Why My Life Sucks

It seems that the pre-press version of D&D 4th edition got snagged some how, and tossed out on the torrents. I got a copy of all 3 books as a set of PDF files via ISOhunt using ktorrent on smallbox.

I am one happy gaming geek now. I’m still going to get the hardbacks, but at least I have an on computer copy RIGHT NOW.

w00t!!!!eleven!!!

Full of the win!

My 4th edition game has it’s own blog. Check it out.

I don’t watch a lot of TV, but the shows I do watch, all, repeat, all, of the scripted shows I watch this season has sucked or ended very fucking badly. Yes, I know there was a writers strike in the middle. Doesn’t matter, most of the suckage was in over all story arcs, not the gap in the middle and the shortened season.

Of course the biggest amount of suck was that there wasn’t a 4th season of Veronica Mars.

Oh, this is post is spoiler-rifick, but given that all the shows have been broadcast, I’m not going to spoiler tag any thing. If you haven’t seen these shows, well, too fucking bad.

In order of least suck to most suck:

House: OK, the “House’s Head/Wilson’s Heart” dual show was, quite possibly, some of the best TV since “A trip to the Dentist / Leave it to Beaver” (last two shows of Veronica Mars, season one, and the best scripted TV, ever). I’ll even give that it was better than “Not Pictured” (end of Veronica Mars season 2). Not better than “Spit & Eggs” (the end of the rape arc of Season 3 Veronica Mars), but better than “Hush” (Season 4, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and “”Once More, with Feeling”", the musical episode in season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

A note:

If you add in “Aftershock”, (episode 134 of Law and Order), “Smile Time”,”"Hero” and “Not Fade Away” from “Angel”, the “Bete Noire/Twilight/Kill Ari” arc of NCIS and the “Lady Heather” episodes of CSI you have my list of best scripted TV shows in the last 15 some odd years.

OK, back to why “House” sucked this year. Well, they started the season with the whole game show thing to choose the new team. “Cut Throat Bitch/Amber” was the last one not to make the team, but comes back as Wilson’s girlfriend, then is killed. Then they toss in “13″ having the gene for ‘Huntington’s chorea’, well, just a big bummer of an ending.

NCIS:
The good: They killed off Director Shepard.
The bad: They broke up the team.
Hopefully they will stop with the bizarre idea of the director of NCIS being active in field ops, much less going off solo and getting into gun fights with Russian spies. Pretty much any NCIS episode where Jenny Shepard was important in either sucked or was off the wall, or, normally both.

Shark:
Just should have ended at “Bar Fight”. The last 3 shows didn’t seem like they fit in with the rest of the season. “Wayne’s World 3: Killer Shark” didn’t feel like a series finale, it felt like a normal mid season show. Odd pacing, to say the least. Plus, given my own personal life the whole “Julie and her boyfriend” arc was off putting, to say the least.

CSI:Las Vegas (yes, I know not really the name, but just want to be sure you know which one I mean.) Of the “young turks” (tm TWOP), they got rid of my two favorites, Sara and Warwick.

Bones:
It’s a toss up between the existence of Dr. Sweets, the 24-year old psychologist who TPTB have Booth and Brennan see or them having Dr. Zack Addy ending up being the apprentice of “The Gormogon” serial killer. I literally screamed at the TV when I saw Dr. Sweets as a regular in the credits for one show. Of course me screaming at the TV isn’t all that odd.

This season has sucked, and sucked hard.

On the reality shows I watch, well, Top Chef isn’t over, so I don’t know about it, but their is a 75% chance that I’ll be happy with who ever wins. My personal favorite is Stephanie, followed by Antonia, and has been from the first show this season, but I could live with Richard winning. Lisa, well, not so much, however better her than Spike, who lasted way to freaking long.

On “Project Runway”, what the hell happened to Chris March? I suspect that if he didn’t use human freaking hair as a major part of his final collection he would have done better. The look on Michael Kors face when he heard Chris say the fringe was human hair was second only to Michael’s general reaction to the whole WWE Divas challenge. Both high giggle factors TV moments.

