Pender’s Fabulous Journal of Random Stuff and Things!!!!

We’ve just gotten home from our trip to Saint John. It was neato (I’ll elaborate later in another post, hopefully). Now we’re re-packing for our trip to St. John’s (diff province, similar name).

The drive back from Saint John to Halifax was “teh hell”. It was winter wonderland of doom conditions at the cabin, and the roads weren’t plowed. It took 30 mins to move the car backward the 3 feet to actually get onto the road. Then it was an hour drive to go the normally 15 minute drive to the highway using my car (read: mustang, ie: tobogan). Then the highway roads were pretty crappy all the way to Sussex. We stopped at the Irving for a brain-break and coffee. Soon after leaving Sussex the roads were superslick with freezing rain until almost Truro. Then it was nifty nice dry roads all the way to Halifax. Apparently the worst that Halifax got the entire week was a bit of rain yesterday, the bastards. On the way home we stopped at the mall so I could get a hairs cut.

Fascinated yet? There’s MORE!!! Oh wait, not there’s not.. We dragged our George loot upstairs and I plopped down in front of the computer where I started writing the following words that you see before you starting… now.

We’ve renamed christmas to “George”. We figure there’s a gay “merry” guy out there someplace named George. So that’s who people are talking about when they say “merry christmas” they mean George.

The plan for George is to go to Saint John to celebrate with Hollywood’s mom, sister and her sister’s boyfriend in a cabin in the woods. Then on the 27th we come home only to fly out of Halifax on the 28th to Newfoundland. Then we’ll hang out for a while with my fandamily, then fly back here on the 4th. So if you’re knocking on the door we’re sleeping but I assure you we’re in the apartment so don’t steal our cats and prized rice pudding collection (at least, that’s what I would say if I actually had a prized rice pudding collection).

Merry George!

Well, I love it. However I failed (with the amd64 bit version).

It’s completely amazing, the system is so fast, it does almost everything I want it to (more on this later) and it has more stuff in it that you can shake a cat-on-a-stick at. There are these things called repositories, and you can download precisely one zillion things from it without having to worry about compatability or whatever. Things install amaaaaaaaazingly fast. I click new nvidia drivers, say “apply” and within 30 seconds I have my system using completely new nvidia drivers and I didn’t have to do anything else. I want a new game, I look through the list, mark it, hit apply and 5 seconds later it’s in my list of games ready to be played. The interface is very very slick. It has all those “I wish” things from windows that I’ve ever had all wrapped into it. For instance (this one sticks in my mind because I love it so much) I can set the delay suuuper short for the keyboard, and the repeat rate suuuper fast. So I can type hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii all the way across the screen in about 1 second. You may not think that’s such a big deal, but I love it. Even writing about little bits of the interface and trying to make people understand how wonderful it is, I plan to fail miserably because words are shallow comared to real experiences.

I setup XMMS, which is basically a winamp for linux. When I say “basically” I mean, they even stole the interface, 98% of the options, and it even uses winamp skins so it looks identical. I was even able to use shoutcast to play streaming music, so I could listen to tunes while I learned leenux. During my setup process, however, I hit a giant bump with trying to change my monitor resolution to use the refresh rate I like. I don’t like 60hz because it’s like a blinking light bulb, and it makes my eyes bleed, I need 80hz+ so I can’t see it blinking. Well it took me bloody 4 hours to figure out all the finicky things I had to do to get it to work. It sucked. When I got it to work though, it worked fine, so it sucked less. The strange thing was not having to tell my operating system all the drivers to use for my entire system, it detected them ALL. I didn’t have to tell it one thing. Even my flashcard reader worked out of the box, which surprised me and makes me regret spending 45 mins trying to figure out how to get it working when it already *was* working (I just didn’t bother to even test it, I just figured it wouldn’t work.. I’m too used to windows). It comes with an irc chat client, so I didn’t need that. It comes with.. well.. almost everything I need. I could mount my windows drive and read from it just dandy.

Things that worked well:
It comes with 90% of the apps I use already out of the box, or within 5 clicks of the mouse.
The interface is awesome.

