The thrill of installing whole operating systems just for the hell of it is a unique pleasure, which paradoxically often involves lots of screaming and cussing. I'm usually too worn out to write up my own experiences, but happily for us, iDRMRSR has been reporting his escapades on alt.slack, and he graciously gave me permission to re-print some of his writing here.
I include links to Google's archives of the actual threads, so you can follow our rude responses and snotty suggestions we made and perhaps add your own.
061128 00:09 by iDRMRSR
Yes, I've decided to try something which for me is UTTERLY PERVERSE.
I'm right now downloading UBUNTU 6.10 for installation on one of these spare PC's I have cluttering up the place. The Windows ME which formerly ran it is now no longer supported by Myqrocopht. I could just take the HD out and plop it into my XP box, but this seems such a waste.
Especially since the old machine is actually a nice 1GHZ plus Pentium.
I already know it won't accept XP, and I won't accept spending $100 for another licence...and I hate to throw the thing in the trash, so I'm doing the only other thing that seems sensible.
I am RAPING it with Linux.
Please note that this is an admission on my part that...I abhor Apple something terrible...I'm not that impressed with Vista by any means...and this will give my idle hand(s) something to do in my dotage. That is, keep up to date functionally without expense of any real money.
I can't see how I would turn that old box into my main squeeze BUT you never can tell, I might be closet-gay for Linux after all. So let's just say I'm bi-curious.
Prolly gonna SHIT all over the nVidia video card, though...and I'll be up scouring the net for install hints all night...and end up throwing the thing out in tomorrow's trash anyhow, like I did the last time I futzed with Linux back in 1996.
Wish me luck...
061128 03:57
Already I'm finding out how much UBUNTU SUX for your average Windoze dude.
So, OK, I managed to install it to HD and still keep around my ole windoze partition with all the data. Didn't scrog it all as I thought I would. Dual boots nicely.
Then I got into a catch 22 with the fucking video card driver. It's NVIDIA TNT2 M64. I go to the application installer (graphic) and lo and behold, there is NVIDIA LEGACY DRIVER on the list. I check it off and a nasty message comes back that THIS IS NOT SUPPORTED ON YOUR HARDWARE.
Two more hours of sifting through Google searches and I find some clown who actually wrote a program which you run in Terminal that goes out to Nvidia and yanks their proprietary driver and installs it and configures all the other ninety seven layers of crap between TTY and your monitor which linux imposes.
Well, it worked, and got me into 1280 by 768 mode just as my wide ass monitor required.
Then I go to my MySpace page and I get an error message:
TOTEM cannot play //fd//0
or some such crap like that. Because there is an embedded MP3 file, and UBUNTU is all FREE software but MP3 is proprietary and so...gasp gasp...
FUCK IT. It's too fucking late to deal with this, I need some sleep. I'll have to wait until tomorrow, or maybe the next day if Google is slow, JUST to get Firefox to play a fucking MP3 embedded in a web page.
This is why I say Linux SUX. No bells and whistles work right out of the box. I thought this would be a little better by now.
Yeah, if I was putting up a database server or something gray and odorless like that, yeah, Linux would be OK.
I dunno.
I was going to say "the night is YOUNG", but for "Bob"s sake, it's 4 AM and I just got the screen resolution working.
PS it's slower than Windows ME was, sigh, on the same hardware.
061128 14:58
Well, I give UBUNTU Edgy Eft one half kudo.
My camera flash card reader...JUST WORKED!
My old scanner...JUST WORKED!
I also got the MP3's to play and satisfy TOTEM, whatever that is.
BUT...my WEBCAM...arrgh.
I'm being held hostage by a lone French developer somewhere who has written an application which works for SOME Logitech cams, but mine (device ID 046d:0869) of course fails. I'll have to wait until he finds time not bathing and not changing his underwear, and in that interval I'll prolly grow as much armpit hair as he has, while he codes up a new version.
It gives me great pleasure to install something with the UNSTABLE repository option, too. This cam is stacked up to the ceiling at WalMart. I guess they don't have une WalMart en France, eh?
So I can't post a YouTube video of me running UBUNTU here in the Condo of Solitude just yet. Oh, there's another method (always is) which requires me to cut and paste 35 different commands into a terminal window, covering three and a half pages of text, which might yield a working driver in the end as it attempts to compile every line of C code written by humankind.
Didn't Linux ever hear of INSTALLSHIELD?
Heh, that and Linux is CaSeSeNsItIvE to boot, which to my Windows eyes is grotesque.
