I'm at the Googleplex this week for the Ubuntu Developers' Summit. Across town the Web 2.0 conference is in full swing, and as a nod to the emergent new web, I have prototyped an example of Web 2.0 technologies.

This is what the web will become. A conduit for your creativity. A canvas that will, instead of feeding you the content a provider wants, allow you to design an experience tailored to your needs and desires. An ultimately rich and yet utterly simple springboard for the latent artist in all of us. The web defined by users, for users.

Click here to see my interpretation of Web 2.0. And prepare for the web your way!

Thanks to Allison Randal for the inspiration!

In about 72 hours this site and others hosted on this server will be down for about a week as the box physically moves from Portland, Oregon USA to Montreal, Quebec Canada. I'm anticipating a shutdown around 11pm UTC on Monday. You have been warned.

Thrill as your host drives across a continent!

Marvel at the beauty of the American nation!

Gasp at the stultification of the populace!

Read on to learn more about five days of heat, sleep deprivation, and breakneck speeds!

My desktop machine has a Gigabyte GA-K8NS Ultra 939 motherboard. It's been great; rock-solid and performs exactly as expected.

One of the nicest things is that it has the ability to update the BIOS from within the BIOS. You bring up the BIOS, tell it to find a new firmware revision on a floppy, and it updates itself. No OS needed. Fantastic. No longer is a user required to have a specific OS in order to update their BIOS.

Except Gigabyte distributes the firmware as a self-extracting Windows executable. That's right. The firmware comes as a .exe file that will only expand under Windows (and yes, I have tried to unzip it with Linux's unzip with no luck).

How farking brain-dead is this? There's no need to compress the BIOS image, it's small enough for even modem users. But then to compress it and lock users into a specific OS in order to decompress it is just idiocy. Any benefit provided by the BIOS being OS-agnostic and being able to update itself is rendered completely useless by some idiot engineering manager's decision to distribute a self-extracting Windows executable. And not even provide a .zip file for people that might not run Windows.

Gigabyte, are you listening? Do you care about your customers that choose not to run Windows? Do you yourselves really understand the benefits of a self-updating BIOS?

Morons.

I'm not a fan of Windows or their installation "wizards," but this one I'd like to see ship on all versions of Vista.

I'd also like magical pixies to leap out of my monitor and spray me with rum and pennies. And that's probably more likely.

Thanks, Mac-arena!