Victor Solanoy

I finally got a chance to watch “Meet the Robinsons” over the 4th of July weekend. I was pleasantly surprised considering I wasn’t expecting much.

While I wouldn’t consider myself a kookie Disney fan, I’m a big fan of Walt Disney, the man. There’s a great quote at the end of the movie that I think should be the credo of engineers everywhere.

There’s a tendency to play it safe, hoping to repeat the successes of previous projects. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s a way of progressing forward to create bigger and better things. It’s single handedly the reason why certain companies fail to follow-up their previous success, while other companies build successes on top of other successes.

It’s the difference between 1980’s Apple and IBM, and is the difference between Apple and HP, or Apple and Microsoft.

There’s really no secret about our approach. We keep moving forward—opening up new doors and doing new things—because we’re curious. And curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. We’re always exploring and experimenting. At WED, we call it Imagineering—the blending of creative imagination with technical know-how.

…from a 1965 presentation by Walt Disney called “Total Image”

I’ve been running Ubuntu 9.04 on an IBM ThinkCentre M51 I picked up from MicroCenter for $150 for a little over 2 weeks now.

Almost flawless… I have a Belkin wireless card installed in the box, which as the Atheros chipset, which results in a lost wirelss connection after a few hours of use.

Ubuntu 9.04 identified the card, lauched a restricted driver dialogue. After downloading and activating the MadWiFi driver, everything’s running smoothly. It’s been over a week now and the system hasn’t lost its WiFi connection.