Sunny Breaks

Finally started the repostioning project – all still in the hangar though. Popped through to the wondows95 partition earlier to check IE with the current layout of this page, it’s too frustrating.
Wasted vast amounts of time today, but did discover that 17 santas met for a conference at Hotel Arctic in Greenland, during 1995. Had a little idea that it’d be fun to write a story made up only of things found on the net.

Those dingleberries at Heinz soup should get their act together. How hard is it to create a label for a tin of soup that’s clear and simple. I mean, it’s not an art form for crying out loud. I got half a mouthful of “tuscan bean and tomato” in my mouth before I realised it had freakin’ bacon in it. It doesn’t say bacon or meat anywhere on the can except the fine print in ingredients. It’s not even visible in the damn picture. I intend to write them a stern email.

It was kind of a surprise to see the author of the `30 days’ thing pop up at Core: here. I don’t know if I’m cynical or overly suspicious about people’s motivations. I thought I was going easy on him – was originally going to comment on the possible overuse of prozac on the part of the author, but let it slide. [Mental note to self- more delineation needed between spouting spout/writing style and Core article style.]
Even though I’m always swimming back upstream through the pipes to see where people came from, I occasionally forget that other people do too.
Why is there no rippling australian flag .GIF animation in the top corner of my site? i dunno. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one anywhere. Funny that… odd but understandable.

Via metafilter, here’s some viking related fun. It appears I was wrong about 70% of the lyrics in that song. I thought they were saying, “I wanna go where we can sing and shout” but it was “our only goal will be the western shore” … and … “always singing, crahing out” is actually “on we sweep with threshing oar”.
S’pose I never linked it to Vikings either, but I did get the idea of boats in there. Probably assumed it was about heading to america – maybe. But I know a lot of Led Zep is Tolkein influenced too, which gives nice imagery.

Digging holes and building walls would have to come up 1. and 2. in primal boyish pursuits. Digging holes really is fun – I’d have huge holes all over the backyard if it was a bit bigger. Got to do a bit of diggging today – getting the veggie garden set up. Soil’s very find and almost sand-like but we put heaps of compost in there too. The shovel kept bending … need a better shovel. jean got a flying bug in her ear – had to pour water in there and drown it.
Nothing planted yet – that’s next week.

I can empathise with Jeremiah newbie, back here – I’m using Noatun [there’s another of those wackily named Linux apps] – the KDE music player – on “random” but it seems to have its favourites and only occasionally do they click with mine. Hearing the Sen˜or Coconut version of Tour de France once a day is enough.

Nice to see the X Files back on telly. i like that John Doggett guy – got an affinity with him somehow. Probably the `being the act after the hard-act-to-follow’ thing – but only in the metaphorical sense. And him sitting around on a saturday arvo, cleaning his gun and watching NASCAR – that’s just what I do! (except for the gun bit … and the crapwagon NASCAR bit).
I wonder if that Lone gunmen spin-off got off the ground?

Actually – speaking of car racing there was a nice article about Alex Zanardi in the weekend australian mag. The main points in his life read a lot like the `journey of the hero’ mythical type structure, except that he’s still alive and could get involved in more adventures. It’d be great if he took up a team-owner position in CART.

Oh – and the palaeontology bit – while digging out there – hit this thing that looked kind of like an pipe – but was an old, thin tree trunk that’d been hollowed out. Very strange looking.

It’s been so long since I read any Irvine Welsh that i wouldn’t have much chance of pulling off writing this entry in coloquial scottish, but I do remember fitba’ = football.
For the record, i was brought up a geelong supporter. This could not go on with any seriousness passed the age of 13 otherwise i would’ve suffered irrepairable psychological damage. Being a contented supporter of the geelong football club is about as easy as pushing a glass of water off the table with mindpower.
When the Brizzie Bears (yes, it really needs to be spelt that way) hit the scene, i rebelled against the family and started secretly barracking for them. I was drawn to the em>koff unconventional colour scheme of magenta n’ mustard, and that dynamically angry koala emblem emblazoned across the front of the shirt. But it was a dualist kind of support, because i was still taken to many-a geelong home game at kardinia park. Geelong had/has? a habit of doing really well and all the time, you saying to yourself, ‘I don’t care that they’re doing well, they’re a buncha losers’ — and then just as you give in and do really care they die in the arse.
i went off brizzy when those fitzroy johnny-come-lately’s showed up. They lost the koala and the colours. For a while i thought it was worth keeping up with the fitba for the sake of conversation. But now i don’t know anyone who likes football, which I suppose is an interesting indication of aquaintence elimination. The grandfinal’s (the granny) worth watching because Roy n’ H.G. commentate.

