice about? Again, just because a license isn't presented doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And that extra click -- wow, still no repetitive stress injuries to report. Anyway, miswrote, misspoke, forgive me.

Celebrate the upcoming high holiday known as "Talk Like a Pirate Day" by swashbuckling through this episode with Peg Leg Shoe and One Eyed Lisa. Those are our pirate names, not our pornstar names -- jeez, guys.

Heh. Land ho!

All the amazingly relevant links:

Linux Weekly News -- Subscribe, you must! Well, unless you want this week's news last week.
Zonker speaks of the EULA BFD
Zonker is on a serious roll talking about the EULA SNAFU

And hey, follow us (all of us!) on Twitter: sudowrestling is the broad account, and lisah and linuxlibrarian... well, it kind of looks like we're the broads, but not the broad broads. Or something.

Shoe tried her hand with Audacity (she loves it) and edited this week's cast, which consisted of a "Lisa" voice file and a "Shoe" voice file. Shoe says Lisa still sounds way hawter,  but we hope you'll find that the sound quality is a bit better than our previous over Skype recordings, and will likely improve more once Shoe figures out exactly which buttons she should press, and which she should leave alone.

We live for listener input, you know. No, you know how vampires require blood? Shoe and Lisa require listener input. Everyone is more than welcome to tell us anything! Anything!  Volunteered input is much better than having us outside your window in the dead of night, scratching to get in and steal your input. Just sayin'.

Download | Duration: 00:31:16

        

You want the truth? You can't handle the truth! 

Fine. The truth is, I felt the need to see if I could get the webcam to co-operate with the fact that I tend to gesticulate (like fug, gesticulate is not a dirty word. Nor is masticate. God, people).  Why? Because we would honest to pete like to do some video bits in the future, but we have to walk before we can run. Or get up before we can stagger around. Or something.

Explanation is as follows in the video.

        

No, this is not us ganging up on you (or ourselves, since we're part of you and you're part of us or some sort of weird cosmic crap like that). This is not an intervention. We are telling you (and us) this because we care.

Okay,  most of the time when we give the "because we care" line,  we're pulling the leg of the soul "cared" about really hard, and we're trying to make ourselves feel less guilty about it. But not this time.

We love, and use Linux and FOSS on a daily basis. We appreciate fully that some people have different ideology about the open/free state of the software they use on their systems, and that's fine. We are not going to force you to use flashplayer-plugin-nonfree if you don't feel right about it, though we will state freely that we don't really like the idea of someone being dragged through the mud if they want to use it.

Thanks to an interesting listener comment, though, we realized that we probably have been a little unclear about what we find particularly troublesome about Linux users -- as a community. Community being Lisa, and Shoe, and everyone else out there using Linux -- purists, militant fundamentalist extremist purists, and WINE and Crossover users and people who are way too overly in love with codecs -- we all have our troublesome bits.

We don't have to move every Linux user in the world on to a special Linux commune and share a bathroom to get along peaceably. We do have to start putting aside personal agendas about who should use this software, and how, and realize that its strength is that it can work for many people in many different ways.  We have to realize that what we bring to the table -- with Microsoft, with supplying a distro to an OEM computer manufacturer, with any intimidating corporate types -- we need to see, and believe, that what we bring with Linux/FOSS is valuable, useful, accessible and profitable...  And we have to realize that it is okay to walk away from offers and negotiations, as well as see that sometimes accepting them might not be quite as catastrophic in the short term, and possibly beneficial in the long term.

We have to get over ourselves -- every last one of us, and we need to have faith in ourselves.

Looks like our time for this session is up. See you next week. Until then, listen to this podcast to relax.

Download | Duration: 00:11:22

Related links (related, but not in an Oedipal way):
Zonker talks about community -- he just talks. No kumbaya singing or guitar strumming involved, sorry.
The comment that got us thinking -- no small feat, that "getting Lisa and Shoe thinking simultaneously" trick.

Got anything to say? Sure you do! Tell us in the comments, we'll listen! And you don't even have to fork over a co-pay or meet a deductible for that service!

        

Seriously, in many ways you just don't want to know. It's Shoe, flying solo in Episode 7.5, bringing you sad tidings of utterly massive amounts of microphone and sound recording lose and fail. We like to learn from lose and fail, though, and we hope this will help us bring you all better sound quality in the long run. Because god knows you only tune in for the dulcet sounds of our lovely voices, and not to point and laugh and stuff.

Lisa is recovering with some Jack Daniels. Or isopropyl alcohol or something. I didn't want to disturb the poor girl, she's had a hard enough time with the sound file from hell at this point.

A look at what's ahead, anyway... and a tease for the once and future podcast on community that we promised (and recorded, and...) to deliver last week.

Download | Duration: 00:07:00