August 2006 Archives
Once again, it's that time of year that Floridians love to hate: hurricane season. Why do we love to hate it? Let me count the ways...
Unreasonable (and unwarranted) panic exacerbated by the media is first and foremost. All the non-native floridians running around like headless chickens, gathering up water and sitting in gas-lines for hours and hours on end, for what? A tropical storm? Let's wait until a real storm comes through to start the looting. Seems like people are just itching for a reason to get crazy and yell at each other. That's not to say that native Floridians aren't panicking, but I'd speculate that larger chunk of people stopping up traffic, embroiled in a screaming match with some guy who 'cut them off in the gas line', are probably not from around here.
Speaking of gas-lines, it's an understandable notion that you'd want to fill up your tank before the storm, because we all know that after a storm there are terrible gas-shortages. Simply put, that's just not the case. After the last set of hurricanes, we got gasoline well before we even got power. Trust me, gas stations are in the business of selling you what you need. Ahhh, paranoia.
Stocking up on water is a good plan, but the blind raging panic of people in the stores is really almost scary. Animalistic. These are the same people that, during a real catastrophe, cause riots, violence, pain.
I'm not saying people shouldn't prepare. Quite the contrary, people should definitely be prepared. And by now, by the start of the 2006 hurricane season, should already *be* prepared. These crazies, these dangerous people who resort to violence and give in to rages during times of non-crisis, these are the people that should really reconsider living in hurricane alley. Maybe they should live somewhere less prone to natural disasters like hurricanes. Or tornadoes. Or earthquakes. Or anything at all. Hey, it's not like hurricanes just come up from out of nowhere. They're not ninja hurricanes just popping out of your closet to give you a scare!
Crazy people. Really. I categorize them in the same place as I put those idiots that haven't figured out that slower traffic should move to the right lane.
Typo has long been a nemesis of mine... I've attempted installation at least four separate times, and documentation is, at best, pretty limited. After the last attempt, I simply threw up my hands and shelled out some duckets for a Movable Type license.
Movable Type is awfully cool. I like how it does things. I like a lot of its newest features. The interface is good enough for government work, and is nice enough looking, I suppose. All in all, I was very satisfied with it. So why move to Typo?
Well, Typo is a Rails app. And I, as everyone who knows me already knows, am obsessed with learning Rails right now. So getting Rails apps running and looking at the entrails is... appealing to me right now. After all those failed attempts, however, I was starting to lose faith (in a lot of things, not just Typo), but then I stumbled on this article. It's a fairly well-written wiki that is only useful to people with a technical background. That's not to say I have a technical background - but I can fake it well enough to stumble through it.
15 minutes later (yes, 15 minutes!) and Typo is humming along nicely. So far, I like its style, I like the way it does things, and I need to run around its innards with rollerskates. Oh yeah, and I need to somehow import all my entries from the MT blog... *groan* I'll figure it out somehow. ;)
Wow, maybe it's just because I've been pounding away at an OSX machine for so long that I've somehow inadvertently become adept with a un*x box... or maybe Ubuntu is friendlier than my last foray into the Linux universe... or maybe I haven't tried anything *really* exciting yet. Here's the story so far...
Installation wasn't as breezy as advertised. Well, no, that's not fair. I'm sure installation would be straightforward enough on a more... serious machine, replete with gobs of RAM and a chunkier processor. However, this poor little machine only had 256mb of RAM, and it plugs along on an old Celeron 1.8gHz. I'd get two steps into the install, and the whole machine would lock up tighter'n... well, tight.
I was under the impression (mistakenly) that Linux would have lighter requirements than Windows XP, but no, the documentation states that the minimum requirements are 512mb of RAM. Annoying? Kinda... I tried installation with the "Alternative", text-based install, but to no avail. Blegh.
So I had to scrape up another 512 DIMM (two 128 DIMMs and two slots in the Optiplex), so I ended up with 640mb. Installed just fine, got GNOME all juicy and running nicely... and I thought "why aren't they using KDE?". What little experience I do have with Linux is associated with KDE, and the way Ryan (resident Linux/Unix monkey and overall impressive guy) described it: "GNOME is The Windows Way, KDE is The Mac Way." Indeed.
So I'm gonna start playin' around with this crazy thing. More to come!
So I keep hearing about "Ubuntu" this and "Ubuntu" that. I look it up, and it's african for "beautiful friendship" or "harmonious companionship" or "happy network administrators". One of those wild untranslatable words that means a hundred things. Aside from that, however, it's also apparently some new and special distribution of Linux.
Tim Bray of Ongoing has been keeping track of his experiences with Ubuntu on a super-swanky new Sun Ultra20. Sweet box, 64-bit processor, a small country's worth of RAM. I wish I had a reason to drop some dough on a piece like that - but I really don't. And "playing with a linux distro" doesn't quite justify it (for me, at least - Tim, however, got himself a great deal on it, so it's all good... I wish I had that kind of connection to the community...)
Anyway, Tim's been giving these little glimpses into it, things that work and things that don't, that sort of thing. In the spirit of this, I'm going to do something very similar, only my notes will be based on experiences with a really, really old and crappy Dell Optiplex G60, scavenged and patched together from three defunct Optiplexes. Way I figure, if it runs on this machine (and runs well), I'll be able to get a pretty good opinion of how it'll do in a more... stressful... environment. And so, the adventure begins! Ubuntu is currently being downloaded in several different flavors, and we'll see what happens.
Could it replace my Powerbook? Would it? I'm thinking that's not the purpose behind this experiment (aside from the fact that *nothing* can replace my Powerbook). But I'd definitely like to experiment with it and see how feasible it would be as a backup workstation... or maybe a really inexpensive box I could pair a grunt up with (maybe even a Windows grunt?) The geek gland throbs.
Happy birthday baby! It's Shaunna's 24th year on the planet, and we're gonna celebrate that shit in high style. Me? Robbing the cradle? Of course! Who'd expect anything less...? Muaahahahahahaha.......
It's a sad time. I just recieved news about Nat's impending departure - specifically the date she leaves us all behind for a fabulous and spectacular life in San Francisco. So, on the 20th, we wave goodbye as she embarks on yet another leg in her journey through life.
But it's not a permanent goodbye! No freakin' way! We'll visit, of course, and she can't stay away from the Elbo Room for extended periods of time (she gets awfully thursty) so I expect we'll be seeing lots more of Nat over time. It's just sad right now to see a good friend move along.
In celebration of this event, we went to Key West for the weekend! Key West, as we all know, rocks the heezy fo sheezy! When I say "we", I'm talking about most of The Gang: Erica and South Florida Mike, Elise, Bobbie, and Karen. People missing include Marky, Shaunna, Suze, Brad, and a few more, and they were definitely missed. Suckas. But everyone shows their love in their own way, and when they can, so it's all good. How good a time did we have? Well, there's freakin' photos, yo! I just haven't posted them up quite yet (takes time, people.) Be forewarned, though... there's a photo of Natalie's white Ohio butt. Yeah, you can't wait now, can you?
