The sun, whose rays are all ablaze

For some reason, this poem popped into my head today that I haven’t thought of in a while. I first heard part of it in the movie Brick, which I liked. I much prefer the way it’s almost recited in the movie over the way it’s sung in the Gilbert and Sullivan show The Mikado. It’s really a great poem, very lyrical.

The sun, whose rays
Are all ablaze
With ever-living glory,
Does not deny
His majesty —
He scorns to tell a story!
He don’t exclaim,
“I blush for shame,
So kindly be indulgent.”
But, fierce and bold,
In fiery gold,
He glories all effulgent!

I mean to rule the earth,
As he the sky —
We really know our worth,
The sun and I!

Observe his flame,
That placid dame,
The moon’s Celestial Highness;
There’s not a trace
Upon her face
Of diffidence or shyness:
She borrows light
That, through the night,
Mankind may all acclaim her!
And, truth to tell,
She lights up well,
So I, for one, don’t blame her!

Ah, pray make no mistake,
We are not shy;
We’re very wide awake,
The moon and I!

-Gilbert & Sullivan

Makes me miss someone though…

Dell XPS m1330 with Ubuntu

I just read that Dell is now offering the laptop I’ve been wanting with Ubuntu pre-installed. Drool. I saw a picture on the Ubuntu website about a week ago and was hoping this is what it meant. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like they offer the optional nVidia graphics card upgrade (only on-board graphics) due to Ubuntu’s restricted drivers components. And actually with their current sale on regular m1330s, it’s cheaper to buy one with Vista installed and you even get better specs. Anyone understand that logic?

Google Talk and iTunes 7.6

After seeing a few people’s “status messages” in my Google Chat widget change displaying what song they’re listening to (hat tip: Usama), I thought it would be fun to try this myself. Unfortunately I had just upgraded to iTunes 7.6, and when I installed Google Talk, I wasn’t able to display any of my current music playing in iTunes. If I play things in WMP though, they update my status message just fine. Considering I read somewhere that the Google Talk program hasn’t been updated recently, I tried installing Pidgin (the free software instant messenger in Ubuntu, formerly Gaim) with the MusicTracker plug-in. Unfortunately, this gave the same results as in Google Talk. It worked with WMP but not iTunes 7.6. Did the new iTunes change something, making it incompatible with these two chat clients? If I find out, I’ll let you know. Just FYI, though, I have no evidence that it’s iTunes causing the problem and not something on my end. I just assumed there would be a lot more complaints out there if there was a problem with the 7.5 version.

Whew! That was quite a few links, huh?

Update: It turns out that I had a problem with my iTunes install. Repairing iTunes and re-installing Google Talk and/or Pidgin fixed the problem. I hope that helps anyone else experiencing this problem.