For those who didn't catch my last entry, Lisa's car was doing a bit of steaming and losing water. I had yet to find the leak. My big fear was that the car might have blown a head gasket since the water was coming from an area where there aren't water hoses.



Today, when Lisa got home, she informed me that she found the leaking hose. I was thrilled; I'd much rather be wrong and find that it's a $20 fix. So I skipped out on the last 1/2 hour of a lecture on Socrates and went home to take a look.

There seems to be this crud going around here. It's not quite the flu, but it still makes you feel achey all over. I can't quite shake it. Then again, late night Taco Bell doesn't really help the healing either...



Today was truly bizarre. I woke up to the sound of branches blowing across the roof and heavy rain. For anybody who doesn't live in the USA's Pacific Northwest, this almost never happens. After my usual morning routine, which typically includes vegging out for a bit and watching a bit of trash TV, I took off for class in the pouring rain. Class was sort of lame; we watched a bad film about clay-mation. I did manage to talk to my stats professor though, and he is way cool. Winston showed me how to make Flash do I what I wanted it to do, which was to rotate an object only between two keyframes. It didn't seem to work before, and then it simply worked later on. Bizarre. Apparently Flash is like Windows; if it's not acting correctly, shut it down, restart, and it'll probably be OK.

When I saw the announcement for 2.6.0-test7, I created a story, only to get ensnared in formatting problems. When I finally submitted, Mini Booster Nori had beaten me to the punch.

Ah well. Just goes to show that someone is always faster ;-)

I have random new goal to ignore now -- learn 10 distinct methods, innovations, shortcuts, or general self-improvements per day. I could make it 100 or 1,000,000 and it wouldn't matter -- that's how much self-discipline I have. But I am listening to some ancient tapes by a memory expert whose name (I think -- must be working, eh?) is Robert Livingston. Heh. Right.

Last night as I procrastinated my English paper I ran across Seventeen or Bust, did some research, and figured out what the Sierpinski problem is. I'll have that be 1 of my 10 there. Math is nifty, but even so I can't really see what practical application of finding an odd k such that k*2^n+1 (where n is any integer from 1 to infinity) smaller than 78557 can have. But I am not a math major, which is good, because I've got an annoying tendency to ignore signs. So far i've gotten away with no homework in calc, yeah, but that's just because I have a fantastic teacher. But I've got my home computers and my work laptop chewing on old Sierpi nonetheless. Why doesn't it run on my K6-2? Piece of crap.

I don't care what anybody says, OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 is the equal of M$ Office. This program ROCKS! It does everything M$ Office does, and it's cross-platform as well. The best thing about it is that if you have a properly configured printing system, you get WYSIWYG printouts.

Today, after ten years of playing bass and having shoddy equipment, I decided to spend money I don't have and correct the situation. I ventured down to the Tacoma Guitar Center, which was extremely busy today. After about two or three hours, I emerged with a new Fender Precision bass, hard shell case, Gallien-Krueger 1001RB amp head, an Ampeg SV-15E cabinet, a Korg rack mount tuner, and all of the cables to make it all go. Originally, I wanted to get an Ampeg SVT-300H head, but they didn't have any in stock and they wouldn't sell me the demo model, which actually sort of surprised me. The manager told me that the demo models are shipped directly from Ampeg with a $10000 insurance policy on them, which greatly exceeds the value of the amp. It really makes me wonder if Ampeg's demo models don't come from the same factory line. Either way, he sold me the Gallien-Krueger amp, which was also a demo model (but one he could sell), and he sold it for cheaper than the Ampeg amp (which was less expensive). The GK is more powerful too; it's 540 watts. It's also quite a bit smaller and lighter than the SVT as well, and that's pretty helpful when it comes to carting the amp around. The one thing that scares me is that since I've been home and checked out how others feel about their GK amps, it seems like you either get a good or a bad one. Some people have ones that have worked without a hitch with tons of abuse, but others have had amps that have quite literally burst into flames! It's weird, and it can't be traced to a given lot either; I checked many different series to see if they were the same story, and sure enough, some were great, but some were lemons. My unit was a demo unit, so hopefully if it was crap, then the problem would have surfaced as it was used in the store. I'm keeping my fingers crossed...

