PCLinuxOS rocks
I say it again, as much as I want to like
ubuntu -- and I do like them/it for many reasons --
PCLinuxOS is pretty hard to argue with. It Just Works(tm), it works elegantly, and there is a TON of software in their repositories.
So once again, we have a desktop machine that can play DVDs, play my music collection, with a bunch of cool 3D games for my daughter.
Geekery can be fun, if a bit expensive at times....
Geekery
Well, I'm finally getting around to
rebuilding the desktop computer. Only took six weeks.... :-/
I had really wanted to install Ubuntu Linux, mostly because they really seem to get what free software is all about. I want to like it, and indeed I use this distribution on my laptop.
But the new release, Dapper Drake, has a bug that prevents it from seeing all the partitions on my 2 hard drives. This, like, sucks. And stuff.
So I put in my LiveCD of PCLinuxOS that I had lying around, and sure enough it works flawlessly on this new hardware. I'm currently listening to headphones of Radiohead playing through amaroK through the LiveCD; this means that PCLinuxOS Just Works(tm). It sees the soundcards, the harddrives, and everything works fine out of the box.
So I'm presently downloading a version of PCLinuxOS that has the nVidia drivers already built-in for my nice videocard, it's 61% done. Once it's fully downloaded, I'll verify the integrity of the disk, burn it, and run it on the desktop.
So hopefully soon this happy new machine will be running PCLinuxOS....
creativity
Well I seem to be snapping myself out of the funk I was in via brute force. For the most part I've been eating better and exercising more, which always helps.
In addition, my creativity has been increased; I now have acoustic guitar tracks recorded for 9 of the 11 songs going on the Freakwitch album, so things are moving forward there. We also have a gig coming up next weekend, which helps.
I've also been playing with a ccTiddly, which is like an online version of a TiddlyWiki that I can update from any computer... cool.
Not much else to report... life continues pretty much as normal, busy busy busy.
Oh, it looks like my sister and my niece will be visiting Maine for the first time about a month from now... very excited about that. Maine is awesome, and I can't wait to show her around a bit.
Fire in the sky
Today on
Boing Boing I saw this photo:
It's a photo from Los Angeles, taken in the middle of the night in 1955. As you can see, the light is quite bright for the middle of the night. The cause? The US government was conducting nuclear test explosions in Nevada, probably at least 200 miles away. These photos, which are contained at the LA Public Library photo database, show clearly that the night sky was lit up to daylight levels.
Very interesting that this comes up in the wake of North Korea's recent missile testing. The present US government is up in arms (ha) about this, when North Korea is just doing something that the US government did many times over, 50 years ago. And North Korea aren't even exploding nuclear warheads on their own soil.
Funny what retrospect will do to you. Nowadays, anyone paying attention would be horrified if the US government were exploding nukes in Nevada. But at the time, it was seen as a necessary thing. It makes me wonder what the present US government is doing that will be seen in a similar way 50 years hence....
