Fnord

• Computer:
  Played with Vista some more. It has some major advantages to XP and when hardware is better and more software is compatible with it, it will be the clear choice over XP.
  However, I am happy to be switching back to my Linux drive which needs a lot of package updates since I am using the preview releases of the next Kubuntu release. It went from alpha to beta while I was using Vista.
  I set the Windows drive back to XP since it seems to work better in general for now.
  My powersupply is overloaded with my hardware, even though it shouldn't be. I don't want to replace it and any parts the blowout I had last week may have rendered garbaggio. Instead I finally want to get a Shuttle PC for this desk since it needs something small and easy. Shuttle PC's are those lunch box sized computers that you can carry to LAN parties.
  
• Work:
  Work is going well although I overdid it last week. I am refreshing my skills and all that good stuff.
  
• Me:
  Now this ties in to work but I started feeling burnt out last week. I wasn't used to the long hours and level of human interaction that goes with this job. I was also worrying about my jobs too much instead of just being concerned.
  I used a lot of coffee to stay perky the first three weeks. By the end of that period I had a lot of upper back tension. It was throwing my upper back, causing inflammation, tension, and general pain. I nursed it as it came and generally went about my way. Then I started feeling too tired.
  Since I have woken up to the fact that the combination of the new stress, the stress of having a new stress, the tension rather than alertness from all the coffee, not being able to get to bed at a reasonable time (Still working on this, I mean I need to be up by 6:30AM and I'm really not ready to sleep until about 1:30 unless I am dead tired. Then I oversleep on days off and I'm really not tired the night before the next work day until 2:30 or 3.), and a relationship I was in that wasn't working.
  I am now trying to balance my energy and not blow it unnecessarily. It's getting easier as there's less to learn on the job. Going to the gym was helping but the back tension got too bad and I had to do it sparsely which is where I am with it now. I will get back to it. I'm trying to cut way back on caffeine and seeing about cutting it out (again). I really enjoy the taste and aroma of coffee and I am not convinced by the decaf I've had so I'll have to see. I am also contemplating on the term "relax." Whenever I'm feeling tension rise I chant it in my head and let it overcome whatever's bothering me.
  I am also reading The Introvert Advantage a bit each day, as I have time. I am trying to take in its ideas that I can make sense of. It's already given insight on a few occasions. I am trying to understand how to deal with having a introvert base that means that human interaction drains me while I try to function as an extrovert in the workplace and sometimes socially. I enjoy working this way and have gotten more and more able to do it, skill-wise but I can't fool my mind's system of energy which says that it needs to recharge a lot more than I can working this sort of job, day-to-day.
  I will see where I arrive on this.
  
• Dating life:
  So far I've been pre-occupied with the energy thing so I haven't had the ability but I'm looking to try a different method of relationships. I still think I don't want to talk about my relationships on LJ in more than a broad way so that's all for now.

Hello, comrades, I am writing zis message in Vindows Wista.

Well the install took the same length of time as XP which is a bit of a suprise since the Vista install disc is 2.6GB and all the old ones fit on a CD (XP was a full CD at ~700MB and 98 was a half empty CD). So yeah it took me about 35 minutes, with 5 additional for the first time reading new options.

I promised to have it b0rx0red by today and I came through on it. I made it unbootable like an hour ago by disabling this thing that slows down booting to check for other versions of Vindows. I used a thing to tear that out and apparently Wista was not happy. I popped my DVD back in and it offer a Repair dialogue, just as the XP disc does. On the XP disc it is cryptic and offers to basically either reinstall on top of your current installation and try to keep the configuration as much as possible (it doesn't work so well but it gets you back into the system to get files backed up [it also takes the full length of a new install which is no less than 30 minutes and you basically have to wipe it later if you want things to be smooth again]) or to use what looks like a DOS prompt to edit stuff but isn't really. I used to it every time I wanted to reinstall so I could rename the old Windows folder. I never once wiped my HD in 2.5 years by this method.

The Vista disc actually has smart utilities and fixed my boot loader with a couple clicks and offered about 8 useful options for fixing things. I should also note that the repair was an instant success which is in high contrast to XP.

So now I'm going to sniff every built-in settings menu and play around. When I feel satisfied I will use them and some utilities to try to strip Windows down to an almost Windows 98 level like I do with XP. Hopefully I will b0rk Windows a few times again.

I'm posting this from GAIM. Is that not phat?

I had been meaning to write about an entertaining experience with my computer I recently had.

Years ago, when I bought the hard drive I'm currently using, I set aside about 5% of the 250GB for a future Linux partition. I promised that when Vista came out I would switch. I didn't want to watch XP's support dwindle as I continued to use it, considering how much it needed. I didn't want to feel like I had to upgrade things to use an OS that basically copied OS X which copied/was built on Linux/BSD.
So, with Vista announced and available through warez channels last month I decided it was time. I had made an attempt a while back but I didn't have great luck with it although I did learn a good bit about how Linux works.

Towards the end of December I installed Ubuntu and start playing around with it, figuring out how to get all the stuff I wanted up and running. Then I decided, after a week that it was time to move my MP3 collection to the Linux partition. It was huge and made fragmentation a big hassle. Linux doesn't fragment thanks to journaling in the file system (check wikipedia for more on that) so it would be great for my MP3 collection.

I spent some time making final adjustments and organizational tweaks to the collection and then I burned it all to data DVD's. I also went ahead and backed up my "Downloads" folder which held my documents, image files, digital and web cam shots, and any other personal files along with every program installer I wanted to keep. I burned and verified all the data on every disc (I got it all onto 12).