Well, Angel (the drummer in my current band) has decided to leave. It was definitely an issue of irreconcilabile differences. But, to his credit, he came through, called me, and said he was going to be moving on. This wins points with me,because he didn't waste our (myself and Winston) time.



I called Winston to let him know, and now we've got to decide if we want to find a new drummer and keep going on with Wicked Asylum, or if we're going to hang it up. We have a show scheduled for Halloween at The Old Town Pub in Silverdale, but not having a drummer complicates matters considerably.



In the meantime, not much else was going on, so I took the opportunity to jam out with these guys. It was actually quite a bit of fun; we played mostly metal, and while I've played in many punk bands and hard rock bands, I can't say that I've played in a full-on metal band before. It was pretty fun, although even my two amps together were woefully inadequate compared to the two half-stacks the guitar players were using. It was incredibly loud. Once again, it's becoming painfully apparent that my current bass equipment sucks. It was just loud enough at the point of clipping, and even then it just sounded sandpaperish and gritty, without any real power behind it. I am seriously considering a half stack and a nice bass. I've just got to figure out how $1500 or more worth of equipment is going to be paid for.

What better way to start a blog entry than with a butt-rock quote? Overkill rules! Better yet are the pained expressions Whit used to get while blasting it in my Camaro. Without further delay, I'll give you the updates in my typical unorganized bulleted list fashion:

• Thursday night, I went to see "Lost in Translation" by myself in Tacoma. It was awesome! The movie was totally my style too; sleeplessness, and searching for reality. It's unfortunate that the big movie theaters decided that those of us in Kitsap County are too stupid to get this movie here. We never get cool movies.
• Friday went OK, I guess. Flash class was sucking pretty bad as the instructor was really being a unconfident, snappy bitch. I asked her if there was a way to be able to tween multiple layers at the same time and she launched into a tirade about how I couldn't expect too much from the program because it was already doing a lot, blah, blah, blah. I said, "I don't think you understood my question," and asked it again. Still, there was no clear answer. Translation: she doesn't know. Now, this is my pet peeve with instructors like this. They're so damn afraid to say "I don't know" that they look like bigger idiots when they pull all sort of question deflection to avoid admitting it. This really bothers me. I fully admit that I'm a complete novice when it comes to Flash. I know how to import images, convert some stuff to symbols, and do tweening and some crude effects. This I picked up in a few hours of messing around. But I do think it says a lot when the instructor is so unconfident in her own ability that she chooses to interpret legitimate questions as efforts to make her look stupid. As someone who has done instruction before (in the Navy), as well as tutoring in computer programming, my policy has always been to be prepared enough so that there is almost no chance of getting stumped (if you're not, you're probably not ready to teach anyway), and if someone does ask a stumper question, I do not interpret it as a challenge, I usually go "I don't know" or "I may be wrong" and then I go find out the right answer instead of offloading a bunch of BS on the student. Asshat instructors.
• Tom, a guy that I used to tutor in Java and who is now in my Flash class, had some questions about flaky x86 hardware. As it turned out, we traded some hardware, but I think I got the better part of the deal. He got an older Quantum IDE hard disk, Whit's old TNT2 card (having retired it myself out of Lisa's box), and some books on Redhat Linux 5, and web stuff (CGI, HTML, and best yet, VRML!). I got a HP SCSI Scanjet 5, and (Wally you'll love this), a SCSI Zip InSider, and some Zip disks. I'm excited about the scanner; I think most of the SCSI ones are decently supported by SANE. Oh, and Wally, if by some bizarre coincidence you're still looking for an internal SCSI Zip drive, I have one and it's yours if you want it! (I have many memories of Wally searching for this as the holy grail about four years ago; probably while I was simultaneously looking for bizarre Mac hardware.)
• Lisa and I went over to Les and Missy's place for dinner on Friday. We had steaks and salad; it was yummy. Lisa also proceeded to get fairly wasted on Les's goodass beer. I had a taste of the honey ale and it was fine, but I abstained due to feeling the consequences of too many Red Stripes the night before. Oh, and Les, you should know that Lisa is serious; you better invite her when you brew again! I'll hang out in your computer room while you're taking care of that and sacrifice your Windows boxen to Satan for you, and thereby do you a favor.
• Lisa and I came home, finished watching the "Apocalypse Now: Redux" that was showing on Bravo, and had a great conversation about the whole movie, the actors, their characters, and the messed up 60's. I thought Brando did pretty damn well as Colonel Kurtz, but Lisa like Martin Sheen's character (name eluding me right now) the best. Factoid here: Lisa says that Apocalypse Now might be her favorite movie, period. For me, it's hard to say what my favorite is, although "Clerks" and "Office Space" are high contenders in spite of not having any earth shattering message. Come on, I still laugh at the "37!" joke in Clerks.
• I've spent the last five hours, sleepless, making sure a very drunk Lisa isn't choking on vomit in her sleep, and watching "The Falcon and the Snowman" as well as "EDtv." Jenna Elfman is pretty damn hot; it's too bad she's into Scientology.

