dialogue lost

I think of this blog just sitting here like a pool of stagnant water, evaporating. Perhaps my heart hasn’t been in it because I have no comments. I miss the opportunities for discussion. Comments were what I loved and hated most about the blogging experience. (Not that I am done with, or sepparated from the blogging experience, not by a longshot.)

I should get working on whatever it is I’m going to do to “fix” the situation. This morning I got up at 7AM and installed wordpress. It’s taken me ages to get around to what ended up being a 5 minute process. Of course, now I have all kinds of testing to do. I want to make it work without mysql too, but I think that may take a ton of work. I’m not sure yet.

I have all these plans and they’ve all been washed away by time sucked up in the vortex or black-hole like void that is repetitive video-game syndrome. (RVGS.) CoH style. That and I’ve been feeling particularly emotionally dispondant. Not that anyone would notice what with my eyes glued to the monitor every non-moving waking moment. But I’ve been funk’d up for a week or so now. There are some things that I’ve been having trouble settling into the cracks and fissures of my emotional landscape. Maybe I’ll rant more about things once they have some kind of resultion.

lists and lists and lists

I’ve only read 58 of Phobosweb’s top 100 science fiction books. That’s just under half, but then again, I’m not sure I agree with their list really. Off the top of my head Iain M. Banks and Rudy Rucker are missing for sure, and there are a bunch of books that I have read that I would consider mediocre at best.

Their Top 50 sci-fi movies are not really any better in my opinion, but I did add the 16 that I haven’t seen (see below) to my netflix queue when they had them. (Apparently Forbidden Plannet (1956) hasn’t been released on DVD yet, and I couldn’t even find This Island Earth (1955) or Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) which is being remade for release sometime next year as directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans–that should be good for a laugh.)

Speaking of lists, last night I compiled a list of Fringe shows I still really want to see, and realized that this afternoon I’m going to have to try and catch AKESPEARESHAY, and Philosophy: The Music of Ben Folds. I’m sorta skipping a work meeting to see them, but the first one especially is one that I really want to see, and this’ll be the second to last show. (I don’t know if I’ll be able to make the last one.) I’m pretty sure the meeting can be postponed without anybody complaining too much.
Continue reading “lists and lists and lists”

desktop heaven

In one day, in one fell swoop, I both installed linux on my desktop machine at work, and fixed all the weird errors I was getting on my machine at home.

The linux install was pretty much an all-day affair. We started around noon, using partition magic to split everything up (so I didn’t loose the XP install, and I’m even set up to boot from it, if I so desire. I’ll be doing that later today to move my mp3s to the linux readable/writeable fat32 partition we created just for that purpose. I guess linux can only read Windows’ standard ntfs format, and even reading is a little spotty.) After that it was clear sailing, (with a few tidal waves along the way). My co-worker Matt was really the brains behind the whole opperation, although Ryan has been around the linux block himself, and was the one who convinced Matt we should go with Debian instead of Fedora. One might say Matt was the wind beneath my penguin wings.

By the end of the day (ie, seven and a half hours later) we even wrote a CD with memtest86 on it for me to use at home. I loaded that up at home and was immediately getting errors. Thousands of them. So later in the evening, after dinner, and a scintilating hour or two at a bar with Kristin (who is in from NY for a few days) I started swapping out memory sticks, and found the faulty one! Amazingly, no more checksum errors. Windows didn’t spontaniously reboot, not even once! I ran all my anti-spyware/virus software, disabled some startup processes (like iTunes, who wants to run some background thing, but works just fine without it) and now the machine appears to startup much faster than before.