Bleh. Not the worst of the bud products, but damn sure not worth the extra charge they attach to it.
From their press release: “Budweiser American Ale defines a new style of ale ‘The American Ale’ with the full-bodied taste profile of the amber ale style, yet remarkably smooth and balanced,” said Eric Beck, brewmaster for Budweiser American Ale.
I want some of his drugs. If this has a full body taste profile, I’m massively over weight and, oh, I don’t know, some thing like ” GW Bush is the most popular president ever”.
I now have 5 bottles of beer to give to friends who don’t like weird beers so they can think they are drinking a real beer like us beer snobs. They claim a IBU of ~28, but I’m thinking 15ish is closer. It’s flat tasting, (and for that matter fairly flat in general). So-so mouth feel. Loses it’s head with remarkable speed and has no, repeat no, after taste. I’ve had water with more bite.
They also claim 5.2% by vol, which is either bull shit or they make special beer just for Oklahoma, my bottle clearly says not more than 3.2% by weight. Which does bring up the point, which I will look up some time, which rating (volume vs weight) gives the “higher” number. Evidence says volume. Which means a lot of Oklahoma rednecks that drive across the border to get “6 point beer” are wasting time, gas and money.
Will not buy again, with or with out live angry fish in bottle.
I think I’m going to have a Flying Dog Road Dog Porter or a glass of The Darling Wife’s Blackberry Merlot. I’d make my self a Gin and Tonic, but I’m out of Tonic and straight Gin and my tummy is Right Out.
The running score card:
(The daily beer will show up in Bold Red)
My brother, Random Dafydd, is of course a Wikipedia admin. This gives him a more than a few geek points. While I don’t have the time to put in to it that he does, I do use it a lot. Tons. It’s damn near my goto source for non technical stuff, right after Google. And they need money. Don’t we all.
However, as it happens, I have check for a bet a made about the US election coming. The bet was that it would happen at all,not who would win. It’s a damn good thing I won, because I would have owed him about what I made this year. It was a 1:1000 odds. I have faith in the US system, at least for now.
This bet was made on Bofhnet (we still don’t talk about chickens here, much less waving them).Thinking about it, I decide the geek thing to do was to support a geek cause with the money. A.T, I hope this meets with your approval.
This is a list of things that Ice-rocket found for my site in the last 3 weeks or so. Not all of them, of course. Some of my replies are snark, some are advice, some is deadly serious. I leave it to the reader to figure out which is which. Spelling and punctuation to the left of the : marks are from Ice-rock. Errors to the right of the : are mine.
Leading off the pack, once you get past all the various versions of “[why] my life sucks” is
Bristol Stool Charts: Color me a surprised shade of brown.
lunesta drinkin: Dude, just don’t. It’s a waste of a drink. You’ll get about half to 2/3 down and pass out.
what is shelf life of midrin: Don’t know. Mine are pushing 2 years old and still work.
lunesta redhead: Odd mix. Don’t think it works as a date rape drug, so that just makes it weird.
firefox 3.05 sucks: Some one else aiming for a ban I see.
why does my life suck and what can i do about i: Find a medical professional that you know and trust. Listen to what he or she says. You are not alone, even when it feels like you are.
why is the phone taking over my life: There is that “off” switch. Even land lines have a switch to turn off the ringer. Rember, the phone is for you, not the rest of the world.
rants about how life suck: You may or may not have come to the right place.
“classic+traveller”: Check out Mongoose’s version. They have cleaned up some of the oddness of CT, but it feels like CT, not TW:2000 ins space.
my life sucks without him in it: This is a bad sign.
How stool in there life pictures of them: I am going to assume this was a Britol Stool Chart search. Yes, they have pictures. Not to gross, but enough to get the idea across.
why does tulsa suck: Because it can.
Is there anyway i can make: What? Seem to be missing a final word or phrase there.
install gsl c++ express: I know what the GSL is. I know what c++ express is. I don’t know what they have in common, unless GSL doesn’t expand to what I think it is, which means I couldn’t help any way.
Amidrine is it good: If you freaking need it, yes, it’s God like. If not, it will make you feel like crap. It will make you feel like crap even if you need it, but it beat the hell out of the migraine.
leopard 10.5.5 vs 10.4.11: Dude, just don’t do it. Not worth the pain for the pretty mirror effects. And it’s 10.5.6 now any way.
g5 drivers sucks: Pretty much.
dungeons and dragons fourth edition sucks and D&D sucks: Two folks aiming for banning.
classic traveller vs mongoose: Hard call. I’d go with Mongoose today. Ask me tommorow I might have changed my minds. Both are available if you know where to look (legal copies), but Mongoose is puttting out new stuff. Just ignore the weapons in the last 10 pages or so of Mongoose Mercenary or your head will explode.
why life start at 40: You might want to talk to a right to lifer about that. Hell, even pro choice people assume that once your out of the host body, your alive.
tehran sucks and khomeini sucks: Why, yes, it does. Course he’s dead, but he still sucks.
michael kors suck: Must Not Post Gay Joke. But he seems so nice on Project Runway.
upgrading from 10.4 server to 10.5 serve: Unless you really like pain, don’t do it.
author of why my life sucks: J. Michael. That’s about as much as I’m going to give out. Real geeks could find out fast enough, but if you don’t know how, I’m not going to tell you.
nambla suck: Must Not Post Gay Joke. And, yeah, they do. Not the good way either.
don’t know who to contact at ft bliss: The offical page is here Of course you have to play silly games with getting their SSL cert approved by your browser. Why all the browser people suddenly started to not trust .mil SSL certs is a question I’d like an answer to. Starting to chap my buns.
