Sunny Breaks

To the end of my first week at uni that is. Only musddle up being getting the wrong room number for one lecture (and being 20 mins late).
Psychology seems pretty good. The tests are really well written – very clear and nice to look at. They know what user-friendliness is all about – then again – I s’pose it was some strain of psychology that invented user-friendliness. Alot of the resuorces are electronic too, makes it easier when it’s all broken into diff. mediums I reckon. sadly – it’s all MS based.
And During the last partition reshuffle here on JuggernautI lost woodnose95 – and it seems that it’s impossible to get it back on without reformatting the whole 40 gigs, which is a no-go. So it seems I’ll be doing all of my e-learning on the Li’l Lugger. Luck I still have it.

Communications looks like it’ll be interesting, a bit more academic than psychol. but inneresting none the less.
Thos two subjects are 1st year – so the lecturererers have been kinda gentle on us, but the other two – Social Theory and ‘The End Of The World As We Know It’ (or, as I’m refering to it TEOTWAWKI) are 2nd year, so it’s been straight into it. But the TEO…etc. (also known as politics) is right up my alley – the readings are easy to grasp.
Dunno about social theory – the stuff reading for it is pretty freakin heavy academic-wise …. If there was a way I could drop down to 3 subjects and still be classified as full-time – then soc theory would be out the window.

******
Heard today that DingoBlue – the ISP is goin under. Bit of a shame – I was really pushing for us here to connect to them – they seemed to have a good offer going and I’d heard good things about their service.
As it stands, we are leaving Smelstra Bigpoo at the next anniversary date (the 22nd) and are gonna change to TPG. Their price is okay – and they are unlimited time/data (for dial up this is) but I’ve heard nothing of what they’re like. The only thing I remember reading about them is that the service was originally started by ASIO/Pine Gap — which just can’t be good. Any way – it’s a three month contract – after that will decide whether or not to stay. *****

Off to see Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds in concert tomorrow night. I hope it will be good. My track record of seeing music I really like in a live setting hasn’t been fantastic. And I hope I don’t get squashed or nothing.

[post-edit] – This was written yesterday, but could not be posted due to the dr servers being stuffed

I tells ya – this is big adjustment for me. Going From a working at home enviro — to ridgey-didge full-time university. Getting up before one’s body/head is ready is truly an appalling thing — well at least it is until coffee has been consumed.

Oh Why? Why do I be such a zombie pre-coffee + shower?
Had Psychology lecture this morning. Went okay. Lectures are a new thing for me – we never had them at Tafe.
Then a ‘get to know the campus computers’ session. They’re all using Woodnose 2000pro. Pretty shocking being in that environment though – wall to wall CRTs and they’re going in all directions. I could feel the hair on the back of my neck jitter-buggin’ ..... not to mention (UG) alway the flourescent lights. Don’t think I’ll be spending much time in there if I can help it.

This is what I’ve been thinkin’ lately. They were orignally formed by people as a way of
differentiating between people with the same first name.
“what? Gary’s wife is pregnant again!?”
“No! not that Gary, Gary – Will’s son Gary” = Wilson – etc.
I really like figuring out how surnames came about….

But today even a first, second and surname combination isn’t good enough for ‘The Man’.
Now We all have to have digits and more digits to identify who we are. so why bother with this surname sham, this illusion that we are human, that our herritage means anything at all to that stranger standing next to you at the pedestrian crossing.
These people who insist that it’s a breach of civil liberty to impose a National ID card and number on us masses are just delaying the inevitable.
In fact, why not start now – You – Yes You, take the initiative! Hop on down to your local depol office and trade in that cliched old hack of a surname for nine Gleaming digits of your choice!
Or if your not quite ready to go the whole hog, then how about just changing it to ‘Surname’.