Right now I'm about as likely to embrace Linux as Islam, sigh.
061129 01:22 by iDRMRSR
Had to give up on my webcam. It's just not going to fly under Linux. There's like only two people on the whole planet writing drivers for webcams and they haven't got round to my model just yet.
So then I decided maybe I could do something neatsy keen with MUSIC. So I downloaded this package called Hydrogen which alleges to produce nice drum and bass loops. I know a lot less about music than I do about Linux, let's face it, but when I played the DEMO that came with it, it sounded kind of like when you pull your straw through your Big Gulp lid. Not like drums at all. Squeaky.
Then I tried to play some MIDI file I had laying around, since Hydrogen is MIDI based. Ho HO! No player associated with type MIDI. So it did some kind of scan and told me I should install a package called AMAROK, which is kind of an iTunes for Linux.
I installed it. It's so freaking complicated it had to install a database server, too, which I let it do. Then I pointed it at my Windows partition which had all the music. 58% of the way cataloguing the music, it burped and I never heard from it again.
I cranked it up and tried to feed it a MIDI file. It thought for a while and then said "Unsupported Format". This is strange because, after all, the system RECOMMENDED this package to me! Then I noticed when I tried to quit the stinking program, it argued with me because it wanted KDE and I have GNOME installed. Failed recommendation on TWO counts.
Another quick search on the net finds that there is precisely ONE program which can play a MIDI, TIMIDITY. I installed that sucker, and LO AND BEHOLD it plays MIDI files just great...but the only thing is...it's a CONSOLE MODE program.
Yep, no pussy "click on an icon and pretty music". No, you have to type the whole invocation of the program and then the path to the frigging file every time you want to hear a MIDI file. My fingers would get worn out.
Not only that but I had to download a whole symphony of synth tables, again from some asshole in France, and it pinned the CPU at 100% the whole time it was playing. However, I must admit the SOUND was actually much RICHER than when played under Windows!
TIMIDITY and HYDROGEN do not speak to each other, sadly, so I get the "wet thumb on the rubber balloon sound" instead of snare drums still.
Now I have to figure out just how to UNINSTALL Hydrogen and AMAROK and its SQLITE database server. Cuz, it's not like Linux is going to have a good ADD/REMOVE SOFTWARE thing. Heh, to be FAIR, it has TWO of them...neither of which talk to each other.
Oh, and FIREFOX 2.0 took a crap WHILE IT WAS MINIMIZED WITH A BLANK PAGE! I thought the mantra was Linux NEVER has the same kind of problems as Windows. I could see it crapping out if it was DOING something but it was minimized. My my.
The icing on the cake was the bubble that came up to inform me that I needed to apply 13 CRITICAL PATCHES. Yup, this shit has "automatic update" built right into the pie.
One thing I sort of did solve was the way the FONTS look in Linux. STRANGE. Every program has a different idea what Arial should look like, and Firefox sometimes substitutes a Serif font for the non serif ones! The only thing WORSE looking that I've seen is a Mac.
It turns out you have to download and install TRUE TYPE fonts if you want Linux to look anything like Windows (eg, what I've been staring at for 8 hours or more a day for the last 12 years). Turns out UBUNTU can't include them automatically because they are LICENSED by MS.
Can you believe that, the company LICENSES the fonts!
I wonder if they LICENSE the English language, too. From what I've seen of some of the Linux phraseology, it's obvious the coders don't speak that
language.
I hate to deal with a dialogue like "ARE YOU SURE TO QUIT?" and "Please wait while we gather the informations".
I also had to chuckle because the default installation of Firefox had the RSS feed for the BBC installed on the toolbar! As if I give a rat's ass about England. What's wrong with CNN?
Oh, but then I should have waited for someone to put together a UBUNT-USA distribution. I actually bet there is a team of French programmers right now that are gathering all the "informations" for that distribution as we speak!
061130 00:13 by iDRMRSR
Ahhhh, ratz. I spent most of the day UBUNTU-ing.
I finally found something that put a charge in my shorts. There's a windowing system out there called Beryl which actually puts your graphic card to use. Looks like what I imagine Aero on Vista will look like. Semi transparent windows, which wiggle and bend as you move them around, transparent task bars, loads of colors and reflections and animations out the wazoo.
Unfortunately it's BETA code, so like when you maximize a window, it may just turn completely black inside...or scoot up above the top of the screen so you can't grab the title bar and yank it anywhere. However when it's working, it beats the SNOT out of Windows XP and makes OS X look like the ugly sister, from what I've seen of videos of OS X on YouTube.