10.5.5 trying to login into 10.4 server: Assuming you mean the remote server admin tool that used to be so cool? They broke it.
lunesta and two beer: equals a long nap.
macports vs fink vs gentoo. Em. I haven’t play with Gentoo on a PPC, but I have spent way to much time with on x86/x86_64 boxes. If you got a working Mac, I’d go with 10.4.11 and fink. It’s my standard for mac machines.
We are currently in room 25 of the St. John’s ER. The Darling Wife started having lower back pains, which spread the be “like tire of pain around my middle” to use her terms. She was very clear this was not her normal IBS sort of pain. We went by the Urgent Care place first, but they kicked her up stream to the ER, calling ahead and giving us their work up, which eliminated the triage stage. We were in a room and had been seen by a nurse and doctor with in 10 minutes, plus had blood and other fluids drawn soon there after. She’s already had what ever type of scan they use for soft tissue between the navel and hips, which did require some dye.
I almost hope it is appendicitis this time, so we can get it over with. She’s been fighting random pains from, as I put it, navel to hips for years now. It’s getting old. I’ve been told that if I (a middle aged white male) came in with the same symptoms, that would be one of the first things they would check for. With her history, on the other hand, well, not so much. I’ve contact all the normal contacts, and told them not to show up until we know what the issue is this time.
I’m a lot less stressed than last trip but I suspect that is because lower belly pain, even new kinds of it, is more or less normal for The Darling Wife, and because I’ve taken 3 mg of time releases Xanax this morning, which explains why I haven’t tossed this computer across the room because if freaking fails every time I attempt to publish. Trying one more time with only PG wording and see if that helps.
[edit] Either not saying any of the 7 words you can’t say on TV helped get by St. John’s proxy, or the German’s poked their database server with a sharp stick. Smart money is on the Germans poking with sticks, but who knows [/edit]
Tonight’s beddy bye time beer is Flying Dog’s Road Dog Porter. I’m just going to quote the bottle on this one.
“Good Beer, No Shit. This shit is some dark and malty shit, the best shit you’ll ever try and that no bullshit”. And, yeah, as you can see in the glass, it’s some dark shit.
6.0% by vol IBU of 31
I’m not sure it’s the best I’ve every had, but it is a damn tasty porter. Got a bit of sweet foreground, with that coffee like bitter aftertaste that a good porter has, but it doesn’t have that much of a bite. In other words, the bitter doesn’t hang around making trouble for you as you eat say, some Cheddar cheese chips, which you might see in the back ground there.
Any rate, here is the running table. I can see this is going to be a bit of a pain over time, I suspect it’s going to drive me to right a Wordpress plugin. “Beer of the day”. Might be a good project. Something to do.
For relative scores:
(The daily beer will show up in Bold Red)
Beer
Rating
Choc 1919
9.0
Flying Dog Road Dog Porter
7.9
Petrus Gouden Triplel Ale
7.7
American Budweiser
3.0
Bud Lite
2.0
Pearl
1.0
This is a winter beer, way to thick and rich for a hot day. But, then again, it’s the 2nd day of Christmas, Boxing day, the Feast of St. Steven, the Protomartyr so a winter beer is just fine. For those that care, I’m adding these photos to Flickr You might want to be real careful about that section in my photo stream called “Adult”. Just saying.
This is Brandy. I’ve talked about her a few times on the blog, but this is her first photo.
For reasons I do not understand, she has decided that I am her human. If I am in the house, she is in the same room with me, and normally with in 5 feet of me. Keeni is much the same way, but she will some times wander off for a bit.
Brandy was a breeder in a puppy mill and was rescued by The Redheaded Girl. Brandy, being the wise dog that she is, didn’t like The Redhead Girl’s current boyfriend, so she ended up in a dog run out side their trailer. Once we got her out of there, she stuck to me like crazy, which The Redheaded Girl thought was odd, because she was under the impression Brandy didn’t like men.
Seems it’s she (Brandy) didn’t like her(The Redhead Girl) ex and his friends. Having been exposed to this bunch of people I can understand why.
She’s more than a little nurotic and still has some trust issues with regards to being given doggie treats, for example, but she’s a sweet dog and a very freaking good “alarm” dog (vs a watch dog). A watch dog will attack some one coming into and area they are not supposed to be in. Jack fills that role in our house, I suspect. An alarm dog will tell you if some one is. She still not so sure about the allowing our neibour’s kids to go between the houses (on there side of the fence) just our side our windows. She barks a couple of times then “grumbles” about them for a while. She also barks at any one that comes into the the house unless I tell her that it’s OK. The execption to this list are The Redhead Girl and Art Dude. You will not the Darling Wife is not on this list. Makes for fun time when she gets off work at 3:00 AM.
