New and Improved!

I've been running Ubuntu 8.04 for a couple weeks now. Got sick of the constant M$ updates, adware, and patches and decided i was ready for a new challenge. This coincided with building a new machine and what better way to break it in than with a new OS, right?

The stats:

• Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
• SAMSUNG 2232BW+ Black 22" 2ms Widescreen LCD Monitor 300 cd/m2 DC 8000:1(1000:1)
• EVGA 512-P3-N807-RX GeForce 8800 GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card
• EVGA 132-CK-NF78-A1 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 780i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard
• Kingston ValueRAM 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
• Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 Wolfdale 3.16GHz 6MB L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor
• Samsung dvd burner

So far, so good. Install of Ubuntu was pretty painless which shouldn't be much of a surprise. Monitor is beautiful. Power supply was DOA which sucked but it's been dealt with.

Why Ubuntu? Why not just install my copy of XP again and streamline it? Why not jump onto Vista or xp-64? I've been using windows for 10 years now and things have gotten boring in my life. Everyone is eager to jump on the M$ bashing boat but most refuse to put their money (or OS) where their mouth is. Out of the box Ubuntu mostly works with minimal swearing and headaches which is ideal for my home machine. I need an OS that won't cause me headaches and allow me to web bowse, IRC, IM, torrent, and listen to music. I don't have the patience anymore dealing with trying to remove some malware like Vundo that somehow got past my AV and decides to pop up 10 minutes before i leave for work. I don't have the patience to go looking for yet another burning program because i have an NRG file and i don't have Nero installed anymore. I don't have the patience to go out there and find a program that will make an iso image that i can later mount for VM's. I don't have the patience to go out and find yet a different app that will let me mount an iso file. This leaves me with Linux.

The reality is, i personally identify with linux more than i do with windows. I like how straight forward linux is. Once you find a decent text editor, linux is a bunch of conf files that need to be uncommented and edited. I can't play games on it easily yet but then i never played many games to begin with. Burning an iso was idiot proof with the default burning software (brasero) which was a huge relief. Gone are the days of fighting wth Nero and Power ISO and every other burner app i had to download just to get something unique to burn.

I'm still learning the structure gradually and so i have only a vague idea as to what these gremlins are doing. I don't care. Gone are the days of wondering what malware got hooked in startup in the registry. I've only begun to learn concepts of how to shell script. I don't care. I don't exactly know how to make a proper .bat or .vbs either so what's the point? I like the fact that most things log to an intelligible log file and so you can actually decipher what is going on from reading that file as opposed to looking at the cryptic event viewer in windows. There are days that i used to wonder if you needed an MCSE to understand the event viewer and what it was trying to tell you. I now have a machine in my life that i'm interested in and will help keep me in the work mindset more consistently. My machine is logical. It spews info into /var/log/messages where i can see problems arise in real time rather than waiting for a BSOD.

I'm home.

Blast from the Past

I graduated from High School in 1997. Early on in my HS days, my older brother and his girlfriend got robbed right before Christmas. The crooks got caught a couple days later and all items were retrieved. They had apparently pulled a couple robberies that night and so there were excellent descriptions of the perpetrators and their vehicle which made catching them easier.

The other day a letter came in the mail addressed to my brother. It turns out that one of the perpetrators had been up for parole in fall and this letter was to notify my brother that parole had been denied.

This got me thinking about what has all happened between that night and today. My brother is now married, was in the army and is now in the reserves, and is a completely different person than who he was way back when. A life time has passed since then.

More often than not you hear people argue that we need to have stiffer penalties on criminals. Even though i don't remember much of anything about the backgrounds of the defendants, I do remember that they weren't murderers, rapists, or hard core thugs. Just some punks that were out trying to pull a fast one because they were stupid. This person has lost a significant portion of their life because of their actions. The fact that parole was denied for this individual implies that he hasn't exactly been behaving himself while in prison. I find myself wondering how this person will ever transition to the outside world if/when he finally gets released.

The reality is that when someone like this is finally released, the world is drastically different and so mere suggestion of a smooth transition from 1996 to 2009 is a laughable. I'm not advocating for the release of an individual who was recently denied parole. My intention is to put weight behind the numerical value of a sentence. The threat of a 10 year sentence sounds rather light by our "truth in sentencing" standards but we need to take a step back and put things in perspective. Where were you 10 years ago? What were you doing back then? Did you know you'd be in the place you're in right now? Removal of an individual from society for 10 years is close to being a life time in terms of mentality. This is not an auction where the highest bid wins. These are individual lives we're talking about. People who could do much more important things in our society like consuming and producing goods and thus part of the greater organism that we all live in.

I sit here thinking back to that long ago incident and how heart broken i was when my brother was robbed of what would eventually be christmas presents. I was so young back then. So naive. So much has changed in both his life and mine and yet the individuals who did this sat and idled their lives away. I'm sure they learned their lesson a long time ago, but i wonder when it was that they forgot what they were supposed to learn?

Ironies in life

I work in the same building that had the shrink i got sent to eons ago. Maybe that's why i'm ready to have a god damned break down.

My brother called asking if i knew anyone i could suggest for virus/malware removal. This further demonstrates how little he knows me.

Give me enough time and i can fix something. Put me on the spot in a production environment and i'm apparently useless.

I can't have anything that resembles a stable relationship. Then again, people turn to me for advice on how to handle friends/family/work.

I enjoy reading. I've not read more than 20 pages at a time in a book since spring.

Writing my random thoughts is one of my favorite past times. This blog is rather sparse.

Joyeux Noel

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424205/

This was a film I had been meaning to watch since i first heard about it. WWI and trench warfare have been a fascination of mine for a couple years. I'd heard/read about stories like this but to see a film so well done was breath taking.