It's got all the candy colored clown they call the Sandman, all right. Had to slap on quite a few tweaks for my Nvidia graphic card (which is five years old BTW).
SO then I thought I'd impress everybody and prove that I could POST to alt.slack. I installed PAN, the only newsreader I could find which does Yenc and multipart post reading/decoding. Very slick, almost like AGENT and completely FREE.
That is, until I tried to post a PIXTURE. I selected the NEW POST option. NO ATTACHMENT ICON...no way I could find to attach a binary. Sheesh.
I clicked the HELP and it went to some web page for the product, and when I clicked USER MANUAL I got a page ALL TO FUCKING TYPICAL OF LINUX..."We're working on this!". Yup, no manual of any sort. I'm getting used to this now.
Looking for FUN STUFF, I found this program called BLENDER which is a BRYCE clone. The only thing is, the User Interface requires a creature with eight tentacles to simultaneously press three keys at a time whilst engaging left clicks and right clicks AND thrumming the scroll wheel.
I imagine I would require two or three hours on the Krel Educator to figure that one out, but then my mind would be even more fried than it is.
Oh, there are tutorial VIDEOS out there, loads of them, but they download at 4.3K or slower. Apparently they aren't intended to be actually viewed by anybody who didn't write the software. I gave up after trying to download one of them for an hour.
I think I managed to get it to do a rather flat looking render of a cube partly lit on a blue background. Screenshot is on ABS. Gotta be the WORST User Interface I have ever seen!
I haven't got to the point yet where I could live without Windows functionality, though I do regret not having a windowing system like Beryl. I was kind of hoping I would SEE THE LIGHT, but thanks to UBUNTU, I have only been able to pull the wool over my own eyes.
Vista, I'm ready for you.
061130 23:32 by iDRMRSR
Including what I could get of the Beryl Window system to work. Now normally it gives you a six-face cube for a desktop, which you can rotate, but I never got it to do anything consistent for me.
Still, I could browse the web, download from ALT.BINARIES.SLACK, play MP3 and MOV files, logon, logoff, and empty the trash successfully. Which is about all the average SubG ever needs to do besides pee and whank and drop stool, all of which are better done offline anyhow.
So what am I complaining about, the price was right, all FREE FREE FREE. And compared to Windows, which has been very good to me, Linux is worth EVERYTHING I PAID FOR IT. With Windows, at least I could POST my own binaries, play MIDI files, and use my webcam. Well, by the time my PRIME system here becomes the old shoe, in that glorious future perhaps UBUNTU will be sufficiently well developed to satisfy me completely, and I can slap a Linux on it before I turn it over to the glue factory.
Viddy this, me droogies:
061202 01:05 by iDRMRSR
I think when I leapt into the UBUNTU fray, I certainly didn't do enough (heh heh) WINDOW shopping before I mindlessly downloaded plain old UBUNTU.
I just installed KDE along with GNOME (which was standard with UBUNTU) and now I am MUCHO happier in most regards. KDE looks just like Windoze, well enough so that I don't feel completely lost. It also plays with BERYL much better. I can flip and rotate my six desktops to my heart's desire.
Which is pretty ironic because, I'm ONE sole person here. What in "Bob"s sweet name would I need SIX desktops for? However it's nice to know I could have them if I wanted. MIDI playing is quite a bit better, too, for some reason.
The only thing is, KDE is about 50% slower than GNOME. It's pretty obvious the eye and ear candy is stressing the pants off the 1.3 GHZ processor in my old box. I didn't bother to 100% configure everything in it to my liking. I can see that would be rather daunting. So many crappy options, so little time.
How ever I can see now that if I had INITIALLY gone with KDE I would have spent fewer hours in total frustration.
Well, this'll give me something to do to fill my solitary hours with something besides playing SOLITAIRE.
Especially since MySpace seems to have petered out as a source of diversion. Less traffic there than on some of those alt.slack.whatever newsgroups you see from time to time.
061202 20:31 by iDRMRSR
OK guys, I tried all the various tweaks and all I got was SLOWER and SLOWER.
I did manage to get my cached reads up to 1019 MB/S whilst at the same time the buffered reads came in at an astonishing 3.48 MB/S (eg, floppy disk speeds) with some sprinkling of parms.
I even managed to get my system to TOTALLY FREEZE with one invocation which happily I forget now. Gosh, that's becoming a nauseating PATTERN with Linux. Remove one card in the house of cards and it comes SHATTERING DOWN.