In all cases below, I’m using the factory default setting for the video drivers unless other wise stated, and have installed “today” non-beta version of Second life.
Right now, with the current downloads of PivitPro, on the DellBookPro system. (that would be the one that is a lap top with a badly busted hinge that I used normally in Portrait mode, SecondLife dies in a messy way if i don’t put it in Landscape. It also, as of this version (Second Life 1.21.6 (99587) Oct 14 2008 17:42:25 (Second Life Release)) tells me that my video sucks. I know that. I set the video to recommenced levels. Set it run in a 1024×768 window, I set it to my standard mode, which is turn on bump maps and shiny, use avatar impostors, local lights, and high terrain details. All other are left at what it thinks it should use. Standing on my porch (harbourne 3,124,48) looking out over the water, I get a frame rate of around 20 when it has focus, around 10 when it does not.
We don’t talk about the Linux mode on this machine with regard to Second Life. Radeon Mobility 9000 are just barely good enough with windows drivers. With Linux X11 divers? I don’t think so. I’ll test it with current drivers and SL software. Barf. 3.00 FPS. That really does suck. Plus I looked like shit, with parts of my avatar being invisible. General badness.
On Godzilla, in Linux mode, same settings I get 30 FPS when it has focus and about 12 when it doesn’t, when in landscape mode (i.e. xrandr -o normal). Issuing an xrandr -o right makes it claim it’s getting the same FPS, but it’s smoking crack. Second life might think it’s do that, but the real FPS is like 3 to 5. It works, however. In full screen mode (1280×1024) I get 25-26 FPS). This i can deal with. This is on a DVI connected monitor, with the “open source” version of the ATI X11 driver. The closed source version of the driver has issues with my card, as of now. The linux box is also acting as an Apache2/PHP5/MySQL5 server, I’ll grant with zero load, but they are running. [edit: It just hit my. My screen refresh rate is 60 hz on this monitior. That means those 30-32 number I was just seeing are really as good as it gets. w00t and all that. Don't make me go into my "more than half the refresh rate of the montior" is wasted rant....]
Godzilla in Windows and Portrait mode, supplied by the ATI driver, no second party tweaks. With the “recommenced mode” set (which, BTW makes water look worse than it does on the othe versions done above) I get 19 fps, in land scape, I get 23 or so, or roughly what I get in linux mode, but with, in theory better graphics, but I don’t think so, water in particuler looks like crap. Turning on the same setting as above test I get 28 FPS, and water doesn’t look like a white mist.
Turning on all the flags I get around 15 FPS and it looks freaking great.
Upgrading the drivers to the latest version for the X1550 card from Saphire, the OEM of the the card in question, added maybe 1 FPS, after all the building loaded. In “bells, whistles and gongs mode” (i.e. all the flags turned on), it’s getting 16 FPS, and it does look pretty. Well, the next door building that’s all in default plywood mode is a bit of an eye sore, but that’s not the drivers fault.
On the 17″ G4 Power book, in “bells, whistles and gongs mode” (i.e. all the flags turned on), it gets roughly 0.5 FPS. This obviously is not usable. It’s odd that it let me set those. On the other limited graphics boxes they would not let me try that moronic setting. At recommended settings, I get 17 or so FPS. At my normal settings I get 15 fps. Meh. Apple G4 laptops are not known for being gaming machines. Those values, are WITH X11 running, they are slightly lower if it’s not. This makes no sense, but I’ve given up expecting rational behavior from OS X and X11
Short version. Looks like my second life stuff is going to be done on Godzilla, normally in Linux, in landscape mode.
This really isn’t “the beer of the day”, because, well, It’s only 3:30 and I haven’t had a beer yet. Choc 1919 (note corrected spelling of name and warning, flash monster web site) is one of my top 10 beers from any where, and is my current favorite domestic beers. Choc has had a fairly strong effect on my life, given that I met Redheaded Girl at a club that I became a regular at because they had it on tap. Me meeting Redheaded Girl, of course, had a huge effect on both The Darling Wife, Art Dude and the sundry critters, Brandy and CoCo being hers to start with.
Enough about that, let’s talk beer. It’s an odd duck, being a fairly dark beer, officially an “American Wheat Ale”, made with2 row barley malt, malted wheat with a mix of Liberty and Cascade hops. It’s IBU is 15, and it’s officially 3.2% by weight, which is why you can buy it at Reasors and QT stores, which are both Oklahoma based companies and a major force in “Green Country” retail markets. I will note, for the record, that Krebs isn’t in Green Country as such, being in “Little Dixie“. I’ll also note that it’s one of the few 3.2% beers that the better “beer” liquor stores in Tulsa carry on a regular basis.
For those of you that aren’t from Oklahoma, you can’t sell any thing stronger than 3.2% beer at any thing but a liquor store. There is a tendency in liquor stores, at least in Tulsa, to some what specializes as either a beer, wine or “normal” liquor place.