The latest google results are in and after three months of concerted effort, Spouting has made it to the top of the spouting pile. Hooray! i’d like to take a moment to thank Spouting’s Oomphers who oomphed this little website into the light, particularly Core, which has enormous oomp-power. While I’m gushing gratefulness – y’know, there’s probably thousands of movable type installations out there on the net and all of them by default have the “syndicate this site” feature – but Spouting can proudly say that we are one of the few that actually is being syndicated via Core. As the surfers would say, Lampin’!

name: SirFlakey
email:
url: www.core.org.au
ip: 144.132.163.213
date: 2002-09-28-14-54
Personally I like the writing style, others may go because they are drawn to the colour scheme. Glad to see the core sends you many an intrigued “browser”. Keep up ze gut work. =) (oh and my greetings to Google because GOOGLE ROCKs =) ..)
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 144.132.163.213 / Block IP range 144.132.163.*

name: yak sox
email:
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.58.6.3
date: 2002-09-29-15-30
Hehe – yeah the colour scheme… it’s all down hill after this one.

I’ve just been spurred on to follow through on this entry by Tony who seems to be in the same boat. I was humming and harring for several weeks about telling my mum the address of my blog. Acually, it sounds like Tony was tracked down – i gave myself up voluntarily. i was wondering if I’d start self-editing myself more, and not-swearing where normally i would swear. But it doesn’t seem to bother me – she knows what I’m like (and of course most of this weblog is boring and incomprensible computer jargon). In fact, mum left a furtive comment in the guestbook – probably not wanting to embarrass me. “Hi Mum”, he says waving feebly.
What did put the fear of god into me was when jean told her mum about spouting. I won’t lie to you, there were some hasty corrections a-going on with the virtual red texta that night. :^P

It’s come to my attention that quite a few of The Kids out there who use Linux are fishing for a crack for Codeweavers’ crossover plugin.
Should we see their closed source company as just another that keeps information from being free, regardless of the fact that they’re producing resources for Linux?
No – I don’t think so.
Perhaps those programmers in minnesota aren’t really starving, but the codeweavers company isn’t their hobby, it’s their job.
Pragmatically, the Linux user still end up well ahead, financially speaking, compared to the Windows/Mac user. With a good net connection and a CDRW the whole Linux OS can be got for free, paying an extra $50 AUD isn’t too much to ask to veiw Quicktime etc.
If you really believe in free software and can’t do without your Quicktime, then go learn about WINE, join their development community and help create an open-sourced alternative to Crossover.
These young-uns have got the wrong attitude. If you want to use the crossover plugin without the nag-screens, then buy it. If you don’t want to – then don’t use it, and if you’re trawling for crackz – then you might as well go back to Windows. A crack still leaves you in the dark as to how the application works. If you’re not interested in how it works, or the importance of the principle of being able to find out how it works, then go back to Windows.

name: supruzr
email:
url: http://
ip: 65.56.128.239
date: 2002-11-12-22-07
I think you’re full of shit, because, you see, Crossover DOES use WinE code. It’s a closed source fork. Do you really think it’s ethical to take an open source project, totally rip off all the code, then make the result closed source? I don’t. That’s leeching. Sure, running a crack with no knowledge of how it works is not conducive to an intelligent linux community, but then neither is gaining monetary profit by stealing open source material. Do some research before you preach. Freeloaders have destroyed dumber systems than the open source movement.
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 65.56.128.239 / Block IP range 65.56.128.*

name: yak sox
email: yaksox@spouting.net
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.58.6.10
date: 2002-11-13-11-54
This is from the page, ‘why you shouldn’t use the LGPL license for your next library’;
“The GNU Project has two principal licenses to use for libraries. One is the GNU Library GPL; the other is the ordinary GNU GPL. The choice of license makes a big difference: using the Library GPL permits use of the library in proprietary programs; using the ordinary GPL for a library makes it available only for free programs.”
WINE runs under the LGPL, and presumably they chose that license for a reason.
Ethics don’t enter into it – Codeweavers are utilising a resource that’s perfectly okay to use.
If you can’t respect other people’s right to make money from selling a product, then don’t expect anyone else to respect your right to believe that software should be free.