Just got weird. Again, with out violating more than my own privacy, I can’t go into the full details of why, but yeah, it’s weird.

On the geek side of life, I’ve beaten ’smallbox’ into submission, and it’s back to being mainly a Linux box, with booting into Windows if and when needed. Can’t say enough good things about Hardy Heron, the latest version of Ubuntu aka Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.

I’ve also gotten quite fond of andLinux on the laptop. Really slick design. Runs a modified version the Linux kernel as a service under XP. You get more or less the full KDE experience if you run ‘kicker’ I’ve got mine configured to be a vertical tool bar on the left hand side of the screen, normally in “hidden” mode, so all you see in windows in a small button with an arrow pointing down. Once you click that, you get the normal KDE 3.5 launcher.

In other geek news I’m going to be starting a D&D 4.0 campaign, with the first “full” game coming up this Sunday. Granted it’s ‘Keep on the Shadowfells” to start with, but until the books and SRD comes out that is what we’ve got. The enWord.org’s “Pre-release” book is also a good starting point. The offical WOTC page for it has a 6th pre gen, which gives some idea on how to level up a Warlord, which is new info.

On the personal front, other than “weirdness”, Redheaded Girl and I need to talk about what the word “puppy” means. The white dog in this photo is the “puppy” that they rescued. She had called me to find out if I could keep it for the afternoon while they dealt with a situation out at Art Dude’s property. I said sure. When I got home, well, I went out to look at the “puppy”. Sorry, if you are that size, you are a dog, not a puppy. I’ll grant it might not be full grown, but still, that’s not a puppy. Sweet dog. Gets along just fine with other dogs (or at least with our 3). No clue about cats, but I’m sure we will find out real soon, given the number of cats Redheaded Girl and Art Dude have. Might keep the semi-tamed raccoon and the opossum off her front porch, but most likely not given that the pit bulls next door to her house.

Update: White dog gets along fine with cats. Some of my cat’s don’t deal well with her however.

On the professional front I’ll be back doing work at $WeSellUsedMacs next week. Don’t know how long that will last, but I’m trying to make it a “full time” part time job. I think, I can do a 20-30 hour week now, but we will see.

I have found a new toy. And I think it’s what I’ve been looking for for a while. I can now run Windows XP and Linux at the same time, with out a virtual machine.

Check out andLinux It seems to do what I want. I’m in the progress of updating the Linux side to 8.04 from 7.10 ubuntu, and if that works, well, I’ve found my current working environment. Might want to get just a touch more memory in the lap top, but other than that, well, I think I’m set for a while.

Yngwie Malmsteen – Carry on Wayward Son(Kansas Cover)

Yngwie is a speed metal guitar player from Sweden.

He does more than covers, however this one is also a cover. Of Bach. I’ve always thought the Bach would have done speed metal if he were alive today (or in the 80’s) Much more that Ludwig van Beethoven would have. (insert random “Bill and Ted” reference of the day)

More or less. This is what my living room looks like. We are finally getting our stuff out of the old house. I’ve been rather busy… Real postings to start again, soon, I hope.

This is going to be a live blog post as it happens, so to speak.

I’ve got a more or less stock HP s7400n, with 512 megs of memory and a 150 gig hard drive. It came with XP home installed, but after a few months became dual boot, then became a fully Linux machine. For a variety of reasons I need it to become a dual boot machine again. I’m going to install a copy of XP pro SP 2 (from MSDN, which makes it as close to a “pure” copy of XP as your going to get) and Ubuntu 8.04 desktop on it. The drive layout will be 40 gigs to XP, 30 gigs to ‘/’ and 80 gigs to /home, which I plan on making read/write to XP. So far I’ve rebooted to the XP install CD and started making the 40 gig install. It took just shy of 16:41 to do a full format of the 40 gigs.

We are now doing the copy files thing. Still in text mode. Hit the first reboot point at 22:03.