It’s bottle conditioned, and is unfiltered, so you do get that slight hazy effect and of course some yeast stuff in the bottom of the bottle. It’s a damn good beer. A soon as I can get the time and energy together, the whole of the extended family group may make a trip down to Krebs where they make it. I’ve been told the restaurant that started it is damn good as well.
For relative scores:
(The daily beer will show up in Bold Red)
Godzilla is running “Mint” Linux, which is ubuntu in a VERY thin plastic disguise. Xcfe4 desktop, with all the standard document and image tools, running in portrait mode most of the time. Once i have the 70 bucks or so, I’m going to get one of those holder that let you rotate the LCD, so when I really need the extra speed, I can put it in land scale. GLxgears gives me 30 fps in portrait mode and 2300 FPS in landscape. I suspect I need to look deeper into my xrandr settings and spend some quality time tweaking my xorg.conf file.
I’m on a rather large list of medications that say “don’t drink and take this shit” more or less on the bottle. My Doctor, however is also a beer snob, and had more or less told me that one or two beers at night, as long as it it’s at least 2-3 hours after I’ve taken (or before I take) my meds, I shouldn’t have problems.
So, I’m trying new imports, more or less 2 or 3 a week. To night is “Petrus Gouden Triplel Ale” Top fermented Belgium blond. Tasty, slight fruit undertones, but with high hops, but not killer levels. Not really a winter beer however. Would make a GREAT “I just mowed the lawn and cold beer would be good right now” beer. It’s bottle conditioned, which means it’s extra “heady”, but not to bad. 7.5% by vol.
First, can not say enough good things about Wordpress 2.7. Rapidly becoming a member of the “Classic software of all time” list, at least my version. Recommenced.
PivotPro. This is a must have if you work on portrait documents. Another one for the classic software of all time list. If you need it, you need it freaking bad. Good test period, and it’s not to obnoxious during the test, and $40.00 for a single user copy is dirt cheap. Recommended.
Which brings me up to the DellBookProDocumentPortiableStation-D600, If you are very cleaver you will notice that the screen is 90 degrees from normal. With an pay for copy of PivitPro, it now does what I want to, and i get to use the normal key board. Sill working on the real support system, as it stands, 2 old speakers and CD-ROM 100 count spindle seem to work. I went pricing portrait mode moderators. Doing this is way cheapest, and I may go ahead and do it with the next laptop with video grunt. The DellBookPro (so named for the camouflage Apple sticker on the back) is dual boot XP pro/Uubuta 8.x Aside from the for crap hinges and the plastic they attach to, I’ve been happy with this machine, once I changed to the A6 BIOS firmware. Versions over that don’t deal well with chip sets running over 120 deg Farengight, which given it’s rated to 212, something is off.
Godzilla: This is going to be may main station. Dual boot window and some flavor of Linux. Gentoo is the current attempt. Seems to have some issues with HAL and X, which I’m playing with. Ojbective is to tget it to run in portate mode a a FPS slightly over 4 Hard to say what it;s doing now, because I’m currently testing in the brain dead X mode. (i.e 3 not very good xterms and xclock in a high fashion sea-foam green and white. Also needs to be rebooted when it leaves X mode. This is, while not good, should not be a problem once I get my mutant mix of Xfce4 and KDE 3.5 installed.
The whole freaking shooting match. The J. Michael work area/time sink. Yeah, I need a bigger desk, but I have no freaking idea where to put it.
In theory I could get a single bigger desk to replace the white desk and tower of bad things about to happen, but you know, that’s a time+money issue, neither one is great supply right now.
Smallbox, AKA the house of crazy NOC. It’s also the standard machine for normal personal use. Got a 512 GB external drive attached to it, which is going to be replace “real soon now” with a TB sizied drive and the 512 go into Godzilla. I might just put the TB drive in Godzilla and make it the primary storage drive for the nextwork. Got to think about that. I do know that I’m not going to make it NTFS drive either way.
Images in this post from http://whymylifesucks.com/ The pictures shown on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license. It means you can use the pictures freely as long as you attribute your source (i.e. http://whymylifesuckss.com/) and you may distribute the resulting work under a license identical to this one. Please click the link above for the detail
[edit] I freaking hate to use tables for layout, but this one stumped me. I wanted each paragraph about each image to start at the image, but no version of clear:all or clear:left seemed to work. I suspect it has something to do with the theme I’m using, which I’m also rather fond of. I can deal with a table every once and a while if that’s what it takes.[/edit]
Because the damn out of the box version of the ATI Radeon X11 driver doesn’t support xrandr, at least not on current release of ubuntu, I’m going to attempt to get Godzilla working with the stuff I need on it via Gentoo. Stand by for something like a live geek blog. Granted, even with this box, I don’t expect Godzilla to be a working box for at least a week, working being defined as “I can read a US Army supplied .DOC file, Read a PDF, Write a pdf, (ideally from Lyx) run DigiKam and Gimp 2.6, ssh into other machines, and run Firefox 3.x, all in portrait mode, with out going nuts on how freaking slow the video driver is. Displaying a flash animation with sound is optional. Also must be able to boot in to windows. Being able to read/write the NTFS partition would also be nice.
Just got the stage 3 tar ball down. The fun starts now.