Things that sucked:
I couldn’t install windows 32bit media codecs to watch windows created videos because I had the amd64 version of the operating system installed.
I couldn’t get Cedega compiled because I was in amd64 (cedega lets me play windows games.. like solitaire).
I couldn’t get Visual Boy Advance to compile because I was in amd64.

So basically all my woes come from poor WINDOWS 64bit drivers crap. How ironic is that? I can’t use linux because windows can’t get their shit together. If the drivers existed I could use them, but they don’t so it’s pretty damn difficult to be backward compatible with nothingness.

So I’m installing the i386 version of Ubuntu as I write this. That should solve all my problems including the nervous twitch, smelly eyebrows and stiff dance moves.

Here’s an article about a drug that stops “Myostatin” in the body which helps you to produce more muscle. ~60% more muscle, without changing your normal life. Those mice got that in a MONTH! As I was reading the article I was thinking “man, that’d be so cool for bodybuilding, or even normal pencil necked geeks!” but then right in the article it has an entire paragraph about being “abused by athletes and body builders”. Friggin’ pencil-neck geek jerks. Apparently use of anything that works well is “abuse”, and takes away from curing people with legitimate need. Well sure, feed the muscular dystrophites first, but make enough for everyone else! I mean, this is american medicine, aren’t they just in it for the money anyhow? The answer is: yes.

Of course, if it makes my heart as large as a watermelon, maybe I won’t use it, at first.

Photoshop Phriday

I laughed, I cried felt bad (for laughing).

Yesterday I brightened the font, changed it, made it bigger and spaced the characters more on this site. So now all the blindies out there should be able to read the page better using their old man bifocals and magnifying compasses.

Lately I’ve been chatting with my buddy rOss^ from #allillegal and he’s got me all interested in trying Linux. You know (or don’t know, whatever) an operating system other than Windows. It’s Free. It’s also neato (ie: tailored for ease of use and stuff for tards like me who’ve never seriously tried Linux for more than 2 days before tinkering with it and killing it good).

Enter “Ubuntu“, which is an ancient African word, meaning “humanity to others”. Ubuntu also means “I am what I am because of who we all are”. Ubuntu also means “I wanted some pizza last night so I walked downstairs and ordered some pizza but the guy was so slow to make it that I got mad and sat there all mad and eventually got my pizza and said thanks to the guy, but I didn’t mean it, but he pizza was good”. It’s also a distribution of Linux.

I downloaded (in 35 minutes) the “live” version of the operating system (live meaning, it is loaded from the CD rom, nothing is even installed on the hard drive) yesterday, burnt it to a disk (7 minutes) and rebooted the computer. It was an amaaaazing experience. In less than an hour I was all set. I was presented with all the neatoness of a completely different operating system that loaded in about the same amount of time as windows does from the hard drive. It felt polished. Every single driver for all of my computer parts was automagically detected and I had to do absobloodylutely nothing to get everything to work.

It came with a crapload of stuff, like OpenOffice (which is a free type of Micro$oft Word, and even interacts with Word documents properly) as well as a paint program called Gimp, which was as good as the $1000 Adobe Photoshop. All for free! (Yes I’m hung up on the free thing). It came with a chat client and a bunch of other stuff that I use every day. I can get a program called Gaim which is “a Linux/UNIX instant messenger client, which can handle multiple protocols including MSN Messenger” which I use! I can also get a program called cedega which will let me play all my games. So what else is there? Nothing of consciquence, that’s what!

Two problems:

So maybe there’s just 1 problem. I never said I was an expert countist!

I’ve downloaded the full version (that gets installed on hard drives) of Ubuntu. I’ll write about how that goes at a later time, if you’re lucky and like to read long articles, or unlucky and don’t like to read long articles.

Andrew Stimpson, 25, was diagnosed HIV-positive in 2002 but was found to be negative in October 2003 by Chelsea and Westminster Healthcare NHS Trust.

Mr Stimpson, from London, said he was “one of the luckiest people alive”.

BBC News

I think he should be shot and his organs harvested. If you are miraculously cured and you don’t offer yourself for as much testing as its necessary to help find a vaccine for everyone else: you should die.