There’s a kiddy-movie out now called Lilo & stitch and all the talking heads are pronouncing it Lee-Lo. What does this mean? Is the Linux boot Loader is also pronounced this way – - and I’ve been pronouncing it Lie-Lo…

Have decided to embark on a domestic campaign to route out typoes and mis-spellings whereever they lurk within this site.

I don’t have a lot to say. I’m tired.
Speaking of corporate opportunities for product placement via the big screen, jean went to see `goldmember’ last night. I refused to go on account of the AOhelL-reeking hype. Sure there’s lots of movies that fit into that category, but Mike Myers – have you sold your soul? Apparently there was some pretty blatant Starbucks entertain-mercials in there.

What I think would be cool is if there was some way that I could place a “name” style anchor on pages on foreign pages – that is web pages not in my control. Say – from here I want to link to a web page, but it’s long and there’s only one little bit four fifth’s of the way down the page that i want to refer to – it’d be great if there were someway of placing a `virtual thumbtack’ on that spot that wasn’t bother the page’s owner.

Did you know there’s a google weblog? I think it’s interesting. I’m facinated by the technical side of how that engine works. The only way to find out stuff is by playing with it and keeping tabs on when it updates things.
The magic mirror tells me someone using french-google googled my name yesterday – my real name. There are other beings out there who share the same alpha-numeric combination as me (and they get top rankings in that little pile, which is just fine with me). One of those odd little mysteries i’ll never get an explanation for. the reason why I’m so taken with knowing what people are looking for – and what brings them here is because it’s like people-watching. There’s all sorts of weird, wonderful and bizarre combinations – from the shudder-worthy “unclothed aunty photos”, to restless, irritable, discontent to the functional Benq DC1300 linux.

Today at school I found out that there’s a 126metre strip of limbo where the border between west australia and south australia/northern territory should be. Once upon a time the Pope devided the world in half so the pirates from Spain and the pirates from Portugal wouldn’t get in each other’s way. Spain was having car-repayment problems and offered 17degrees of the world to Portugal for some quick cash. The original world line cut through south america (that’s why brazil speaks portuguese) and spain got the west coast. The continuation of that line passes by the west coast of WA. But when portugal got the extra bit – it chunked the “spice islands” (indonesia etc.) and that new line a fair bit later – became the west australia border. But for some reason it doesn’t match up down the bottom … but i never found out why.

name: Pedro Saraiva
email:
url: http://
ip: 212.113.164.98
date: 2003-01-13-04-16
Pirates?
Were Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin pirates?
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 212.113.164.98 / Block IP range 212.113.164.*

name: yak sox
email: yaksox@spouting.net
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.3
date: 2003-01-13-13-27
Pedro – I don’t follow… I was talking 400 years ago – that kind of thing.

I found this page via OSNews – it an xft hack which makes typefaces in OpenOffice.Org and KDE look nicer. And here I was thinking they were as nice as they could get. i haven’t tried applying it yet.

When does daylight savings start? Soon I hope. The birds started at 5:35 this morning. They go beserk saying, “It’s a new day! It’s a new day!”. I admire the enthusiasm, but it’s not such a brilliant time to be waking for me. Although, my hat flies off to the people who do. i went outside for a minute then – and eventhough it was mild in temp. it was really foggy – which is highly unusual for here. Would’ve looked excellent on the beach.