Because I need another test flash file, and well, because it’s Godzilla I’m working on:
First edit 10:18
This is not a good sign. It takes over an hour to download and untar the stage 3 and portage tarballs? Gack.
I’m going to live on the edge, mainly because I want Gimp 2.6, so I’ve turned on the ~x86 keyword, in a global fashion. Done before any compiles or what not, so it should, repeat, should work OK.
Chrooted and about to type emerge –sync It’s 10:25
It seems to be deleting an whole lot of freaking files, like if I didn’t know better, I would say all of them in the metadata/cache directory, which is what took a ghod damn hour to un tar.
And now it’s putting them back. You would think something called “current snapshot” would in fact be the current snapshot. This does not seem to be the case. Sigh of heaviness.
Finished at 11:03, then wanted to emege it’s self. Which fail. My error. It seems gcc 4.1.2 doesn’t know what a Core2 arch is. Got to go fix that. OK, set to noccona for now, and emerge portage went fine.
Told it I’m a ‘mercan that speaks lish and I live in fly over country and we are about to suck down the kernel source. It’s 11:15.
Didn’t take as long to snarf and barf as I thought. It’s 11:28. Now the fun starts for real. Making a kernel. Oh Joy.
First, of course, get and compile the genkernel tool.
At 11:52 the compile starts. I did turn on a freaking ton of modules, but then again, that’s why I used genkernel to start with.
That was fairly quick It’s only 12:07 and it’s done? OK then.
Going to load up vi now, just because I hate nano.
Did the other tools (cron, etc) and grub. Grub seems to have problems with the lack of a floppy drive
OK, 1:00 exactly and it dual boots. Granted the Linux side is useless, but that will do for now. Just short of 3 hours to get the bare bones installed. Now the real stuff.
Start with X. It’s 1:31. Just started to attempt first compile of X11 That’s 101 things it has to download and compile. Of course, ran into a circular dependency based on having the HAL turned on. That’s Hardware Abstraction Layer, not some thing that says “Dave” a lot.
Going to bed. Will launch Xfce4’s emerge in the morning before going to work.
Other than the afternoon of Dec 11. That was pretty nice. The rest of the week? Sucked.
I don’t think my meds are working any more. At least the mood stabilizers don’t seem to be. I don’t know. I’m seeing the doctor later this week, but yeah, it sucked.
I thought I could write a semi-funny account of it, but I can’t. Multiple meltdowns aren’t funny.
I think that some time tomorrow, when I should be out helping people kill kobolds, I’ll write up the “nice” version of it.
Right now, going to eat a baked tater and read Jane’s Infantry Weapons, 1982-83.
Oh, and just to let y’all know, Wordpress 2.7? It rocks. Not the “bad” kind of change I ranted ab0ut a couple of weeks ago. They took a good product and made it much better.
A double dose of Adderall in the morning is not a good idea. Did that yesterday. Some random notes about why this is not a good idea.
I think I was talking as fast as Redheaded Girl reads. Maybe faster. For those that don’t know her, she reads faster than I do. I read some where around 3 or 4 pages a minuted (pages being defined as standard paperback pages) Back in school I read faster the the fastest speed on the SRI reading speed testers that they used at Patrick Henry Elementary school, back when it was the beta test school for that sort of stuff.
Side note, all 3 of my siblings went there as well, and we all do ridiculously well on standardized test. We should, we’ve been taking them from kindergarten on. It’s like we have been trained to take them or something.
Sleep does not come easy after doing that, which is weird, because I normally take the same amount, granted spread out over the day. Normal dose is 10mg, then 5 and 5 later in the day.
My eyes still feel like I was in a desert. Very freaking dry and some what irritating
When you listen to “Through the Fire and Flames” by Dragon Force and think that a speed metal version would be cool, your speeding just a hair.
The number 1 search, after “why my life sucks is” {drum roll}
Bristol Stool chart with 10 hits. Add in 3 for “Stool chart”, 2 for ” medical poo chart ” and one for ” bristol stool ” what we have is that a lot of people looking to quantify their crap. Glad to be of help and may you always have a type 4.
Two hits on Kolpophobia. Just for what that’s worth, it means “Fear of genitals, particularly female” this might not be the right blog for that.
In the single hits we have ” dungeons and dargons linux “. ” linux Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 “. and ” linux d&d “. Please, keep your geeky in separate accounts. The OGL/SRD, never mind the GSL make licensed software a bitch to make. While there is DM support software,it’s mainly ports of old MS-DOS apps.
“ayatollah khomeini blue oyster cult” Not as random as it sound, as they did do a song about him. See it here. For the record, they are against him. I think they advocated blowing his ass up, but there might be other ways to send him to hell, which is what they said.
“veronica mars sucks ” I may have to ban some one.
“nissan sucks versa ” Another person shooting for a ban.
” why doesnt my wife like getting eaten? ” Did asking her, as apposed to the interwebs strike you?
“macports leopard 10.5.5 ” Broken, Use fink, and unless you have an Intel based Mac or an application the requires 10.5, reinstall 10.4
Got rid of a lot of the “Features” I didn’t like about Word Press 2.5 and seems to have it’s shit together on doing auto-updates. Had a little trouble with a plug in I wasn’t using (wp-sitcky) causing fatal errors, but once that was removed, clean sailing. I also turned off the kitchen sink WYSIWYG editor, just using the basic one now. It will do.