The other funny thing is this. Whilst KDE is rilly attractive as an operating environment IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO SET THE SCREEN RESOLUTION AND SIZE! KDE simply picks something out of its blue-ish ASS and sets it there.
There IS no way to change this. I require 1280 by 768. GNOME lets me set its brownish ass this way, and all is good. From that point, all the fonts are set at 10 points, all is readable with these old eyes, etc etc etc.
I then switch into KDE and the fonts are like HALF the size I'm used to. This is because I believe the screen resolution is now 1600x900, which is appropriate to the desired aspect ratio BUT WAY TO TINY font wize. Yeah, I could go and set everything to 12 point fonts etc etc but that's a lot of setting in EVERY FRIGGING app I launch....sheesh. And I did a GOOGLE for setting up the KDE desktop size, and all I can do is CONFIRM nobody has a way to do this.
That's Linux for ye. You only get a PARTIALLY baked cake with icing covering only PART of it. Oh, if you manage to graft the GNOME cake with the KDE cake, I suppose you get a whole VIRTUAL cake that's to your liking but...
OH IS THIS FRUSTRATING.
Still I've got nothing to do with my life besides this so I might as well see how many more egregious things I can do to this old system in the name of seeing if there's a way to get Linux to work for ME better than Windows ME for example (which is what this box LAST had on it).
PS I don't seem to be able to find a stinking VOLUME control under KDE, which is necessary because Linux, upon booting, seems to want to turn off one channel (l/r) or the other automagically, which is again VERY FRUSTRATING. At least with GNOME I could jiggle the volume control and the missing channel would come back on, but with KDE, I can't even find anything like a volume control.
That's prolly because the volume setting utility is named KQZVVL or something arcane following the usual cutesy poo way of calling things.
ARRRGHHH....
I will report more as I continue to make my blood boil here. And I will TRY not to post HTML from UBUNTU if ever I figure out HOW NOT TO DO THAT. PAN from GNOME was posting in plain text, but from KDE something made it decide that HTML posts were better, and I canna find a knob to turn that option off ANYWHERE. Nor can I find out why PAN runs differently under KDE than GNOME.
Oh my this is like trying to fit your limp dick into a keyhole for pleasure on a cold night. I begin to think Linux is for masochists only.
061203 22:32 by iDRMRSR
Rilly, Linux fans, I almost literally took a chill pill and came down from my high MS Horse. OK, so in this humble MS user's calm and considered opinion, yeah, a modern distribution of Linux is probably a decent replacement for a Windows business desktop box...maybe not XP Media Center, though.
It falls short in the graphics and sound categories. I see I'm not alone here, as Google searches reveal, either. Reasonably, that's because I'm trying to run Ubuntu on a "designed for Windows" box. If I were to swap out my video card and audio card for more well supported models, it'd probably work. Same thing for the webcam.
It falls short in the USENET category, too. There isn't ONE program that I can find which BOTH posts binaries AND unwinds multiple Yenc posts. Still, I could use KNODE to read the text stuff and the non multi part posts, and post binary attachments, and then switch to PAN to download multipart stuff. Which is similar to what I do on Windows, alternating from Outlook Express to Free Agent. Though, I COULD use Free Agent 100% of the time...except personally I hate the quirks in the user interface (scrolling with mouse wheel, won't display attachments like .jpgs INLINE). So I just use it to download LeMur.
I finally did soup up the disk access to something better, though I have no idea if it is OPTIMAL. I'm not going to crack open the HD enclosure and look at the chips inside. But I found a couple of tweaks (like UltraDMA mode 5) which put a charge in its shorts.
It excels in the desktop eye candy department, though. Even without Beryl, which I wish Windows had now that I've seen it. Still, you can't set screen resolution in KDE, so the fonts are always too small by comparison with Windoze, whereas GNOME is spot on all by itself, but duller than KDE in the eye candy department. And BERYL isn't helped by the particular video card that I have there (nVidia).
So then I had this great idea to try out WINE, to see if I could simply launch .EXE files off my Windows Fat32 partition!
I was going to spend an evening doing this when I discovered ... http://us.ubuntu.archive.com IS DOWN TONIGHT! Yup, that's the main UBUNTU software repository. For some reason, I can't reach that site all evening, so I couldn't even attempt to install WINE.
I'll have to make a note to myself to try this all out in another six months or so. It's such a shame, it ALMOST worked for me, but 95% of a pie isn't going to get me to cut away from Windows for daily use.