Two big assignments for me to do in the coming weeks but I couldn’t ask for much better re: the subject matter. 1. Future trends in technology and 2. Zen. The latter should be a challenge – I’ve got to find the reason and logic in zen buddism. i had to come up with this question myself. On the surface it sounds ridiculously hard, but it has its own logic. I wish i was the type of person who was ballsy enough to do something like draw a few pictures of ducks flying and hand that in, saying `there’, or that old chestnut – a circumferenceless circle (ie. a blank page).
Was re-reading a bit of my fave book on zen this morning – Zen and Japanese Culture by D.T. Suzuki – and got to thinking that one of the big draws of it for me is the slapstick aspect, of which there are numerous examples in the intro- “what is zen?”
What is zen? …. “I do not understand.”
what is zen? ….. “The silk fan gives me enough of a cooling breeze.”
What is zen? …. “Zen.”
And in one audience hall a young monk asked the question, the master walked over to him and slapped him around the face a bit.
The topper is: three garden variety monks bump into a zen monk fresh out of training. One of the monks asked the zen monk, “How deep is the river of zen?” on account of them meeting on a bridge. The zen monk says “Find out for yourself”, and promptly grabbed the other monk by the collar and was going to chuck him over the side when the other two intervened and apologised.
Ah, I dig it, but if i was to practice it I’d just get arrested.

I do i tells ya!
Right back here I mentioned that I was reading Alice got lucky’s weblog. I spent a while reading through the archive, but she wasn’t updating much in the present. But one morning a week later (or something like that) I woke up and had this thought that there’d be something new there that day. An odd thing to think at that time of the morning I know, but nevertheless. And surely enough there was a new entry there. [Of course I’d link to this weblog if i could, but it seems to have been swallowed up in the waferbaby mass due to stagnation.]

And then this morning i woke up and — I think actually dreamt about it, but it was one of those situations where all i could remember was that I did actually have a dream about it – and that was this : that Spouting had been added to the ODP. Again you probably all think i must be terribly nerdy for having drams about the my website … what can i say?
Anyway – here we are Spouting – Yak Sox’s journey with Linux, university, product purchases and living in by the beach in Anglesea, Australia..
Oh Golly – now that i look at it – there’s even a grammatical FUBAR in there. Dang – what kind of an editor am I? i just got back home and notice that yesterday’s title was “Splash Sceens” – Holy Guacamole….
As a side note – `Shinning’ is not a typo – it’s a bart simpsonism.
But i get reminded of most of the typoes I make, thanks to the search engines. Spouting has a better chance of getting up there in the ratings with the wacky spellings. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not spelling thing wrongly on purpose (well, most things at least). I don’t want to be known for the words “photot, chequered or thoery”
So it took three months for the ODP to add me. I was starting to think they weren’t going to for some reason.

Just borrowed The Birthday Party’s Peel sessions album from the library. I used to have their album Prayers On Fire on a tape years ago – and funnily enough this peel sessions one almost sounds more toned down. maybe it was just ‘cause I used to only listen to them on a too-loud tinny walkman. Such a raw and vile sound – i love it!

name: Alice
email:
url: http://
ip: 64.12.96.104
date: 2002-11-04-11-34
AGL is gone, perhaps temporarily, perhaps permanently, but right now i don’t have the time or internet access to keep a weblog. However I am terribly flattered you enoyed it while it was in existence :)
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 64.12.96.104 / Block IP range 64.12.96.*

name: yak sox
email: yaksox@spouting.net
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.58.6.7
date: 2002-11-04-13-53
Yes I did enjoy your writing, it was the freshest i’d seen in a long time. By the time I felt ballsy enough to leave a comment, there was nowhere to leave it.
I hope you return to journalling land sometime, and I hope your studies are going well.

Goodness me – two posts in one morning? Anyone would think I was procrastinating – yes I’ve burnt my 1 week ahead of schedule situation and it’s back to the grind.