Survey says “Good Upgrade, even if the did dink up the UI” .
Actually the current UI makes more sense than the old own, so it’s really is a win all around. Thumbs up!
Only done side is that the tag feature I used a lot went away. I’ll wait until after the full release and the massive pluggin update swarm that follows it to fix that, however the suggested work around plug in does just fine.
I seem to have lost my “I am your Ghod, fear me” effect with Windows computers. The Windows side of Godzilla decided to start rebooting when selected. In what is unquestionably a related note, don’t point the c_drive pseudo drive of the current release of Linux wine at your real C drive. Also, don’t attempt to run the second life windows client under wine, unless you REALLY like a bad acid trip screen.
However, I am it’s Ghod, it should have feared me, because I found my XP Pro SP2 disk, the one that I have a legit 20+ install key for. The Windows XP Home version installed by a moron is being removed even as I speak. I have no freaking idea what drugs he was on when he installed it. And, no, it wasn’t me.
The good news is that the default XP OEM disk has some idea what sort of network card I have. That means every thing else is just driver down loads and dinking about. However, that does bring up an older rant. I’ve always had an issue with the Microsoft IP Address widget. It’s not quite smart enough to do what it thinks it’s doing and the fact that tab does the wrong thing in it is a pain in the ass. Because I haven’t been dinking with IP setup on XP machines for awhile, I had some what forgotten about how fucked it is. I used to rant about it damn near daily when I was working for $WeMakeEmailServers.
Important safety note. If you are downloading “important documents” via Ktorrent, stop it when you start downloading things for other machines. Eats your band width just a hair it does.
Fairly painless install, as windows installs go. First up, get Firefox installed, then SP3, SecondLife and Daz Studio/Poser 7. May or may not install open office on the windows side. The whole reason for the Windows side is to run Second life and Daz Studio. Maybe Never Winter Nights, even though I really don’t need yet another time sink. Every thing else on the box will be Linux based. “Game OS” indeed.
Good thing it’s painless, need to do it again. Should have formatted the drive. All sorts of cruft left on. When Microsoft says “deleting the /Windows Directory, they lie. Oddly, it installs a hell of lot faster after doing a format.
Just downloaded and installed the video drivers. Damn the generic svga driver sucks. Now starting the the Microsoft update cycle. “We think our customers are thieves”, of course, goes on first. Didn’t want a reboot after it decided that I am, after all, a MSDN user. SP3 going on. I’m going to bite the bullet and put some sort of C++ on this box, I suspect the current Express version. And cygwin, forgot how much the command prompt is XT sucks. No sense in doing andLinux however.
Of course, the SP3 download just failed. Starting over. And the graphics driver wants .net to work 100%. Don’t forget, this is a more or less pain free install of windows. Bleh. Just found out why it failed. It was doing auto updates at the same freaking time and it can’t quite deal with the idea of telling the manual update it’s working, please try again later. On debian based systems apt can and does do that. I’ll grant the Gentoo’s emerge will cheerfully let you shoot your self in the foot with multiply copies running, but Gentoo does assume you know what you are doing.
Ah, fuck. Just looked at what it auto-downloaded. Still going to have to put service pack 3 on, and I suspect find a copy of dot freaking net to install. Bleh is right. Still, the pain level is under what doing this to Smallbox was like. Granted having XP see the network from the jump was a HUGH help.
First mandatory reboot. Video Driver wanted one, but would let me put it off.
Odd. It wanted to download and install SP3, but when I said do it, it just started to install it. Something strange in the neighborhood…
Finished doing that, and yes, had to reboot.
And it “found new hard ware”. Audio thingy, which it did not find a driver for. Will deal with that if and when I get speaker for this machine that work.
All right, off doing the 4 fixes post SP3 that it did not have, Media Player 11, because I’m stupid like that and both 1.1 and 2.x .net frameworks. Assuming no other Microsoft updates, time to install real stuff. Fortunately, I’ve been chunking most of the the install packages off on Smallbox’s external data drive, which Godzilla can get to with ease.
And reboot. Still looking for the damn sound card stuff. Sigh. May need to deal with that now. Check for updates. Need to install 7 more. Ok, that’s the 24 it autodown loaded, SP 3, 8 right after SP 3 and this set of 7. That’s 40 updates. Granted it’s from a rather old CD, but three of the last 7 were for Media Player 11. Ah, why not roll those into the base down load of the application? This is almost, but not quite, as bad as Java on OS X 10.4 (which, granted, isn’t really Apple’s fault, but it’s still a pain in the ass)
Small hyper dog wants, no, needs to go out and chase tree rats. I’m going to take small calm dog out as well. She will not be happy about that.
And reboot. Oh, look, new audio device. Still can’t find drivers. Need to do that now. Damn that’s a big freaking file, with a slow server pipe. This is the longest single stage in the whole damn thing, including the format and install fresh copy of XP, and I’ve still got 20 minutes to go. I’m going to publish this now and update as needed.