While I’m waiting, target is a 100% up to date version of the OS, all peripherals working, base line system. I’ll post later what I have to add to the base systems and those times.

OK booted into graphics mode, and it claims it’s installing. Also claims I have 37 minutes left. Total time so far 24:16

Ok, just got to the wanted the magic numbers and computer name 27:17

XP network config (Default, workgroup name SPELLBOOK) 29:33

I had to leave the room at 32:47. When I came back at 37:43 it wanted to reboot. Did it.

OK at 39:29 I have created the two accounts and have logged in as my self, and in theory have a running system. Screen isn’t right, no sound, etc. About to get drivers.

First ah crap moment. No network drivers….

OK did the trivial “anti teletubby” things to set it up the way I like. Off to down load drivers.
Downloaded drivers from HP site. Fairly easy to do. Installed on flash drive, which I have tested, does work on smallbox. Will copy to smallbox hard drive and install.

Next ah crap. Sound driver wants something from Microsoft. Let’s just get the damn network working…

Network and graphics installed, wants to reboot. Did it.

OK network works, and I have activated the product.

Side note

If I didn’t have a room full of computers when I did this, I would have been stuck. No drivers for the network means nothing else gets installed. Actually, I would have just gone a ahead and install Linux to get the network drivers, which would have been a bit ass backwards.

Ok, doing first Windows Update. Joy.
And… It failed. That’s oh crap number 3

Going to finish the HP drivers and try again. Updated the graphics driver. Rebooted.
Installed 915 chip set. Reboot.

Found the UAA HD Audio Driver thing for HP. Sound seems to be working now. Oh, of course, reboot.

Installed the RelTek Audio drivers. Reboot.

Ok, got last driver loaded, no “yellow ball” devices or generic devices in the hardware manager. About to try to do a Windows update, again. The last device was a modem, which I really didn’t need to install, but I did, because I wanted no “not working” devices. Of course I will have no idea if the modem does or doesn’t work in Linux, because I don’t use modems.

Oh… Windows updater and “We think our customers are thieves” software needs to be updated.

Odd. It wants to load service pack 3 on me. I didn’t think that had been released just yet.

SP3 takes some time to down load it seems.

Downloaded and starting to install….

SP3 installed and rebooting…

Ok. Rebooted, ran Windows Update again. Wants to load IE7 and AntiMalware of the month. Off to do that.

IE7 and AntiMalWare installed. Reboot.

Re-run Windows Update. No “High Priority” updates, but 4 software and 2 hardware optional
Root Cert update, goes with IE7
Media Player 11. Going to install it, but I don’t care. Will install WinAmp soon any way,
.Net frame works 1.1 and 2.0
Network driver
Monitor Driver
Install we go…

Oddly, no reboot.
I installed Firefox, and my standard set of toys for it.
I then installed current version of Second Life. Frame rate was not good, but I can live with it on that machine. Total disk usage, 4.44 gig. Windows is more or less done.

Booted Ubuntu 8.04 desktop CD. Told it what kind of keyboard, what time zone and created my account. Did the partition thing by hand, because I don’t want my data files on the OS partition. After I set those up, it did something I didn’t think it would do. It read my Windows account and wanted to know if I wanted to import it into Ubuntu! Never seen that. Said yes, mainly to see what it did with Firefox, being one of the things that it said it would import. It’s busy now formatting and installing. Timing the format isn’t fair because it doing 4 times as much space, but it does seem to be faster.

No question about it. It installed faster. A lot faster. Just did the only required reboot, after doing the install.

What worked stock out of the box?
Well, sound, video and network. None of which the stock windows install handled.

Granted once I rebooted and logged in it told me it needed to do some updates. 57 of them, totally 37 some odd megs. Lots smaller than the Windows updates, but still a lot, given that I downloaded the ISO only a few days ago.

