It’s rather disturbing to see the lack of knowledge displayed by the staff members at the “official” UbuntuForums. Posts like aysiu, who has no clue what a dist-upgrade is, aysiu again showing he has no clue about .ICEauthority, daller, who asks a lot more questions than he answers, and meh, it’s hard to go searching through to find more; I just happen to come across them. Then of course, people like lovechild who actually know what they’re talking about are ignored.
At InvisionFree, we hire support staff based on their technical competence, not their postcount. If we followed the activity / postcount mantra like the Ubuntu folk do, we’d have people like Paul Ritter and Codename on staff. Fun! 
That said, it’s really rather annoying to go to the UbuntuForums and I find myself frequenting IRC more and more, and the forums less. IRC + the wiki = everything you need to know.
UPDATE: Yes, I recognize the need for “moderators” who need not know about the subject of the forum at which they work, but these incidents are not of that caliber. Also, since it seems that those who are leaving comments aren’t brave enough to put their name and e-mail in, comments are now off for this entry. If you’re going to speak your mind, at least take responsibility for what you say. That’s what I’m doing.
UPDATE 2: Much of this is irrelevant after some staff changes that just happened. However, much bigger problems have now arisen at the forums. Coming soon.
Mine arrived today… 10 x86 CDs and 5 x64. MUCH faster turnaround time than for Hoary… it can be seen how much better they’re getting their act together for each release
So I finally got my membership status approved at Ubuntu (took long enough 
) and so now I have a shiny new e-mail address @ubuntu.com, yay!
Today was the release of DeskZilla, which is a desktop interface for Bugzilla, which Ubuntu also uses. Although DeskZilla is a commerical product, they offer free keys to anyone working on an open-source product (such as my work with Ubuntu). So I requested a key which should make my Bugzilla work much more efficient.
So Firefox is broken in Ubuntu right now, and I needed a browser fast. Fired up Konqueror and it FLIES. It’s still quite a bit clunkier than Firefox, but it’s faster, has KDE integration (which is my current kick), and the fonts actually work, which Firefox is having a bit of problem with right now.
I’ll probably switch back after Firefox starts working again… but it’s nice to know that there are solid alternatives to the alternative browser of choice.
Getting a new phone gives me a pretty good excuse to do all sorts of things I’ve been putting off:
- Consolidating my contact data
- Getting my Tungsten C back up-to-date with all my stuff
- Standardizing my vCards
- KDE integration (this is the biggie)
I lost all my Palm addresses when it ran out of battery and I didn’t come home to charge it for two months. But I still had lots of data on my Ericsson t610. Behold, the convoluted path I took to reach synched Nirvana:
- Ericsson t610 to Evolution, via Multisync, via multisync-plugin-irmc-bluetooth
- Evolution to vCard
- vCard to KAddressBook
- KAddressBook to Palm via KPilot
- KAddressBook to v551 via KMobileTools
For some reason Kitchensync was trash; didn’t want to work at all. So I used MultiSync, which is a Gnome program. Of course the current version can only export to Evolution, not KAddressBook (CVS version can go to KAddressBook via a plugin, so it shouldn’t be long). But it’s all imported now, and I can pretty much ignore the t610 from this point out.
I think I’m going to be really glad that I took the time to move things over to KAddressBook. It’s awfully spiffy; for example, if you’re in my address book and your card is filled out with all your info, for example, screen names, then you’ll be flagged with your real name and photo in Konversation IRC and Kopete IM. KDE is also smart enough to put all the contact metadata together, so it knows that you changed your nick on IRC and will update your address book entry accordingly. And it’s all stored in one centralized place.
Don’t think I’m quite ready to use KMail yet, as cool as that would be. Thunderbird is still much better.
In other news, my car got broken into 
they didn’t steal my iPod charger or power inverter or CDs, but they grabbed the ~$40 in my armrest. Boo.