I'd rather be placed in an "easily escapable situation involving an overly elaborate and exotic death."

Is that on WiFi only or does it use the native data capability of the phone to route calls over the data link?

Don't be ridiculous, you're allowed to use vim in this day and age.

Caldera --> Slackware --> Ubuntu --> Fedora --> Linux Mint Debian Edition Of course dabbling in a little bit of everything, BeOS, FreeBSD, CentOS, Linux Madrake, etc.

You mean KDE 3 right?

I haven't used Unity but, to be honest, the one thing I can't get over is the lack of symmetry. I know, it's petty, but it just hits me as wrong, like fingernails on a chalkboard wrong, to have something on the top and left side of the screen. Is that changeable?

Ruby or Python.

I lived in the Atacama dessert for a couple of years so I can attest to the oasis concept, at least in part. For the most part I lived in cities and didn't know where I got my water, although I know there is one main river that makes it down to Antofagasta (the Loa river). But one time I took a trip a few hours inland. Now, keep in mind, the Atacama dessert (apart from the cities) isn't like your Mojave or anything like that, with tumbleweeds and Joshua trees and cacti. It's more like the surface of the moon (in fact there is a "valle de la luna"). Between cities there is nothing but dirt.

At any rate, we eventually arrived at any incredible oasis. A nice stream flowing in a small valley, or more like a tunnel or crevice. I don't know if they were planted but there were tons of fruit trees (membrillo). Lots of lush vegetation. It was truly amazing, like something out of a movie, except you didn't see it until you were there because it was down below the surface.

Pretty much every day, but I write digital signal processing programs in C/C++.

The ugliest desktop I have ever used or laid my eyes on. I remember in college trying with all my might to compile, install, and run Blackbox on the computer lab HP-UX machines without root just to avoid the hideousness of CDE. I'm sure it was fine when it came out but I don't see the point to this now.

Incidentally, does anyone remember when XFCE came out I thought it was initially billed as an open source version of CDE. Of course it's gotten much better and is actually my primary desktop. I might be misremembering that though.

I recommend python as a great starter language. I haven't seen this reference here yet:

http://www.openbookproject.net/thinkcs/python/english2e/#

Of course, the previously recommneded Dive Into Python is good as well.

I use Firefox over Chrome now for a few reasons:
1) I can install a rocker gestures add-on in Linux. That never worked well in Chrome and now doesn't appear to even work at all.
2) I can install it on my work Linux box without having root access, in my home directory.
3) Oddly enough, I had intermittent but distinct problems with Chrome not working with gmail...of all things! The site would sometimes not load at all in Chrome. Then I'd go to Firefox and it always works perfectly.
4) Context menu open in background. In Firefox I can change a setting in about:config that allows me to "Search Google for ..." and it will open the results in a BACKGROUND tab. I found an extension in Chrome that allows this but it's a bit of a pain with having to traverse a few layers of menus.
5) Session manager in Firefox is simple and defaults to just saving my tabs and re-opening them. I imagine it's possible in Chrome but after trying one or two I couldn't set up that default behavior without more interaction.

I imagine I could fix a few of these things in Chrome if I put in some time and research. But why bother if Firefox gives me what I need?

Here it is (pdf) : http://phoenixprojectfoundation.us/uploads/IEEE_Solar_Hydrogen_Paper.pdf

I can't find it now but a few years ago there was an article in the IEEE regarding what alternative energy sources could meet the (as then) current demand for the entire world. I think it was in the Signal Processing proceedings, of all places. Anyway, the technology that they said could fit the criteria was a parabolic trough.