And, yeah, it did import my wallpaper. “Prairie Wind” looks odd on a Gnome desktop. Looks really bad until you tell it to tile it. Didn’t seem to import the Firefox stuff, but that’s OK. Would have been cool, but not really a show stopper.

Looks like 2.2 gigs of space taken with a base line install. (Gnome based.)
Only real down side I see, it defaults to firefox 3 beta, which the Google Tool bar doesn’t work with.
I can live with that.

It’s pretty clear to me, the “easy to install” OS is Linux, not windows, assuming you start with a “stock” package, not a OEM tweaked disk.

More on what I add beyond Firefox and Secondlife later.

I’m not including either of these, but which is worse

“Stairway to Gilligan’s Island”

Or “Elvis” doing Stairway?

Or Dread Zeppelin doing it?

First note: If you HP machine’s BIOS has a setting to turn off legacy USB, and your running Linux (Ubuntu 8.04, current patch level), by all means turn off legacy. It seems that if it’s on, you get USB 1.1 speeds, even on a USB 2.0 device. Not good.

I’m not sure if I’m going to give that point to Windows or not, however, because it’s not technically part of the reload procedure, just the backing up data first.

More as the night goes on, assuming the tornadoes don’t blow my house over.
Yeah, that’s right, I’m rebuilding my home server while the storm sirens go off. I’m a geek in Oklahoma!

I drink beer, white wines and, of late, gin and tonics. I’ve never had most of these drinks, much less made them.

Hat tip GuitarGirl RN one of my “daily odd medical blogs.”

97%ALCOHOLIC

Just a side note:

Either I do well on this sort of test, or all of them are designed to be easy. I suspect that I would understand why these test exist if I didn’t have adblock with the Filter Set G installed on Firefox.

Don’t surf the web with out all three.

Correction. Smallbox is not going to become dual boot, at least not this afternoon. Moving 80 plus gigs of data across USB, even USB 2 takes a bit of time. Of course it’s still faster than burning them off on to CDR would be, plus the port-o-drive is formated as NTFS, which means any box in any boot configuration can use it. The Mac and the Intel boxes in Windows mode, obviously, can read NTFS native and with NTFS-Fuse 2, so can the Linux machines

He changed my med around a bit.

Doubled my dose on Celexa, changed my sleep aid to Restoril and added Propranolol to counter act the fast heart rate that the 15 mg of Amphetamines a day was causing.

On the software/blog side of life I’m going to attempt more or less daily posts here and else where. I’m also working on getting as much work done on “both” projects. More about those as I get closer to being finished.

I’ve decided that I do, in fact, really like Ubuntu 8.04. While I’m running it on all 3 boxes right now, however I’ve decided to make ’smallbox’ a dual boot machine again. So I’ve got to back up all the data on the /dev/sda1 and reinstall XP and 8.04 Should be a fun after noon.

Looking at how the hard drive is layed out, I think I’ll back up /home as well, even though it’s a separate partition. Windows might not deal with this the way I want to.

Notes about which is easier to do a “virgin” install of, XP or Ubuntu 8.04 when I’ve done both.

Fluffy: Technicolor Yawn. 3:39

I might want to warn the 4 of you that like punk rock that this is the mellow version of the song.

I’ll grant that’s not saying a lot, and mellow might not be the right word for it. Less harsh maybe.

Total running time: 34:39

And because I’m not normal, this doesn’t go in that list.

Have a Cuppa Tea, and don’t forget, some people shouldn’t rap.

Lita Ford & Ozzy Osbourne – Close My Eyes Forever 4:36

To be honest, it’s not the music here, it’s how Ozzy looks in the last oh, 40 seconds or so that is ’scare the normals’. I’m reminded why he was called ‘The Prince of Darkness’ at one point.

On that subject, there is his famous line from “The Osbournes”…
‘”Sharon! I can’t have a bubble machine at my concert! I’m the bloody Prince of Darkness!”‘

Total running time: 31:00

I have some rants coming soon, just got to jell them a bit in my head, for the 4 of you that aren’t family members that read this blog.