Playing in the Shambles

It’s almost 2008, and I feel I should lay upon the world something witty, pithy, and profound.

Too much pressure. I’m bailing.

Look, it’s a terrible thing that happened. I feel so sorry for the poor victim and his family, and those who were injured, as well as those simply scared out of their wits, but does it have to totally dominate the news?

2,172 articles? Still, I guess I can understand why editors all over America wet themselves over this kind of thing. It breaks up the usual stream of drunken and/or pregnant celebrities. Yeesh.

Update: Now up to 2,434 articles. I’m going to bed.

Ahh, goodies from Mom. Shall I have cookies or pie? Decisions, decisions.

I’m usually kind of a Grinch, but I really have enjoyed the season this year.

God bless you all, and happy new years!

Still working on my cat girl, a little along.

This is a better scan than the first version I uploaded, and (obviously) lacking the purple. Still, I think the changes are pretty obvious.

My tendency would be to work this picture over until the Bristol paper wears through from the multiple erasures (it’s happened before, although I wasn’t using Bristol), so I think I may have to say “finished” pretty soon. I still might want to add a background. I always planned to ink her, but I’m not so sure any more.

I never knew much of anything about Oscar Peterson, who passed away Sunday, according to this, which I picked up at Crooks and Liars, along with this YouTube video:

Having read about him somewhat this evening, I have to ask myself, how did I not know about this guy? I guess I really have been living under a rock. I like this video; it seems to imply it takes two bass players to keep up with him. Frankly, I wouldn’t want to be on the stage with any of these guys, not that I will have the chance with Mr. Peterson in this life. Rest in peace, Oscar.

I often reflect on what this blog is for. It would be nice if it was always interesting to others, but I guess I shouldn’t worry too much about that, since that’s an audience that mostly doesn’t appear. As a “web log”, it is useful to me to keep track of things; and that is what posts like this are (mostly) about.

Once or twice a week, I run (well, drive, I must admit; it’s a bit far to run) to a place where there’s a scale I basically trust. This morning I weighed 229 pounds (103.87 kilograms; 16 stone 5). That’s a lot, way too much in fact, for someone who is maybe 5’7″ (almost exactly 1.7 meters according to Google Calculator and my tape measure). It is also my lowest recorded weight in some twenty years.

It’s exciting, but nothing to crow about; this kind of stuff is way too up-and-down for that. Still, that puts me 75 pounds down from my highest-ever recorded weight, which was probably ten or fifteen years ago. I don’t remember exactly, as those days are pretty shrouded in a haze of depression, misery, self-loathing, and assorted other icky, pathetic, disgusting things.

Anyway, as fate would have it, my friend Robert and I have plans for lunch at the Golden Corral today. It’s not a place I go to often, but I expect to be back above 230 lb. in short order. Well, we’ll see.

Three weeks ago, I had no idea that I’d soon be sitting in front of (or rather, off to the side of ) a new computer. Tonight, I am posting this with it. No operating system installed yet; this is Knoppix on a CD. I’m only testing things out, but so far, so good. I did manage to fire her up the first time without having the mouse plugged in all the way (the motherboard doesn’t really fit up against the backplate quite as well as I’d like). Since it’s a PS/2 port, I powered her down before plugging it in. Knoppix took a while at the hardware detection/udev stage, which I caused myself to go through twice. Still, this is pretty freaking cool, and it’s KDE, which makes me feel at home.

Since this is a pretty geeky post, it’s an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2Ghz) on a PC Chips motherboard. There’s a 1-gig stick of Crucial RAM, a fairly heavy-duty and quiet Thermaltake CPU cooler, a Samsung DVD burner (it was a good deal and I like Samsung stuff), and a droolworthy thing I couldn’t pass up, a 500GB Seagate Barracudda Barracuda, SATA2 with a 32MB cache–once I flash it–not looking forward to that. (I do have to say the comments section at newegg.com is well worth reading before you buy something. I found out I needed to pull a jumper and flash the drive’s firmware or it would have been twice-hobbled–and I would probably have never known it.) Everything is in a sleek (but admittedly cheap) black and silver case.

The screen looks good so, hopefully, I’ll be okay with the integrated graphics–the sound may be another matter. I really want an excuse to get a nice M-Audio card or something, but I did splurge on the drive and the cooler, so maybe it will be another Sound Blaster or something for now.

Much to do. This is my first spin around the block with SATA, so I may be fumbling around a bit, or it may be easy. I just don’t know. I have to decide how to partition my drive and all that fun stuff. I must discipline myself not to install more than two operating systems. I must!

So all this is there just to commemorate the moment, I guess. How I came about (most of) the parts might make a more interesting story. Perhaps it’s worthy of a separate post.

(Update — warning warning warning very geeky)

Now using System Rescue CD, which booted up much faster. It isn’t as attractive (right “out of the box”, at least) for things like browsing the Web, but it might be just the ticket for partitioning my disk. I took a swing with GParted in Knoppix but “scanning all devices” was taking forever. There just seemed to be something weird going on with the hardware detection with Knoppix on this system.

Well, that step takes a while here, too. In the meantime I just punted and used good old cfdisk. My partitions are thus::

% fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 3735 30001356 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 3736 7470 30001387+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 7471 7719 2000092+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda4 7720 60801 426381165 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 7720 45068 300005811 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 45069 50312 42122398+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 50313 55556 42122398+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda8 55557 60801 42130431 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)

However, GParted has just done a nice job, it appears, of formatting all my partitions. Quickly, too. Maybe that’s down to the SATA2? I can’t wait to install software on this baby.

Time to flash soon–scary fun. Hey–I wonder if I can get my printer working in this? *That* might have been a job for Knoppix. Never mind. I’m just going to wing it.

Slackware, I guess, will go on sda2 and 6 at / and /home; Ubuntu Studio at sda1 and 5. That leaves a giant–well, these days, largish–home for the UStudio user, and still a 40-gig home for the Slacker, as well as 40-gig partitions for NTFS and FAT32, for file-transfer convenience and because I’m too paranoid to leave them out.

Earlier this evening I was looking at the hard drives where I bought mine. Mostly I just wanted to read over the comments again, but I noticed a couple of 750GB drives and a Terabyte drive as well. Droool. This one seems small already.

(Update 2)

Slackware is in. And the sound even works. All I had to do was unmute the tricksy alsamixer as usual.

I’m not 100% sure about the video yet, but it least it passes the full-screen YouTube test with flying colors. It is supposed to be the resolution and the refresh rate I’m used to, but it seems a little more flickery–I may have to tweak my config a bit, but I’m okay for now.

I’m pinching myself. I seem to have a nice, new, fast computer.

whee

Don’t get me wrong, I still have Slackware on my machine, but this Ubuntu is really nice. And it’s nice to be a part of the Ubuntu experience, in every sense of the word.

Ubuntu Studio

Upgraded WordPress again, to 2.0.11. Man, that was easy. The worst part was sweating it, even though I backed up everything first.

2.0.x is the old (but still maintained) branch, but it will have to do until my Web host upgrades to a newer db, or else I switch hosts, or change blog platforms entirely. But since WP say they are going to maintain this branch until 2010, and it has been so agreeable so far, I’m not worrying about it.