I’m going to let both hyper and calm small dogs back in. They are happy doggies now, eating their post go out side cookies. Keeni, my Russian Blue is helping me deal with Godzilla by holding down my lap top case. And no, she can not has cheezeburger
Of course doing an XP install nails the MBR, so I’m going to have to make a GRUB install CD or just re-install xunbutu. I may do the second because I got a bit carried away with stuff on it, so the Linux side is a bit crufty as well.
Because it’s Saturday and I really don’t have enough to do (sarcasm tags implied) I may go ahead and update the various blogs, other than RedHeaded Girl’s to Wordpress 2.7 RC 1, just to make the damn things stop whining at me. Of course the actual release is Dec 10, so I may wait for that. Depends on how Godzilla goes.
Just finished the driver download install. Reboot, of course. Seems happy now.
Installing real stuff now.
Of course Firefox, done way up there. Also install DownThemAll, Adblock ,Adblock Filter Set G, the Google tool bar and Webdevloper tool set for Firefox
Gimp 2.6
Foxit Reader
ACDSee Classic
Cygwin (Just doing a core set, plus mc and bash completaion to start with, have other things to do, and I know this one takes some time to run)
PDFCreator
UFRaw
ISORecorder
Clone Cleaner ‘Lite’
SeaMonkey. (OK, so I like the Mozilla composer to do quick HTML Pages. Sue me.) (which wanted to upgrade as soon as I installed. Whatever)
WSFTPle
Palm desktop
Putty
SmartlistToGo, desktop side
Servage Web Drive, just because
Second Life Windows Client. Of course, this seems to have issues. Of course.
OpenOffice
OK, now to fix and/or repair the Linux side, due to the mentioned MBR trashing that Windows did to me.
Boot CD.
Tell it I’m an American that speaks English
Tell it I’m Central Time Zone.
Tell it manual partition.
Tell it nuke the old ext3 partition.
Tell it computer name, my name and a pass word.
Tell it to import my windows account
Watch install bar go across screen
Open front door of Godzilla because it’s about to eject CD
Click “Restart”
Remove CD
Press Enter
Close Front door of Godzilla
log in (it’ rebooted all on it’s on)
Open terminal window, issue sudo apt-get update
Issue sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Note that I, in theory, didn’t have to do that, because it told me I have software to install.
Watch it take 5 minutes to download and update system. While it’s doing that I check what is installed. This is the XFCE4 based version, so it’s a little light, but it will do for now.
While waiting on the update, I tweaked the grub menu.lst to give me 30 seconds to select OS. Trivial, but first thing that required any geek skills, assuming you used the automated update system.
Issued sudo apt-get install mc ncftp arj xpdf
reboot, just to make sure I can get into windows. And I can. More or less done for now.
Spent about 20 minutes poking about with Synaptic to find what I wanted installed. It’s a little crufty, but It’s not bad. Basicly grabbed all the image processing tools and the KDE development stuff, plus a good size amount of PHP/MySQL/Apache2 stuff. It’s installing now. I think I’m going to declare victory and start reading Jane’s.
Other machines:
Craptop is my game master machine. Doesn’t do much else. Lives in my briefcase now. Need to load it up with d20 Modern stuff today.
MacCraptop (yes, even worse than yours Art Dude). Currently has OS 9.2.1 installed. I think I can get it up to OS 10.3, but getting GCC for that species of OS X might be hard, which means no fink. OS X with out fink is bad.
Smallbox. Rocking away as the household primary machine. Need to upgrade the external drive “Real Soon Now”. Most likely after Christmas. When I do that, however, I’m making it an EXT3 drive, the whole mounting an NTFS drive read/write is starting to be a pain, in that I can’t copy files over to it via Midnight Commander with out turning off the “save settings” flag. I want that on most of the time, so I can’t just disable it. Minor bitch. As it happens, small box is making an ISO of the disk I just used on Godzilla even as I type.
DellBookPro. See my post about turning the machine on it side. As a side note, it may or may not be important to know that standard duct tape is exactly the right width to fit over the hinges of a D600. The fact that I know this should tell you something about the design of the screen hinges of a D600. The fact that the default color of a the machine is damn near the same as a normal duct tape tells me something. Of course Dell is a Texas company, and duct tape is a primary part of the redneck tool kit, so this may or may not be by design.
Tektux. My webmaster box, currently living on my desk at $WeSellUsedMacsAndNewWii. With random free shipping. Need to spend some quality time on why that is happening.
Smallmac and Bigmac. (not really mine, but might as well be.) A G4 laptop (yes, that one Art Dude) and a G5 iMac. Both have OS X 10.4.11 Server version install, and the full KDE 3.5 via fink X11 suite. Nice boxes. I’m going to try and get Bigmac to really be mine if and when I stop working at $WeSellUsedMacsAndNewWii. Once I got the fan issue resolved on that box, it’s turned into my favorite computer of all time. More or less.
