I can’t quite figure out if this article is serious or not. It’s very funny … but what if he was being serious?

On Tuesday night Ken and I drove down to Pikeville, KY, for the conference put on by the Pikeville Kentucky Professional Linux Users Group.

I’ve got to admit that my expectations were not very high. After all, Pikeville isn’t exactly the center of the universe, taking a significant amount of time to get to from anywhere of consequence. But there were 63 people in attendance, and some pretty impressive speakers.

Kym Buchanan, of the Open Options Project spoke about getting free software into schools, and about school IT folks generally making wiser decisions about spending their limited budgets.

Ian Lynch of the OO.o project was there, speaking about using Open Office in the schools of England, rather than Microsoft Office, and thus including those students who can’t afford to buy the Microsoft products for home use.

There were speakers from N+1, Asbury College, Sun, and a variety of local businesses.

Despite a few scheduling problems (our table for 20 didn’t get held for us at lunch, causing a 30-minute delay on lunch, and one of our reserved rooms was given to another organization at the last minute), the day was, I think, a *HUGE* success. Major kudos to David Bumgardner for all the hard work he put into this, despite his vice president bailing out at the last minute, and having to pretty much pull this all together by himself.

I was compelled to work with Gimp quite a bit yesterday, and I have a number of very specific gripes about it.

The biggest one is that it doesn’t remember your working directory. I had to do about 4 screen captures, do some minor editing, and save as eps files. I spent more time navigating through the directory tree than any other task. How hard would it be for it to remember what directory I’m working in, and just stay there? I don’t know. Maybe it’s really hard. But it’s annoying.

The next thing is really the thing that’s bugged me about Gimp from the start. The menus are terrible. Things that are conceptually related are in different menus. Finding the things I want — even the things that I use most frequently — is extremely difficult.

Change an image to grayscale? That’s under Image -> Mode -> Grayscale. But there’s also an Image -> Color menu, and a Tools -> Swap colors and Tools -> Color picker and Filters -> Colors. Yes, I’m sure this makes perfect sense, and is correct and logical, to *someone*, but it drives me batty.

Also irritating is the placement of Tools -> Transform Tools -> Crop and Resize, Image -> Transforms -> Autocrop , Image -> Canvas size, and Image -> Scale Image. These things seem related to me, but they are in three different places. This means that almost every time I want to crop an image, I end up looking at least 2 different places before I find what I want.

Again, I expect this is logical to someone, and that if I used Gimp every day, I’d figure this out. But since I use it a couple times a month, I invariably spend more time hunting than using.

Finally, a minor irritant. File extensions. There’s two modes when you save an image. You can pick the output format, or you can have it figure it out based on what file extension you give the file. But for some reason, I ended up with an eps image that was called feather.gif. I don’t know for sure how this happened, but it wasted a LOT of my time, and somehow I think that just shouldn’t happen.

Yeah, I know, whine, whine, whine. But what I keep reading from the Gimp people is that there are never specific complaints. These are my specific complaints. I know that the menu arrangement thing, which purely “cosmetic”, is actually the hardest of these things, since a logical arrangement is really quite a difficult thing. But it’s also my biggest barrier to using what might otherwise be a very nice product.

Seems that my primary domain (rcbowen.com) expired on Monday and I wasn’t aware of it. So, too, any domains for which I do DNS have fallen off of the network. Not sure how I let that happen. Renewed and should be propagating. Sorry to folks whose domains have gone away for a day or two.

Finally getting a moment two write down some of my impressions about the Big Nerd Ranch. Assuming that the folks on #apache will leave me along long enough …

I arrived at Big Nerd Ranch late Sunday evening. I navigated all the way there by GPS, and when I was about .25mi from the place, I couldn’t find the road to turn on. So I called Emily, who gave me the last instruction I needed. The place is about an hour south of Atlanta, and far enough into the boonies to be outside of the city-glow. It was nearly 11 when I arrived, and by then it was completely dark.

The Ranch is located on the site of the historic Banning Mill and the lodge thereof. It is quiet, out of cell phone range, far from the city lights, far from traffic sounds, clean, and amazingly beautiful.

I woke in the morning to the sound of the river and the birds. I walked out onto the balcony/porch, and saw the river and the falls. It was quite breathtaking. The cabins are high above the river/stream, with balconies hanging precariously out the back.

Apparently the land was originally owned by the Bowens, and the name of the township was later changed to Banning because the mail for Bowentown was getting confused with the mail for nearby Bowersville.

I seem to remember that when the Bowens came to the New World in about 1640, that some of them stayed in the north, and another bunch moved to Atlanta. Apparently this is that bunch.

There is a dam on the river. It’s been broken down now, but much of it remains, made of HUGE rocks. Then there are spillways down each side of the river, each going to a water mill wheel far down stream. On one side of the river is the old paper mill, now just the stone foundation, made of equally HUGE stones. It burned in 1905 and was never rebuilt. You can see some pictures of it here (1045, 1046 and 1047) They made paper there out of pine and rags.

On the other side, there’s a textile mill, which was in operation prior to the Civil War. They had electric turbines back then, and people used to come from Atlanta to watch the lights come on. They claim that they had electric power before the invention of the lightbulb, and were using it for the textile process. They claim that it’s the first hydroelectric generation plant in the southern US, and possibly in the world. That building is still there – it’s the large brick building in the photos referenced above.

The training facility is at the back of the lodge, and overlooks the river. The Internet connection was satelite based, and went out during the heavy rains. And there was negligible cell phone reception unless one climbed up on the roof. These turned out to be small detriment to what we wanted to do. If anything, the absence of cell phones was a HUGE bonus.

Each day started with a wonderful southern breakfast. When we were done eating, we started class, and went until lunch, which was equally wonderful. After lunch, about the time that people started getting sleepy, we went for a hike down along the river, or around the Mill property, for an hour or so. After that, we resumed training until 6, when dinner was served. In all, a very full day.

Evenings were freeform, with nothing much planned. On some of the evenings, I showed DVDs on the big screen in the training room. We watched Finding Nemo, Office Space, and Hackers. Need to take more geek movies next time. 🙂

So that’s the long and short of it. The city folks found it too quiet, and had a hard time sleeping at nights. (!!) The rooms were equipped with fans for the purpose of making noise for the city folks. I should have taken a picture of them, labeled as “noise fan.” And if you didn’t have a flashlight, it was pretty hard to find your room after dark. I loved it, and I’m looking forward to going back.