I'll prolly just fall back to plan A, which was to buy a new box next year with Vista pre-installed, a $400 box which will probably be four times as large as the last Dell I got in 2003. Aha, but then THAT Dell will be the OLD machine, and prolly more than suitable for ANOTHER try at Linux!
From my viewpoint, Bill Gates is sitting pretty with no worries from the Linux camp until he retires. Which won't be that much longer! And then I think they WILL be in trouble. It's ALMOST there, and I'm SO dyed in the wool M$ lover, it almost hurts to admit it.
061207 02:29 by iDRMRSR
1. I actually got my old PC to play a commercial, encrypted DVD, with menus and subtitles, from my Firewire connected external DVD writer! Took a couple shots. The old PC had just USB 1.0 connections, so long ago I threw in a Firewire card. It actually reconized the silly DVD writer the minute I plugged it in. I also managed to get it to play some DIVX files with subtitles. Wooo!!!
2. I then tried to boot my laptop with the Ubuntu Live CD. It actually worked, but wasn't able to get to the wireless network I have floating around here. Kinda hard to download drivers and new applications when you can't even GIT to teh intarwebs! Dunno what I'm gonna do about that. I don't want to repartition and install permanently to the HD if I can't get teh wireless working.
Heh, a lot of the web articles for troubleshooting wireless tell you to go here and there and install wireless managers and drivers, but if you are OFFLINE, t'aint possible. I may have to plug the thing wiredly and do some more hair pulling.
Now I need to find a good Linux video editing package like Windows Movie Maker. Simple and something that doesn't just save in OGG THEORA format.
061222 00:32 by iDRMRSR
Obsessed with a six year old PC and trying to get MIDI and the 3D desktop thing working under UBUNTU.
And I just noticed the time, PAST MIDNIGHT.
Today's (22nd) my birthday. I'm at the Heinz Age (57). That's thrice 19!
Equation even sort of works out BY WEIGHT. If you pick three slightly anorexic 19 y/o's, that is. That's an interesting topology question...could 3 19 y/o's fit into my pants at the same time? I don't think so, which is a paradox because then, where's the rest of the weight.
And old as I am, I'm still SCREWING AROUND WITH THIS SHIT!
I'd rant more but I need to check my MySpace page one more time before I change into my evening truss for bed. May even try and squeeze out a little pee before I go to sleep, instead of after.
061222 15:01 by iDRMRSR
On the OSX front, I've been doing some studying, and here's the torture trail for Windoze folks, the things that will cause US to rip out our hair more than the Linux command prompt:
1. Copy a folder to a folder with the same name elsewhere. OSX destroys the old folder (instead of merging the files). INSTANT coronary for a Windows user.
2. Closing windows does not stop the application. Slow death for a Windoze user.
3. Dragging a file to a blank CDR to back it up just puts a LINK to the file on the CD. Like Polonium 210 for us Windoze folks.
4. Cannot MAXIMIZE a window. WTF?
5. Many applications open SEVERAL small windows at once. WTF?
6. Only one FINDER open at a time. Kill me now, before I buy a Mac Mini.
7. CTRL DRAG to actually copy a file's contents. AIEEEEE.
8. Hidden .DS_store files splattered all over your disk.
No thanks.
BTW, I took Leonard's advice and tried this distro:
http://www.slax.org
The LiveCD actually ALMOST WORKED on my laptop. I could get the wireless card to connect. Sort of. Still can't reach the internet, but there's still time THIS YEAR to solve that problem.
It's a cute and FAST distro with KDE. Looks rilly nice, like the girls in those Russian mailorder bride pix, but once you get it home...arrrrggghhhh...
061223 00:06 by iDRMRSR
So close. Golly this live CD boots up REAL FAST somehow with a KDE desktop. On the laptop I tried out, it even mounted the NTFS partitions, including the hidden ones Dell always sticks out there.
Sound, video OK, only problem was ACPI. If you didn't boot with the ACPI=off option, nada, but otherwise it came up almost as fast as a boot from the hard drive.
It's got NDISWRAPPER so I tried to bring up my wireless card. I needed to copy the Windoze drivers files, which were immediately available on the NTFS partitions, plug in the WEP key and ESSID and all that, and eventually I got it CONNECTED.
I set up the default gateway, did this IWCONFIG and that IFCONFIG and this DHCPCD and that ROUTE command for about four hours total and NEVER COULD GET IT ON THE INTERNET. I even ran the same commands, route, netstat, iptables, on my working wired Ubuntu and the laptop. Everything should work but NADA beep. Ubuntu and Slax looked the same, but only UBUNTU could talk to anything.