I spend a lot of my time either editing or reading documents made for “normal” paper lay out. As it happens, the area of my primary machine (The Darling Wifell D600, aka DellBookPro aka Duct Tape Box [more on that later]) lcd screen is with in 10% of the area of a normal piece of paper. Only problem, it’s freaking sideways. Now for reading PDF files, and some other things, I can make the software rotate the data, then put it self in full screen mode, which just fine, once I turn the lap top 90 degrees, (i.e open like a book). Down side, of course is that unless I hold my mouse sideways, it’s a real pain to deal with.
Now the basic display mode of the D600 is 1400×1050. 1050×1400 would be ideal for me. That would make 120 dpi more or less life size for paper. In theory, the chip set on the box has a rotate option. Of course, like most things ported from the desktop world to lap tops, if fails.
Enter my newest toy. Pivot ® software Fools Windows into having a 1050×1400 mode and moves every thing around, and can be easily turned on or off. Happiness and joy is found in my life once again. it has a 30 trial version, which I’m running now. The second I get my next check deposited I’m buying this sucker. 40 bucks is cheap, and damn, it does EXACTLY what I want. I’ll be damned if I’m even going to look for a crack for it.
I tried to like it, but to use my youngest brother’s expression, it is in fact made of fail and poo. The geek in me feels that this should be a good idea, however, as it is currently set up, it’s a freaking failure. Doing any thing like a full install takes days, if not weeks. It fails in _weird_ ways, and can’t quite get over the idea of circular dependency. It’s not that hard. If a needs b, and b needs c and c needs a, install a,b and c if the user asks for any of a,b or c. I can understand barfing and giving up when the user ask for X and Y, where only one of X or Y can be installed, but the other case is just lame.
And, when you get down to it, it’s not any better than Debian or Ubuntu about installing just what you want to have installed. It still pulls down the whole freaking universe if you not very fucking careful.
So, the Craptop is running, for now any way, Debian “testing”. Smallbox and the DellBookPro are running as dual boot Windows XP Pro/ Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Godzilla is dual boot XP Home and Ubuntu 8.10, and tektux runs Damn Small Linux I need to put some more memory in the pig.
I learned alot about kernels and compile time options when I was dinking with Gentoo, but as of now, I don’t think it’s ready for any thing but toy status.
[Update] tektux is running Debian, not Damn Small Linux. I tend to forget that DSL is, in fact, Woody Debian once you do a hard drive install, so I decided to just go ahead and make it an Etch Debian box. Not going to make it testing, just stock out of the box stable, unless I run into something that needs bleeding edge. In which case, I need to talk to the shrink again, because tektux isn’t going to run bleeding edge on a freaking bet. Normal smallish version of Linux have enough trouble, and will until I can get some RAM in to the box.
There is a lot of “Change” going around nowadays. And I’m not talking about Washington DC.
There are a lot of changes to software are being done for no reason other than to make changes. This all may be a side effect of my age, but I don’t like this. No, that’s not really right, I fucking hate it. I can more or less understand why for sale for profit products make changes, but I am at a loss as to why “free” products that are not open source sort of things feel they have to make changes to the product. I really don’t understand changes that seem to do nothing but dink with the user interface.
Case one: Adobe Reader. Version 7, rocks and rocks hard. Versions 8 and 9, no changes, at least that I can see, to functionality, but massive changes to the user interface. Both suck and not in a good way. On the Windows running PC this isn’t so bad, because there is Foxit reader, which is close enough the the look and feel of version 7 as to not be that big of a deal, and is screaming fast. No non-beta version for Linux or OS X, however. xpdf and kpdf (both of which can be made to run on Linux and OS X) come close, but they still have issues. If you know the magic you can get to the older versions of the “offical” reader, but it’s still a pain in the butt.
Case two: Google and Gmail. Stop dinking with the user interface, if your not going to add functionality to go along with it. The more I deal with the side based tabs, the less happy I get.
Case three: Wordpress. MySQL based revision control isn’t a good idea. Stop it. At least make it so that you can turn it off via something like a normal method. Dinking with config.php isn’t a normal method. Un-documented dinking with config.php is even worse. Doing “push” ‘You need to update’ messages, with out saying if it a bug fix, security patch or UI dink is also bad form. I’d be just as happy if I didn’t have to deal with checking in with Wordpress HQ every time I fire up the admin tools for the blog, thank you very much. That includes your freaking RSS feed on the start page. Oh, wait, we call those “dashboards” now. grrrrrr.
Case four: Mac OS X 10.5 Just say no.
Case 5: Windows Vista. Just say no thank you.
Case 6: KDE 4. Less flashy bits, more functionality, please. A major point of running Linux is that you can run on machines with less “grunt” than you need for Windows et. al. KDE 4 takes that away, at least stock out of the box.
Don’t get me wrong, there is some new software out there I really like. Ubuntu 8.x, major upgrade over any other version of Linux. Quite possibly the best desktop operating system ever done. Can and will recommend to any one using an Intel processor. Firefox 3.x Possibly the best browser ever made. The Gimp and digiKam seem to just get better with each release. What’s important about all these releases is that are functionality upgrades, with out near useless tweaks to the user interface. Changes to the UI are minor, and are made to support real functionally upgrades, not just going with what ever the current fad is on buttons and icons.
Bleh. Not the worst of the bud products, but damn sure not worth the extra charge they attach to it.
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