Short entry today: I got an A on my second draft in one of my college classes! Combined with the As I got on a pair of quizzes in two other classes I was in on Thursday, things are looking great :D

Not only that, I deleted my 2.4 kernels from my GRUB boot list. I run 2.6-only on my laptop, and it is GOOD.

Which brand of linux is the best?
By 'best'I mean:
1.)Ease of use (for somone willing to learn the os and not just push buttons).

2.)Hompage support (i have red hat at work now,and their homepage is one big 'join our support network'campaign. This requires paying more money than i can afford, as well as 44 percent of this sites readers can afford too..)

3.) security, support for stuff like cd burners and what not.

Well, RedHat 9 is running on my HP ze4115. It's definitely rough around the edges, which is unfortunate since this laptop has been around for a year, and everything HP has made since looks quite a bit like it. I figured that hardware support might be a bit better, but I guess it's better than it was in the old days! (hehehehe) Here's a list of the current issues:

• X operated correctly during the install, but complained of "no screens found" in spite of an XF86Config that appeared to be correct. Using a workaround, I have X operating, but it's unaccelerated, and it shows. A shame because I picked this laptop over others specifically because it used a Radeon, and not some obscure S3 card or something else. I still have nightmares about trying to get X going on Doffing's ThinkPad i-series and that damn SMI Lynx+.
• If my Netgear MA401 Wi-Fi card is in the PCMCIA slot when booting, the machine locks up. I'm not really sure what's up with that. If I try to insert the card later, it does nothing; pcmcia card services don't seem to register that I've put in a card at all.
• APM is not supported in RedHat's stock kernel, so no suspends or standby mode.
• It doesn't appear that ACPI or other power management features seem to be working either. The processor fan is running almost continuously; it's obvious that the processor cycling is not occuring. Not to mention, the machine gets hotter than it normally does, which is hard to believe because since it's pratically a cooking griddle normally. I must say this: if you're in the market for a new laptop, you might seriously want to consider something Transmeta or Via C3 based if you don't absolutely need the number crunching power. Your legs will thank you!
• All of the extra keys on the machine don't work. I could care less about the instant email and browser keys, but the volume up/down and mute buttons were pretty nice. So was the button to disable the trackpad.

Being sick at college sucks. I don't feel too good right now; but I suppose it was only a matter of time until I got sick, seeing as how there were a lot of sick people around me. But I'm sure I'll recover.

I just hope it doesn't affect my ability to work......

P.S: This was a blog in two parts because I didn't know that the blog selector panel lets you select multiple categories :(