Hidden Secrets of the Bay: The Crucible

One of my favorite things to see in the bay area is when the Crucible puts on a show. If you haven't heard of the Crucible, it is a non-profit organization over in Oakland that teaches fine and industrial arts classes to underprivileged youth - generally things involving fire. Things like blacksmithing, ironworking, welding, glass blowing, ceramics, neon, fire performance, etc.

When the Crucible puts on a show though, it is something unlike anything you've ever seen - except maybe (just maybe) at burning man, but you can avoid all the blazing heat, sand, etc with the Crucible. They generally put on two big events:

1. A fire arts festival in the summer.
   
2. The fire ballet in the winter.

I just got back from the fire ballet which I visited last week. This year's ballet is a twist on Dracul, with vampires, zombies, a dragon, and the works. It is a somewhat more private affair, indoors, but spectacular. To get things straight, I don't really like ballet. I do like fire. And we are talking alot of fire:

1. Life sized metal dragon spewing flame.
2. There is no part of the stage that is not on fire at some point in the night.
3. The characters are usually dancing with fire of some sort, on fire, blowing fire, eating fire, burning things, fighting with swords on fire, pouring molten metal, throwing sparks all over the stage, etc.

Not to mention that it isn't traditional ballet. More like cirque du soleil. The main characters spend about as much time touching the ground as flying through the air. It is quite a spectacle to see.

The whole thing is highly recommended if you have an evening some time and you are in the bay. There are still even tickets available, although last weekend sold out so it might make sense to buy early. Check out the Crucible's Fire Ballet.

Flash is one of Linux's Achilles heels

The NY Times released an interesting article on Ubuntu trying to take on the mainstream desktop market.  Great.  You've already got me doing it.

I have a suggestion for one roadblock that has to be removed first.

This article in 2007 seems to indicate that most linux users use firefox as their default browser.  It's 2009 and I'd be willing to bet that the 60% number is much higher by now, and also much higher for Ubuntu users.  This is actually great for Linux, because firefox is pretty much feature-identical in Linux or Windows.

The problem is the stupid plugins, namely Flash.  I run 64-bit Ubuntu at home and last I checked, Adobe still hadn't released a 64-bit Flash plugin for Linux.  There is a workaround, but it requires a good bit of technical know-how and requires running firefox in 32-bit mode.  Even still, my browser randomly freezes nearly every time I open more than one embedded flash thingy at a time requiring a full restart.  Since I often leave pandora running in the background, this is much worse as I already have 1 flash app running.  Running across any page that has flash is equivalent to asking firefox to playing russian roulette.  And some days I feel that there are no missing bullets.

With so many sites now basically assumming I have flash running, the web feels like a minefield sometimes.  Please Adobe/Firefox/Ubuntu fix this sad state!