My wireless router can see the laptop and the laptop DHCP can lease an address. But if I try to ping that same address ZILCH happens, 100% packet loss. Magnificent. Maybe I should try to run everything through the DHCP server on the wireless router.
Actually, it's simply hilarious. It's like the wireless card is operating all on its own as a sentient being, having a chat with the wireless router and otherwise ignoring the rest of what's going on inside the PC. What make is so silly is having to copy something out of \windows\system32\drivers to install on Linux. I love it.
Ah well, maybe in a few days my Sabayon distro Live CD will show up. And I can use the little Slax LiveCD in case I need a canopener if I ever fuxor the Windows install on the laptop. It's a nice snappy tool for something like that.
Looks like I got some toys for Xistlessmas after all.
061224 12:51 by iDRMRSR
I went to the butcher shop yesterday to buy a turkey. I could have paid $0.89 a pound for one, but instead the butcher told me about a new movement in the meat industry, the open source meat initiative. Under this new plan, you could just get a free turkey, or rather, a type of species very close to a real turkey, equal in nutrition and almost exactly the same in every other regard. Rather than raising them on the farm, small hobbyists all over the world raise their own turkey-like birds and exchange them for free with each other, hoping that one day all the inbreeding will produce a species much tastier than the usual mechafarm produced crap.
So I opted for the free turkey! The butcher gave me this carcass with all the dark meat but no white meat.
I asked, "What good is this?". The butcher said, well, most of the FLAVOR of the turkey is in the DARK MEAT. Due to a legal issue with the HunnySuckel corporation, he couldn't just give me a whole turkey. However, he said his brother was in the parking lot out back, and had the white meat in his trunk for all the free turkeys. He explained to me that it was up to me, if I wanted white meat, I could go out to the back and get it. He said a lot of the free turkey people simply content themselves with the dark meat. "The Free Turkey people are believers in CHOICE", he intoned.
But I would not be so content.
So I went out back, and sure enough, there was his brother, and he pulled from the trunk a nice set of breasts and wings, and even gave me a little handy sewing thing so I could sew them back on myself.
I got it home, sewed it back together, and put it into the roaster pan. Unfortunately, the free turkey was too oddly shaped to fit in the pan. So I ended up having to buy a FOIL pan and kind of mashing it into the right shape for my free turkey.
It suddenly occurred to me, I didn't remember exactly how to cook a turkey. So I searched the internet all over and found a nice recipe to cook my free turkey. The recipe went something like this:
1. Slice and serve the meat but not until you have read the full cooking instructions (unless you have done this before and know exactly what you are doing, and realize that some people have no business trying to cook a turkey unless they know avian anatomy and physiology and food science cold like us, in which case they should stick to eating at McDonald's).
2. Before you do that, you must thaw the turkey, unless the turkey is already thawed, but do not skip step 3 below, EXCEPT when the turkey is already cooked. However, if you want it warm, prior to eating, do not do step 1 first! Instead, heat the turkey and then do step 1. THIS IS NOT ROCKET SCIENCE! Do we make ourselves CLEAR?
3. Bake the free turkey for 250 * 10^6 microseconds per kilogram at a temperature of 449.816667 kelvin. IMPORTANT: if you pierce the breast with a sharp knife, and the juices are still running pink, the turkey may not be fully cooked and you risk intestinal disease if you eat it at this stage. To prevent this {TODO list - insert additional cooking instructions in next build along with documentation referring to desired final temperature of cooked meat}.
So I got out my slide rule and computed the cooking time, popped the bird in the oven and turned it on. I crossed my fingers and presumed the juices wouldn't run pink and all that. Then I noticed the very strangest thing.
With this open source turkey in the oven, I went to set the oven timer. It's a digital timer on a Westinghouse oven. Every time I set it, it displayed 88:88. I could set the timer OK with the free turkey OUT of the oven, but every time I put it in, the display read 88:88. After a while, I simply decided to use my pocket watch to do the timing.
While the free open source turkey was cooking, I did some more GOOGLING and found out that if I had used a KENMORE oven instead, the timer would set properly. Since the turkey was free, I decided it wasn't such a big problem to do without the little timer, especially since I had this nice little pocket watch around.
After about two hours, the smell of turkey began to fill the room and it was heavenly! I could see through the oven window, the skin was browning and crisping nicely. I could hardly wait until the cooking period was over.