Via OS News found this article about the upcoming red hat release including some screen shots. It’s talking about how RH are integrating KDE and Gnome in order to produce a more polished distro, alledgedly at the expense of individual DTE developers sense of self. It’s funny that they change the default email app. in KDE from Kmail to Evolution, and Gnome’s browser from Galeon – to Moz – because that’s pretty much what i do anyway.
On the screenies – ont the panel – they’ve substitued the KDE “K” and the Gnome “footprint G” for an icon of a red hat — i don’t like that. It’s taken me this long to get used to the idea of a computer system having such an odd name as “red hat’ and frankly – i don’t like the gangsta style red had image, while we’re at it – i don’t like ”the shadowman” either … so there!
The only red hat splash screen I’ve come close to liking was that one that looked like a 1930s strike gathering, a whole bunch of guys and one of them wearing a red hat – kind of like those james boag beer ads.
I really like the new Gnome 2.0 splash screen – the Disco mirror ball scene. And i think my fave splash screen was the old gnome one (maybe Gnome 1.2) of dead grass out of focus. I’ll have to try find a shot of that.
I’d agree that if RH are going to step on developer-toes, then they better do it lightly, and give them some credit. Antoher thing I heard was that they are going to change the names of a whole bunch of the more obscurely titled apps – like Xsane and whatnot. It’s taken me two years to learn those names! You can’t dump ‘em now!

Am feeling a tad materially unfulfilled – would love some new hardware or software to play with, but it’s all just window shopping at the moment. I noticed over at everythingLinux that Mandrake do a cheapy personal version of their releases, similar to what Red Hat do. Don’t think I’d want to get it, but it’s interesting to note. They’re almost up to realsing their 9.0. Also there seems to be this equation that goes – the easier a distribution is to install, the more fiddly the package updating procedure is.

A dual processor motherboard would also be pretty cool.

The local annual wildflower show was on here in town this weekend. Glad I’m not a hayfever sufferer because the town hall was absolutely swimming in airborne stuff. I took the camera but for some reason didn’t take any fotos. Flowers still don’t excite me all that much, but there were some stuffed animals set up in life-like habitats. We pretended to be tourists and went on a little mini-bus tour of a couple of spots that had wild flowers growing, along with a bunch of oldies. Old people really can be useful sometimes – they knew all the names of these flowers.
I bought a small book titled What Parrot is That? which has some excellent fotos in it, so I might have a bit of scanner-fun with that sometime soon.

One week’s `holiday’ in a week. Of course there will still be plenty of study to do – but hey, who am I to complain?

Am about to humble myself at the feet of web page design. I admit defeat – my powers of .CSS just don’t cut it. It’s bugging me too much to pull up the front page here – on IE and see it out of whack. I’m going back to tables.

I added the `powered by red hat’ .gif down the side there. In the end it’s just another corporation really, but I thought worthwhile to identify myself as a Linux user, rather than just have people assume I’m using windows, like the majority of folk.

The unofficial borat page is here. He does that accent really well. i remember some other time on telly a month or two back, some guy from the mid east was being interviewed, I was only listening and not watching, and I thought `gee that sounds just like borat. And that bit where he went to Cambridge the other week was a cack – that uptight american kid and all.

Have been mucking around with another visitor-stats system – axs by fluid dynamics. It sets cookies, so – sorry about the cookies – to those of you who haven’t accepted a comments cooky from here yet, or those of you who aren’t using IE (which undiscerningly accepts cookies faster than a flock of trainee Mormons). It doesn’t log the google search words either, but anyway. Am hunting around for another system because ADvlogger has gone all cappo and wants people to pay for the new version. i know AWstats is the best one out there, and it’s GPL — I think I can run it too, but the set up instructions are awfully complicated.

A few times I’ve wondered what other people’s cooky habits are. With Opera, (what I mainly browse with) I do cookies on an individual basis depending on the site, and i didn’t realise how big the cookie filter list had become – it’s definitely something I want to back up and make sure i don’t have to go through all that clicking yes/no again.

Boy is my face red. In technocultures today mr.TB was explaining the invention of the coal lamp – and how it was reputed to have save thousands of miners lives, when in fact, more miners died because of it compared to when they didn’t have it. And then he goes on to how Bhopal was kind of similar .. and it hit me – that that wasn’t an actual union Carbide ad in his book, it was a reproduction of it – I flip through it, and yes, I was wrong-O back here. Of course I didn’t tell him that I’d mistakenly given his book a publicly “disappointed look” on here. How’s that for research skills?, he says sarcastically. Next time I’ll have to be a bit more thorough than just reading half then flipping through the rest and looking at whatever pictures popped up. But in my defense, usually if a book examples something like that, they usually caption it too, explaining why it’s there.