In Other (More Cheery) News
Gene, my partner, has ordered herself an iMac! This is almost as good as me getting one Myself.
I will be able to look at it and correctly evaluate the worth of the OS X operating system.
It’s the href=”http://store.apple.com/133-622/WebObjects/australiastore.woa/821/wo/wrkiS0vWQgKYiahOB6/1.3.0.3.30.33.1.0.19.3.3.1.1.0?13,8”>
Indigo G3 variety, which of course isn’t the absolute heighteth of fashion, but it’s still good eh? In fact, some of the collumnists have been calling it, “so 1990s”. But I disagree.
It took a bit of digging round the website, but we verified that it does come with 10.1, which is fine. The funny thing is that she probably would’ve got the next model up (Graphite with CDRW) but for the fact that it was “a yuk colour”.

Many many time in the last year or two she’s said that she was going to get one, and the yakster would get excited about this, and then Gene would change her mind … so every time she’s mentioned the idea in the last couple of months, I’ve just stayed cool and said, “uh huh, good for you :^)”. But this time there’s a reciept.
It gets here in about a week.

Last night – partly because I was watching saturday night fever on the telly, and it didn’t
start til late so it didn’t finish til later, and I had a couple of cups of tea to keep me going — but ended up going too long.
Maybe am a little anxious too. Starting Uni tomorrow morning, – psychology lecture. Don’t know esactly what to expect.

Last week I got about half of all the text books recommended, which hopefully should do; they’re damn expensive. At the moment it looks like I’ll have to go in there on four out of five weekdays, but hopefully can cut it down to 3.
I s’pose I’m kind of anxious because I think that maybe this time i’ve bit more than i can chew – compared to Tafe that is. Just have to wait and see. The fear of the unknown.

********

So, while I was away, or in journalling limbo that is, I was attempting to set up the Juggernaut’s graphics to use OpenGL drivers, so that I could play the game Tux Racer. (See tuxracer.com.) Was making good progress on finding the drivers, but it seemed to screw up somewhere and wouldn’t start X. Luckily I was able to unistall the offending packages and restore X.
However I still wasn’t satisfied, and – I think (it’s all fuzzy in head now) – installed Mandrake over where Woodnose95 was, thinkiing that that might have more luck with OpenGL. But Lilo stuffed up, and I wasn’t able to get into RedHat again, even with the boot floppy.

I don’t know, sometimes I feel like I sabotage myself. It’s like everything is running smmothly, and part of my head thinks too smoothly, and I mess with the configuration until the whole thing sinks. Terrible timing considering uni is just about to start.

Anyway, I was able to mount the RH partition from in Mandrake, and get at me files and move them around, but I lost things like all theset up; having the desktop just how I like it, and all the bookmarks I’d accumulated in Opera, and several hundred megs worth of updated pakages from Red Hat Network. And then on the transfer from Mandrake back to the reinstalled RH, I forgot to grab all me TTFs – 600 or more I think, schnaffled from all types of hard-to-get-back-to places.

At the moment at least I’m still mounting the little partitiion where Mdk is, so technically (i think) they should still be there, but I can’t find where. One little Lining to this particular Pickle is that I realised that they aren’t as important as I thought. Have got anti-aliasing turned on in Kde, and the comparative few typefaces it comes with see to suffice for web-browsing etc. The problems only crop up when using non-kde apps like Mozilla, or abiword.

One mistake I’m really gonna try to learn from this time is not to install Ximian on here. That always seems to be the beginning of things screwing up.

Another thing I was able to do was to chop down the partition that RH is on, so it’s using about 15gig, and there’s another 18 gigs spare, so that if something interesting comes along, like Free BSD, then I’ve got somewhere to stick it.

The melbourne grand prix is on today, which is, as zombiefied yak, something that I will be able to do.

Seems i can’t get the older entreis up. ah well. may resubmit them anyway.
Getting the date hunky-dory.

Wowey – that was the weirdness from hell.
I don’t know what happened really. Something disappeared or messed up. I had this one file that was just a blank ’
.php’ and couldn’t get rid of it. Anyhoo, since then have had OS probs – and ended up dumping red hat – going to mandrake for a week – then – now back to red hat – and GFTP – the ftp program seems different, and was able to delete that mystery file.
I don’t know if that was causing the problem.
anyway, nice to be back in the thick of it.
May try to restore all the other log entries before anything else.