You witness the French, Scottish (representing the British), and German POV as events unfold. The addition of a love story that didn't have the "forced" feel that I've experienced in the past wasn't as annoying as i thought it would be. More often than not, a love story gets thrown into films based heavily on history that wind up coming up short on quality. Overall I can best describe this film in one word: powerful.

Highly recommended if WWI and trench warfare are of interest.

The Spreadsheet Turns 30

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2338796,00.asp

Happy birthday spreadsheet!!!

Cell phone follow up

I've fallen behind in my writings. My goal is to write something once a week. Why? There are all of 3 people that read this but that's not the point. I write because it feels good. Plain and simple.

In the past 2 months i've not been in a position to have my phone off anymore. My current job requires me to have my phone on 24/7 because of my on-call status. Irritating. I sampled what it felt like to have my phone off the other weekend while camping in Georgia. Phone died and i didn't charge it right away since i was with my friend/coworker. For the bulk of the day, i actually didn't have that weight in my left pocket like usual. It rarely rings. I rarely get txts/pages. Yet i'm constantly aware that it's there.

I used to believe that i could get by without my cell phone if need be. I've spent some idle time lately wondering if that's still true. If not for work, could i handle just walking away from my cell phone completely? Can i handle losing that level of attachment?

After much reflection i believe that i can still handle life without a cell (if not for that pesky job thingy). Those brief couple hours where my phone was dead while camping were nice. When my phone was in my tent, i never really felt awkward or even acknowledged that anything was different. It's not so much that i felt like i felt that my pocket felt "light" without it or even that i felt the absence of it. It's more that i just didn't even notice it either way.

I've since realized i tend to gravitate towards phones with a specific feel to them. They tend to be slightly heavier (not lead bricks but still). I like heavier phones because when they're in my pocket, i always know they're there. Perhaps i subconsciously want that style so that i'm always aware of my "tether" to society. I'm comfortable with them doing more and more but i'm hesitant to embrace anything especially light or small.

Perhaps i'm delusional but i'd like to think i'm still capable of "unplugging" at any given time. My biggest regret is that i can no longer go biking during the summer without it. It's always going to be there in my backpack while i'm trying to be carefree for a couple hours. My ears are always going to filter out background noise for my ringer...

...but nobody ever said i had to answer it when it rings though. :)

Camping

November 13-16, I got to go camping in Georgia at http://www.gastateparks.org/info/georgels/ for work. The owner of the client company footed the bill for us to fly there and go camping. Needless to say, this was an opportunity that i couldn't pass up.

Thurs night (fri morning technically) we arrived at 230am at the camp grounds. Lucky for us, it had rained that day and the tent leaked. That meant we had to set up our sleeping bags after drying off the floor of the tent. Fri all day it rained off and on. Sat the sun poked through and then the temp dropped that night to 38. Sun morning i couldn't wait to get home and shower and warm up.

Overall it was a very cool time despite the weather. Beautiful park and i'd love to go back there again. Food was amazing (low country boil, fried dough, and meals that made me fat).

Highlights:
-A sign in a parking lot that was yellow with black text, appx 3'x8' and read GUNS
-Sign that read "cold beer needs a good home"
-One owner calling the co-owner's girlfriends cat-dog "gator bait" when he saw it
-More signs for Evangelical and Baptist establishments than pawn shops (there were 4 pawn shops within 3 blocks)
-Camping for the first time (sleeping bag, tent, no air mattress)
-Canoing for the first time

Isn't crazy how you can need a vacation after having a vacation?

Coming soon...

The weather is getting cold so now it's time to start writing!

-Research project I'm trying to volunteer to help with
-Cell phone follow up
-Adopted cultural identity
-Cooking!!!

CentOS 4.7 - Install (follow up)

It worked!

[root@null ~]# yum groupinstall "GNOME Desktop Environment"


It took like 20 minutes do download and process the headers but it worked. Now all i have to do is type "startx" and i'm in. Hot damn. I must say though that the background that CentOS has by default in gnome is pretty fruity. Yikes. Seriously guys. Do you have to make your default backgrounds that ugly? I'm not exactly a fan of the Ubuntu brown theme but c'mon!


Off run updates and start the web server process (again).

CentOS 4.7 - Install

Oh great! I burned all 4 iso's just to find out that all i truly needed were the first two disks. Typical. I went through the same garbage with Fedora and look where it got me.

The real irritation about this install so far surrounds "xterm". It seems that the package which is on iso #2 is corrupt and thus your install won't get past that if you're using Gnome. I went through 3 downloads and burns of iso's before i figured this out. It seems as though that CentOS 4.7 i386 iso #2 on all of the mirrors have the same date/time stamp which implies they're all bad. I wondered if this is the same on the dvd version which is "newer" but then i don't have a dvd drive in that box so that's kind of a pointless issue for me.

My workaround has been pretty half assed and seems to be working for the moment. I did a bare bones stripped down install with no x server or gnome. In theory i could have installed everything and just unchecked the package for xterm in the x server packages but opted to go the stripped down route instead to prevent any further unknown issues like this. Well... that and i figured why the heck not see what it's like. :)

Install went fast and smooth which isn't much of a surprise. SSH was selected to be on right away and all i had to do was add a user account. Currently i'm SSH'ed into the machine and trying to install gnome via yum. OMG. YUM has been pulling down headers for the past 20 minutes and there doesn't seem to be any end in sight.

I've decided to let YUM do it's thing over night and hopefully it'll be done in the morning so i can begin the fun task of setting up Apache in my spare time while at work. If successful, this will be my most half assed install of any OS to date. I'm starting to get the hang of this!