This shimmering edifice in cyberspace just happens to be my ministry!

Designed as a brief break from the trollwaves of alt.slack.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.