Also had some spectacularly bad luck with timing and attempting to meet up with jean this evening.. I was at uni waiting aroung after class, mucking around in the mac computer room, which is much nicer than the Acer pit, but the macs won’t accept cookies, thus I can’t post on here from there. I look up at the clock, only 4pm, so moseied on over to the mature (machure) age student room and had a cup of tea and read this interview (it’s great that it’s online too) – which just R0×0r if you’re a rocket-science lovin’/UFO tech fan/evil Nazi german science hatin’/area 51 spotting type.
5pm rolled around and i head out to meet jean, who was picking me up, and I thinks – “Ithought the days were getting longer? Awfully dark… and I get over there and realise it was six o’clock – and the last two clocks in the last two rooms I was sitting in were both an hour late.
The clouds were low, it was starting to rain and getting darker and jean was nowhere to be seen, which was fair enough considering I was an hoour off the mark. … I could go on – but needless to say – there were numerous connections that we just missed from uni – all the way into town, then back out to belmont.
i always seem to be wearing the heavy coat when it’s sunny and I don’t need it, and wearing the thin one when it’s cold, rainy and I’m stuck in the wind, waiting.

on a brighter note, SF at Core gave Shiny Metal Rods! a pleasantly surprising plug. It’s funny – that makes me wish I’d put a bit more effort into it more than getting the 75% mark from school, which was the main reason why I wrote it (as in I had to) — 75 is okay, but if I’d put more than a weekend into it it could’ve easily done better.

I finally got the Shiny Metal Rods! story stuck up, complete with the overview that the mr.TB needed because he couldn’t understand it otherwise – funny – I thought all the assignment writing would’ve restyled me into being less obscure, but there ya go. Could do with some more work though; too much tell, not enough show – part of the hassle of having to keep it within 1200 words.

Am feeling a bit zombified this morning (How many times have I started off posts with that phrase?) — was a hell-night here last night. Furious winds – I thought the roof was gonna blow off. Was rather noisy and combined with the unusually super-ultra-mild 20degrees at night temperature, I didnae get much sleep.
Thankfully I don’t have to think much today. Just the lecture this morn. Am in the Uni datamachine-lab-hole — all these acer machines are humming madly together. Homework-wise I can’t remember ever being in this much of a favourable situation. I got the psychol. report finished a 3 or 3:30 yesterday arvo, and the other assignment that I was freaking out about (because I thought it was due today) actually isn’t due til next week – but I already got it done! I can’t remember if I’ve already mentioned that – my memory get bad when I’m tired.
So, at the start of week nine of the sememster I’m finally up to full-speed. And it’s a bonus that there’ll only be two exams this time ‘round.

Lot’s of tourismo in anglesea yesterday. Doesn’t take much to bring ‘em out – two (week end) days of 25+ and the Great Ocean Road fills right up.

A tree from the neighours across the back fell down in the wind. Fell across our fence – just a little wire one which’ll bounce back. And the tree was kinda tall but thin. I’m surprised we didn’t see more wreckage on the way into geelong.

I tell ya that O’Reilly website is big – i only just discovered they have an open source section. And there’s a review of one of their own books called Essential Blogging: Selecting and Using Weblog Tools, with a sample chapter.
There’s so many things I want to mention, the least not being, poor old Jonathan gennick, who says he suffers from tourettes syndrome. I must be the type of person that’s the bane of people like his existence, because i can’t help but think of it in a comical way. I can’t think of any other medical condition that so little is known about by people in general, but which gets in the media a lot because it’s so funny. i just get these visions of bart simpson twitching and making weird grunting sounds and going, “grr, shuddup, hell, damn, fart”.
Speaking of blogging as a phenomenon, seems to be a wacking great rash of newbies popping up on the aussie blogs updater page — and they’re all using blogspot. Where’s the patience and sweat of learning HTML etc. in that I asks ya… Yes I’m pooh-poohing.
The OSDir section of O’reilly says they want people reviewing apps. I do that already!