That's when, all of a sudden the light in the oven blew out. I could not see inside at all! Panicking, I reached for my oven mitts and opened up the oven door to peer inside.
I discovered that somehow the free turkey in my oven had completely locked up the oven door latch! I could not get inside the oven. The timer still read 88:88 and I had no idea what was going on inside. Normally, I'd just flip the little safety lever and the door would open, but with the free turkey inside, it was frozen shut.
To get it out, I finally had to break through the glass in the oven door. This is not a simple thing because it's tempered glass. Shards of glass got into the turkey, and I then knew I couldn't eat the thing. It was corrupted totally in the process of finalizing the cooking. The smell of the house was very enticing, I must admit, and the parts of the free turkey that weren't full of broken glass were very nicely browned.
I ended up going to Denny's for a turkey dinner. They're open 24 hours, even on Xistlessmass. That dinner cost me $14 including the tip. It wasn't the best turkey around, but the stuffing was pretty tasty and it filled me up. Even though I kind of resented throwing more of my money at a big corporate food place like that.
The day after Xistlessmas I'm going to go out and buy a new oven door, and see if that butcher has any free, open source FILET MIGNON around, just to give that a try. Maybe if I try a different SPECIES this time, I can find a free food alternative that is ready for my kitchen!
061224 13:28 by iDRMRSR
There's an Apple store near me. This I knew long ago, but I saw an add in the paper that they were open on Xmas day, and were serving a complete turkey dinner with all the trimmings, prepared with the new iCook device they were planning on launching in 2007. How could I resist.
I went into the store and they had moved all the computers to the side and put in a completely white banquet table with about 50 white chairs surrounding it. I took my place and paid the $249 dinner fee, which I thought was excessive, but they promised to take ALL the hassle out of dining for me, so I figured, what the hey.
On the plate in front of my there was the iCook device. It had three things that looked like electrocardiogram electrodes, shiny chrome bullets on the end of a very thin white wire connected to the cigarette sized iCook itself. One wire was about five feet in length.
The "chef" came in, and told us all to insert the outer two electrodes on our tongues, and to swallow the one with the longest cord. I thought that might make me gag, but it's coated with an anesthetic so you can get it down really easy. I swallowed mine with absolutely no problem.
Then this freakish bird like thing was taken out of its cage and fastened to the table with bungee cords. The bird was an albino. The "Chef" then attached some probes to the bird, connecting it with a small mini box which, we were told, was the server for our iCooks.
The bird then extended a proboscis with several attachments on it like a dentist's drill. The first one was a feather remover. It buzzed all over the bird and cleaned off all the feathers, which were sucked up into a ceiling vacuum. Another attachment neatly severed the bird's neck. No blood came out!
One more attachment gutted the iTurkey, and the all white entrails were swiftly removed with another vacuum wand skillfully wielded by the "Chef". The "Chef" then proceeded to stuff the iTurkey with white stuffing.
A thirty-six laser light then shone on the iTurkey from above. In about thirty seconds, the skin was crispy and the smell of turkey filled the room. No need to wait hours for cooking!
The probes on my tongue then started emitting the most heavenly "turkey and stuffing" taste. Nothing was in my mouth, yet it seemed as if I could chew and swallow every virtual morsel. As I and the other diners slurped at the electrodes, the iTurkey in the center shrank in size until it eventually disappeared completely.
The probe down in my stomach had expanded in size dramatically. I had to loosen my belt. The taste generated by the iCook device sated me completely, and my gut felt as if it was a-busting. I then became very drowsy because the tongue probes had begun to simulate alpha waves inside my skull. I felt just as if I had eaten the biggest holiday dinner, and the best, in my whole life!
I must have dozed off about two hours. The other diners and I seemed to arouse at about the same time, all as directed by our iCooks. Indeed, for the money, this was probably the best dining experience I had ever had.
Noting that we all had arisen from our postprandial naps, the Chef told us, that was the end of the meal.
Unless some of us wanted to stay to experience the other new product being launched, the iToilet.
061224 14:56 by iDRMRSR
I went over to WalMart and they had these things stacked up against the wall. There were so many of them, and so many people were buying them. Must be like 95% of the whole human race out buying these turkeys.
I got mine home and took the cover off to start to thaw it. I noticed that this turkey I bought was first frozen in 2001, but that it had a seven year shelf life, so I was well within that timeframe. I would have liked to have a new turkey this Xmas, but I guess M$ must have bought the farm back then and still had a lot of them in the warehouse. Whatever, turkey is turkey, and if it's the same as it's been for several years, wtf.
