I have got a Linux Mint Live DVD and I am switching to that distribution as soon as possible. I am sitting in an evacuation center right now, due to the risk of flooding, the levee banks supposedly can handle 12 meters but the river peak is said to be 10.9 meters and all I have with me is my mobile telephone and my cat. But the town should be OK. The Linux Mint 12 distribution has the modified Gnome Shell desktop interface, and I may then upgrade the distribution to use the Cinnamon desktop. I have really tried to use the Ubuntu distribution, but the Unity desktop and the associated problems I have had with it are driving me crazy. The desktop Linux dream will remain a dream unless we can create a nice Linux distribution that can please everybody and not include buggy Macintosh styled desktop interfaces that are not up to the standards that modern computer users expect. I hope that the Wagga levee bank is up to the standards that the council and the citizens expect. They are worried, due to the fact that the levee bank could collapse and flood the town. Not so much about the water coming over the top and gradually flooding the town. But I am on high ground right now and hopefully everything will work out. The climate change alarmists have said that we were destined for drought and drastic water rationing but now the dams are overflowing and we have had record breaking rain.
That is due to some people like Tim Flannery that are preaching bull dust about the end of the world and the planet drying out, that is the thing about Australia, we get natural periods of drought and then pouring rain. I have some awesome photographs of the flooding, but I had to hurry home and pack a couple of things and get out of the CBD, which is low lying compared to the hill I am on at the moment. Anyway, the Ubuntu distribution needs a rethink in GUI terms just like the Linux Mint distribution got, but the Cinnamon desktop is like the traditional Mint desktop, with the single panel at the bottom and a simple and easy to use layout. Linux Mint 8 had the simple desktop with the Mint menu that allowed access to your favorite applications with a single click. The Windows 8 Metro interface is like that, you can delete the tiles that you do not wish to keep and drag and drop tiles that you want to have on the first screen, so that you can access them easily, but you can also pin them to the taskbar as well. There was a registry hack to disable the Metro interface in Windows 8 but this does not work in the Consumer Preview release. I am not saying that Linux should have the Metro interface, but it is easy to use once you get used to it. The Linux Mint 12 interface, although a bit strange, is not as bad as the Unity desktop and I am sure that it is very customizable as well.
That is the key to an enjoyable Linux experience, the usability of the desktop interface, and the ease of accessing the start menu. The Windows 7 desktop was fine, the aero interface, which Windows 8 has kept, does look the same but there is no option to enable the Windows classic style, only the Windows 7 basic theme. That does suck, how long will it be until a Smartphone touch interface is the only way to use your computer at all? This is part of the war on general purpose computing, they want everyone to use the tablet interface and locked down machines to access the Internet instead of a traditional desktop machine with a large screen and a lot of RAM. I would like an Android tablet but I am not sure if it would support installing Linux distributions like the ARM port of Ubuntu. I think that is an awesome achievement, as long as you have a tablet like the Spark Linux tablet that can run a Linux operating system with a Plasma Active touch interface. That technology still has an unlocked boot loader and is not locked down like the Apple machines. Although locked down devices can be jailbroken. That is something. An Apple Ipad 2 running Linux Mint would be a pretty cool thing to have, but I would find it awkward to use in bed. I actually use my phone to type up long documents like this posting, but that is a Nokia E72 with a QWERTY keypad and that is actually very usable with text auto-completion enabled.
I can not sleep at the moment, my Cat is getting some sleep in her cat box, but I have not found a camp bed, yet and it is 02:40, so what is the point of sleeping, the other people here are either trying to sleep or staying up talking or using mobile phones and laptops. Meanwhile the river is rising and due to reach a dangerous level at 06:00. That is when we were supposed to be evacuated by, but I left as soon as I got my warning SMS. That was a good idea from the government, they set that up to alert residents when there is an emergency. They surely can just do a database lookup, that queries the address fields and targets those people that are living in certain areas. I think that is how they do it. Those who do not own mobile phones are doornocked to alert them of the need to leave the town. That is the good thing about modern technology, as well as the radio and television that can also carry warnings. I am reading the Lord of the Rings to pass the time, the story of the passage through Mordor and the eventual destruction of the ring, which was due to the clumsiness of Gollum after biting off the finger of Frodo and taking the ring for himself. The movie of Return of the King was fairly true to the book, a lot of things were moved around, but it is an admirable job that Peter Jackson and the Weta team have done on this film.
The Hobbit, the precursor to Lord of the Rings, will hopefully be up to the standard of the previous Lord of the Rings films, it actually has singing in it and the discovery of the ring by Bilbo Baggins. The ring was lost by Isuldur, son of Elendil and lay in silt on the bottom of a river for 2000 years before the chance discovery of the ring by Smeagol son of Deagol. Then 500 years later it passed to Bilbo. The nine rings that were given to nine kings then corrupted them and created the Nazgul wraiths. I wish I had the power of the ring, I could try and turn away the river. There are some people that are criticizing the workers at the dams for releasing the water but if they had not, then the dam could break and then 6 hours later there would be a wall of water hitting our town 30 meters tall. It would disintegrate the sturdiest buildings and wash away the whole town. It is better to suffer a small amount of inconvenience than die a horrendous death. The people need to learn how the dams work and not be so ignorant. Ignorance is destroying the world. If people were reading more and watching less television then the world would be in a better position than we are at present. Television shows like American Idol and the countless other reality shows and those Master chef television shows that every week eliminate a contestant until the winner receives a million dollars and their 5 minutes of fame.
That is what our modern society is about these days, everyone is in a drug like trance, they watch celebrity wife swap, the execrable Jersey Shore series and other demonic television shows like The Secret Circle that promote Satanism. The other television shows promote materialism and treating others like dirt just to get ahead, the only pay television show that I watch is the WWE wrestling, that is bread and circuses for the masses, but it is good entertainment. The story lines are a bit predictable after all these years, that is to be expected, but it is an entertaining, couple of hours and is relatively harmless compared to the other drudge on the idiot box. The world is headed for idiocracy considering the comments on the Prime 7 News Facebook page are to be believed. If a dam is full to the brim, the water will not magically stay behind the wall by force of will. The 1974 flood was 10.75 meters and this one will be 10.90 meters, but the water is rising faster than the 1974 flood and that provides more pressure and friction on the levee bank, this is part of the reason for the concern. I have just heard that the levee is only 10.74 meters in some parts, I hope that after this is over they can upgrade the levee bank and prepare for an inevitable future flooding, event. They were dredging out the lagoon near the library before the rain, obviously they have suspended that and now they are waiting for the water to go down.