Then I needed to use Partition Magic to shrink Windows to 50% of the drive and give Linux the other 50%.
i put in a DVD while running Linux to begin the moving. I couldn't get it to read after messing with a bunch of stuff, even assuming that Linux couldn't properly read the format of the discs. (I used one that's special for DVD's but which most of the movies you buy come on.) I switched back to Windows the next day to try and copy the files back to the Windows partition and then boot to Linux and drag each disc, one at a time, with a boot cycle of both OS's for each onto the Linux partition. Well I found I couldn't really read the discs.

A couple read but only sometimes and my personal data disc would load the main folder although not every time. I played around with a few programs and eventually concluded that it might have been from burning most of the discs to the very edge. Sometimes burnable discs aren't made too well on the edges. Most of the time the discs wouldn't even show up as being in the drive while the drive light just kept on going. I still have the discs for now but I'm pretty sure they're not going to work with any amount of coaxing.

So with just a bunch of other stuff I didn't care about left on the Windows partition, I did a refreshing reformat of the whole drive into Linux formats. Now I'm running Kubuntu and playing around with every aspect of it and I don't want Windows back. I also like that I don't have a pile of piracy, from the OS to the programs to the files being accessed by the programs. I think I will start buying used CD's again (at Amoeba and Rasputin music), which I hadn't done in a few years. I will try to own some of the stuff I had before in MP3 format. I have also been looking for sites that have MP3's that are free, put out by artists that don't mind people freely trading their songs. I was already listening to some unusual stuff which you can find in a previous journal post and maybe I'll find some even more interesting stuff this way. Some of the stuff I can just listen to online, streaming from Pandora.com .

As for buying MP3's, I feel really bad paying money for compressed audio. Maybe if they offered things in lossless format or Quality 10 Oggs. I also plan to rerip my CD collection to HD and do it right this time. It was originally in MP3 format with the last fifth in Ogg format (free, open-source, higher quality audio compression format) and I had always meant to redo the whole thing in Ogg, switching from quality 6 (like a variable bit rate 192kbps MP3 except taking the average size of 128 - 160kpbs MP3's) to 9 or 10. I really enjoy not having to mess with the CD's and keeping them from further scratches.

I am still amused that I spent a bunch of time and effort to back up all the files I actually cared about and, in the end, lost only those. Some of the files had been carted between my HD's for the past 8 or 9 years.

This is a tangent to the entry right before this one and revolves around anthropological aspects of it.

Tim Berners-Lee sparked a project that became one of the the most important things in the modern world, a sophisticated yet flexible interface for data on the internet known as the world wide web. Now, he had his own vision of how it would work, and that is that "it should be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute." In other words, he intended every browser to also be a page editor with levels of access rights determined by each page or site author. That concept got muted for about 12 years, give or take. Regardless, it was cast into the pool of thought and it did, in fact, resurface.

I've seen that happen in a lot of cultural and general thought pools. I believe that there's no such thing as a forgotten idea once it is noticed by others. It spreads, either consciously or not. Even if it doesn't initially take hold, it has an effect down the line. It may eventually beat out whatever idea took its place, it may just help form a structure, or it may become a deliberate antithesis to an alternate, utilized idea.

Which got me to thinking, by being an antithesis to something, is it an atom (tiniest building block) of a counterculture? Now, clearly a full-blown counterculture may never materialize. But it can, and it can use any available antitheses.

Here is my present take on countercultures. They are always either cultures that were popular culture or are on their way to becoming it. I'm sure this concept exists in present anthropological writings but arriving to a conclusion on your own is a totally different state from just hearing or even studying from somewhere or someone else.

So, my point is, I think that when an idea is presented to others, it cannot be truly forgotten and has some ultimate effect on a thought pool. My second point is that if that idea becomes an antithesis to materialized concepts of a thought pool, it effectively becomes an atom available for assimilation into a counteracting thought pool. Thought pools are ultimately cultures but some feel that culture is a term reserved for formal occasions (clearly they need to encounter more people that regard their cultural elements as insignificant).

The time to upgrade my computer system is near. I'm eyeing some stuff.
I'm in love with this mobo. It has so many great features that I want and very little I don't want: PS/2 connectors, Parallel port, Floppy controller, RAID. I mean, RAID, fine, whatever, but the rest is so last century. It's just a bunch of annoying crap for me to disable and it takes up space for other potential features. The most key feature is the SLI. These means I can install two, identical video cards of the same model and they will share the power load. I can buy 2 $200 video cards and get up to 70% more power than one $400 video card. I would buy one now and buy the second one about a year down the line, when it would be way cheaper and the main card would be starting to fall behind the games.

The card(s) I want is the GeForce 6600GT. It has amazing price-performance ratios.

I would get a DVD Burner and for that I want a Pioneer 108. It's an OEM (boxless) version of the drive they sell in stores. It's about $75 - $90 and it doesn't come with anything, not even mediocre software to stick in my CD graveyard (next to my Sony CD-RW drive software, among things). The quality of Pioneer's DVD drives is excellent, I have proven over time.

The CPU would be whatever was in my price range and the RAM would be a gig of whatever. Those things don't have a big variety of features so they're not as interesting.

I felt the sudden need to share this. There are eggs to suck if it bothers you. Honestly, if it still did everything I needed, I wouldn't upgrade my computer at all. I don't care about having the latest and greatest. But when I do buy stuff it's cool to see what I can get for a good price (there's 0 reason to buy most of the dirt-cheap parts unless you like stuff that doesn't work well and doesn't last long enough). Also, it keeps me up to date on things so I can recommend stuff to other people from my research.

If you're looking into buying new computer stuff let me know. I'll tell you why later, if you don't know yet.