I got a phone call while it was thawing. I came back to the turkey about 15 minutes later and found out that someone had snuck in my kitchen door, removed a drumstick, and stuffed the cavity with Spam. So I took it back to WalMart and luckily the manager agreed to replace it with a new one, and he also sold me a roasting/thawing pan with a deadbolt lock on it and advised me not to leave it out in the open. Fair enough, this is not the best of neighborhoods sometimes.
I got the thing all thawed out, and with the kitchen door secured, I opened up the roaster thing and added the stuffing. I almost forgot to pull out the little bag of giblets! Many times I had baked turkey in the past and the little plastic bag was still inside, but this year I remembered. I noticed there was a coupon in the bag this time.
It entitled me to a $5 discount on M$ next crop of turkeys, which it said couldn't be made available in time for Xmas this year. Wow, I can put that over with my important papers and have something new next year. While this one has been in the freezer for five years now, it's still quite pink and not at all freezer burnt. But that'll be a novelty to get a fresher one, something to look forward to.
This turkey had one of those pop up thermometer timer things. I jiggered it a little to see if it was working, and a little computer chip inside in a squeeky voice told me to cook it at 350 F for twenty minutes a pound, and to poke it when it was browned, and if the juices were clear, it was ready to go. It then told me I should check if it was 165F with a meat thermometer. I went down the street to the hardware store, which was still open, and told the manager I needed a meat thermometer for a M$ turkey. He said, just go pick out any one on the shelf, even the old ones in the back, they're completely compatible. So $3 later I had my thermometer.
I used this generic brand of stuffing and cooked it up and it came out great. Everybody was satisfied and it was turkey as usual, same as last year, same as the year before that. Nothing strange except, you know, for some reason, the closer this bird came to getting cooked, the slower it got at browning. I had to leave it in an extra hour until the juicy pinkness cleared up. Seems like it took longer than last year.
Everybody was so hungry that eventually one of them dug in to get the last piece of stuffing, and would you believe, found a small amount of Spam inside. Must have been stuck in there by someone from the factory. We just threw it out, no problem.
Then later I started cutting up the carcass for midnight sandwiches, cleaning the bones. All of a sudden, the knife clunked up against something right behind the neck. Now, I did remember to remove the giblets this year, what could this be?
Oh, gosh, it was an AOL disk. Lucky, none of the guests knew I had forgot to remove it, and it didn't spoil the flavor or anything. Hey, I might clean it off and try AOL out again this year to see if they've gotten any better these days.
The day after, a couple of us ended up with a mild case of the runs. I guess somebody brought in a virus. Well, with the cold weather and closed quarters, and all these people milling around during the holidays, that's not totally surprising. Took a little Paregoric and I was fit as a fiddle. I felt kinda bad about the virus, but I called the guests the next day and they said, oh, it could have happened to any one of us, it wasn't a big deal, and if that's all that happened was some loose bowels, it certainly can't spoil everybody getting together and communicating and having fun at the holidays.
Can't wait to try out that new crop of turkeys next Xmas!
061228 00:16 by iDRMRSR
While Melinda was doing the laundry, I applied myself to trying out Linux on the other two boxen I have gathering dust here.
One was my newer laptop. I FINALLY found a distro, Linux Mint 2.1 (Bea not Barbara) in which a couple of simple commands got my wifi card working with ONLY THE LIVE CD in the thing! I also found a hunk of software out there somewhere that restored the functionality of my touchpad, so I could scroll by dragging my finger around it as if it were a nipple.
I never "did it" (that is, installed Linux) on a laptop before. I washed real good afterward, and nobody will be the wiser because I just used the Live CD, so there's like no trace of what I did around.
Then I got this 550MHZ P-III box in a closet. It has a WHOPPING 20GB hard drive and a 3D video card with a whole 16M onboard!!! It even has a ZIP drive (100mb) AND a DVD read only drive! Perfect vintage, I supposed, to run Linux on.
Took forever to slap Ubuntu on it, however. But it runs. Just barely. I thought it might be a little peppier than it was with just Windows ME on it (remember that turkey). You can really, really tell it's sluggish compared to a more modern machine. I was lucky to find it was new enough for the BIOS to boot from a CD.
I may screw around with it a little more and then I think it's going to go back in the closet.
Enough of that stuff for today. I'm going to think about sticking toothpicks in Kirstie for the rest of the evening and see what's playing on Eyelid Theater.