I just spent an hour and a half trying to be as clear as I could on how I felt on yet another band disagreement. At this point, I would simply love to have a band where everybody wants to do the same thing. It sucks to be going along thinking everything is going fine, and then "bam!" someone is pissed because we haven't been paying attention to their needs or playing songs they want to play or whatever, and it's the first time the rest of the band has heard about it.



Oh, and I'm whoring myself out to the man again.....that's right, I reinstalled Windows XP back on the laptop. The main reason I did this was because I bought Flash MX 2004 (for my Flash class) and I've got to be able to run it. Originally, I was going to use the computers at school, but most of them are way hosed with old, messed up copies of Windows 98, with not enough RAM to really run Flash to begin with. To add to the problem / confusion, they all have different versions of Flash: one will have Flash MX, another Flash MX 2004, and yet another will be Flash 5. The differences are minute, but when you're trying to learn a program it can be extremely irritating to try and sort out what's different so you can do whatever it was the instructor just taught.



I could have just gotten VMware or Win4Lin or maybe even Wine and gone that route, but there were many other things that unfortunately weren't right (see my previous Linux and laptops entry) and while they can be fixed and worked around, I simply don't have the time to do it. As much as I like to not be a hypocrite in this arena, I don't have the time to be a full time college student, run my own photography business, play full time in one band and record in another, and try to get things that aren't supposed to work in Linux (bizarre HP specific stuff, and Windows apps that I need to run) working in Linux. As much as I hate it (and trust me, I absolutely *hate* Windows), we're in a Windows world, especially when it comes to my crappy college. With great apps like OpenOffice and Mozilla, Linux (and other *nixes) are terrific for most general use, but when your work/school requires you to use specific apps, theres not a whole lot you can do. I simply don't have the time to play SuperMana and simultaneously learn every workaround and alternative out there. I've got to take it one thing at a time, and prioritize, and while I thought I wanted to be up to my friend Neil's level on Linux knowledge, I realize that there's a reason he does basically nothing else. I enjoy playing music and my photography too much to sacrifice them. When I was in the Navy, I couldn't pursue either of those when I was out to sea (and not particularly well when I was in port), so I had a lot of free time to do Linux stuff, and I learned a hell of a lot. So while my home desktop is still going strong with RedHat 9, my laptop is going to have to live with Windows for a bit longer, or at least until figure out a way to set up a dual boot with HP's crappy "system restore" CD's. (There are six of them, BTW, and they wipe the whole drive, without giving any other choice.) I'm not going to warez a copy of Windows (goes against my anti-hypocrisy principle), so my question is, anybody know if there are partitioning tools (preferably open source) that will let you resize an NTFS partition? Does PartitionMagic do it?



College is keeping me way busy; next week has a bunch of tests and big assignments due, and between that and getting practice in for the Halloween show, I'm staying occupied.