I posted a message on Facebook asking about what I should be doing now in terms of the Gospel.  My cousin sent me to christianpost.com, and and article by Ed Stetzer entitled, "Preach the Gospel, and Since It's Necessary, Use Words."  It was a pretty good article.  I wasn't sure what I should do with it.  I'm thinking about reposting to Facebook, but I figured at the very least I should post it here. The article can also be found on Ed's  christianitytoday.com blog, and was reprinted in Ligonier Ministries TableTalk magazine.

PDF fun

So I needed to create scan a 2 page document into .pdf format.  I went up to the computer that the scanner is connected to and scanned the document unto a multipage .tiff file.  Then I went downstairs to my laptop and copied the file.  Immediately afterwards, I realized that I'd skipped a step.  Usually, I convert the .tiff file to .pdf on the upstairs computer, using IrvanView.  My laptop is running Fedora, so IrfanView is not an option.  The solution?  A command-line program called tiff2pdf that I learned about here.
Once I looked at the finished .pdf, I realized I'd scanned the documents landscape--my only option--but the document is actually a portrait document.  How could I go about rotating it?  Irfanview?  Probably, but I didn't want to go back upstairs.  I've used pdftk for merging .pdfs, but wasn't sure if it could rotate files.  As it turns out, it can!
Once that was finished, I remembered something else: I was supposed to number the documents.  I didn't want to write on the documents themselves, and I didn't want to copy the documents and then rescan them either.  I was thinking that IrvanView would have been my best bet--I could have added the numbers in the editor before exporting to .pdf.  If only there was a way to add a watermark to a .pdf.  As it turns out, pdftk can do that too!  But then, the watermark itself needed to be a transparent .pdf, and I had no idea how to do that.  I found the answer here:

convert $INPUT.PNG -transparent white -background none $OUTPUT.PDF
pdftk $FORM.PDF stamp $OUTPUT.PDF output $COMPLETED_FORM.PDF

Coming full circle

So...CentOS didn't last long.  About a week.  The problem was that there just weren't that many packages available.  I wanted to run a tracker, but there were no trackers available in the CentOS repositories.  I found that one of them would run in Wine, so I went to install that, and it wasn't in the CentOS repositories either.  I rarely use Wine, but when I realized it wasn't available that's probably when I started thinking I'd chosen the wrong distro.  So...I'm back to Fedora.  And the same fix I used to get wireless working in CentOS worked in Fedora, so no need for ndiswrapper and the frustration of having to reconfigure everything after every kernel upgrade, which is what drove me from Fedora in the first place.

Centos

So yesterday I made the abrupt decision to make the jump from Kubuntu to Centos.  My linux experience actually started with Fedora five years ago, but eventually I abandoned it because everytime the system updated stuff broke.  Specifically the wireless.  This time things weren't quite so bad, thanks to instructions that I found on this page.