Sunny Breaks

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.