i spent quite a bit of time hopelessly awake in the darkness last night and got to thinking about this datamachine, Jugger — I s’pose it’s been about ten months since I put it together, and i was thinking about what I’d do different in hindsight – re: purchase of bits. I was thinking that if the roof blew off and a tree crashed into Spouting headquarters and smashed Juggernaut, I wouldn’t be too heart-broken. That is, because we have insurance. In fact I was thinking of coming in here and just kicking its side in and telling mr.insuranceman that the tree did it … but of course not until i’d unscrewed the hard drive.
My datas … I feel a little precious toward.
Bits; the LG flatron 795ft+ — this is actually really great – Given the opportunity to pick all the bits again, this is the one thing I’d get again — the monitor. – The full tower case: does the job okay, but seems like overkill. Somehow i had this idea that I’d be filling it up with all sorts of drives straight away. Would go a middle-sized case instead. – The Ibm maxtor 40gig hard drive, again – has done the job (so far, cross fingers) – but when getting it I had this naive biggotty attitude that IBM’s namebrand meant something re: quality when it came to hard disks. It turns out i couldda got a Western Digital for less dough, and apparently, better quality. – The Creative Soundblaster live 5.1 sound card – also does the job, but considering I’ll probably only ever have two … uhm wonderful little speakers attached to the machine, a cheaper card would’ve done. I could always get a set of 5 speakers, but frankly, I’m not too confident that there’s much support for fine-tuning sound-arrangement under Linux.
The other thing is, I’m actually not all that keen on listening to music from the computer. It feels a bit too `in my face’ – prefer the ghetto blaster behind me. – The Sony 12x dvd rom – I’m ashamed to say I’ve never actually watched a dvd on it. Again – I’m not quite sure about how easy (and what quality) this is to run with Linux … and again – that’s what the telly is for. I don’t think I could sit here to watch stuff.
On that point – a CDRW would’ve been infinitely more useful: to extract schnaffled musics from the machine (so they could be played nicer on the ghetto blaster) — and to back up the all-important /home directory, so that I could mess around with different OSes without wiping everything. – The Soltek 75-DRV motherboard – promised a lot – and has done terribly at delivering. I s’pose I shouldn’t complain too much – it doesn’t shut down on me halfway through vital tasks, but the onboard “RedStorm” overclocking thing never worked without wrecking the partitions, and the front-side-bus only runs at 100Mhz, not 133, which makes my Athlon 1gigHz chip effectively a 750Mhz chip, which is no fun. I’ve tried everything to get it going at its normal speed, but it won’t do it without making the whole thing unusably shakey.
-RAM is RAM, what can be said about it?

So, I think this time around I’d go try a pentium chip, and some motherboard that was solid. I’ve heard good and bad reports about all of them – so I really don’t know.
Oh, and the apple pro keyboard, is fine – keep that, same with the old PS/2 A4tech wheely mouse, same with the swannsmart2 dial-a-modulator/demodulator.

This will be a lame entry because i have little to say other than my head is a bit rooted from hammering psychology statistics all day. Trying to nut shit out. Got it done though! Not completely, but it’s the downward slide now – tomorrow can breathe a little easier. It kind of reminds me of getting a real pain-in-the-arse .tar.gz app. to install — and the bugger just won’t work for some reason, and I try this and try that – but it still won’t install. But if it was just an app. i would give up — but can’t with this psychol. report – so battle on – and at last I got it figured – and it’s been a while since i had that sense of achievement, of figuring something out that’s actually challenging. Is different to the arts subjects, where it’s more of a plug on, plug, plug process which eventually gets done without mind-bending.

Twenny-four dah-grees here today, Sweet. bring it on. Is it wrong to love the smell of your own sweat? Hell No!

Via the magic mirror, i just discovered that the GospaceJump story is google no.5 for “tinfoil head gear”. I got this feeling welling up in me that … I would really really like to be at the top of that pile, but i should actually do something, rather than just mention the words.

I’m procrastinating. There should be a law or a decree against doing homework on such gorgeous days – and friday arvos especially.

Zen-king, Mr.Kookaburra was hanging out here earlier.