Black, white and dead all over

Forty years ago, a newspaper was one of the most lucrative businesses to own. What has happened the last year, and will happen next year, is something that should stun any reader.

When I started college, my initial major was computer engineering. It wasn’t because I liked systems or had any desire to design them—it was because I liked video games and had a wild idea that I would make them. Of course, school teaches more about the study of computer programming than how to actually do it … but that’s another topic.

Even in 2000 it was obvious the IT jobs were doomed to shift to India. Sure, there are still people working in the IT field in the US, but they are a shrinking population.

I changed to journalism because it was a job that could not be outsourced.

Or so I thought.

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Lessons from 2 years without Windows

I dropped Windows in December 2006. At the time, Ubuntu Feisty was in beta and I upgraded to it from my initial Edgy Eft install. While I had used Linux for 4-month intervals from 1997 onward, this was my experience in jumping ship entirely.

I have learned a lot—both about Linux and about my own desktop usage—in the past two years. This post is my opportunity to share these with you, the reader.

Lesson 1: Do not customize

Linux is hailed as the customizer’s friend. Most applications store their data in user-editable INI-like files. Root has the power to overwrite any ugly image that offends your optic nerves. If something is shittily organized, you can always reprogram and recompile it to make a sensivle UI as I did with MadEdit.

However, as on Windows, these customizations are temporary.

What I mean is that there is no effective way to preserve your changes during upgrades, and there is no way to collect or save these changes when you need to reinstall your system—especially once you begin tap dancing outside /home/.

Once outside your own user directory, all bets are off. A new update can and will overwrite your configuration changes. While some data in /etc/ might not overwritten—assuming the package scripts were written by a courteous maintainer—changes in /usr/ will be toast.

Did you fix your OpenOffice.org icons to match the same Tango used in your OS rather than the poorly-matched Tango in synaptic? Tough cookies. Those are now gone. Hope you made a backup.

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Obama’s choice of lipstick

I’m so glad I don’t live in the United States.

Not because of the crippling, unequal tax system. Not because I may be sued into oblivion by a clown who gets butthurt over my free speech. Mostly because at times like these, its corporate media system is even more broken than that in which I work.

I woke up today to a full iGoogle ticker with nothing but reports about Obama saying, “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.” Not the choicest of words I’m sure, but only a stone’s throw away from “If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck and shits duck shit, it’s probably a fucking duck.”

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Fuck the CDC, I’m drinking sun tea

Methane gas. Cigarettes. Too much water. Too much laughter. Riding an airplane. Spoiled eggnog. Police officers. Drunk drivers. Your Selective Service card. Rabies shots. Cancer. AIDS. Anonymous. Drunk police officers. Nuclear bombs. The US government. Overprotective mothers. Fun. Yourself. Sun tea.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, everything on the above list can kill you. Can kill you, but probably won’t. Not unless you live in a country that has something the US government wants.

But I would like to hone in on the one item that breaks my mind: sun tea.

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May your Internet Explorer burn in hell

This new site design does not work in Internet Explorer 6. It does not work in that browser at all. It might work in Internet Explorer 7, but I have neither it nor a Microsoft Windows install with which to test.

For those not familiar with Interweb history, the Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 browser was release in mid-2001. The browser contained few updates except light touch-ups to the CSS core of Internet Explorer 5, which was released in early 1999.

Think about that for a moment.

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Archive this post

Hard disk failures suck. I haven’t had one in a little while now, so don’t expect this to evolve into a rant about shoddy technology or operating systems which outright assassinate disks. I am merely musing on how with a hard disk, your information is subject to death at any time.

Not so with the Internet.

From early 2001 until 2003, I ran as site called JumpStation.org. It began as a bridge between several project pages I maintained at the time, mostly fan sites or pages related to translation or hardware modding. I eventually consolidated these projects under that site.

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The end result of the computer debacle

So you may have noticed an absolute flood of postings today related to Ubuntu issues. These were all things I had to solve during a fresh install of Xubuntu Gutsy 7.10 made off a USB stick faking the Live CD image.

The way my computer was resurrected was nothing shy of miraculous.

This is going to be a long, long post, so I’m not going to start explaining how this all played out before the jump. If you are on the front page, click the link for some very useful salvage tips.

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The snowball effect

You know, when disaster comes, it doesn’t just come in small doses. No. Disaster snowballs like a paraplegic being thrown down a snowy mountain.

When he was at the top of the hill, he was mostly powerless. Sure he could slam into people with his motorized go-kart and make people feel guilty about offering their sympathy, but by the bottom, he is a 500-meter rolling ball of destruction with the power to level a village and end dozens of lives with each rotation.

That’s how my computer situation is developing.

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Santa brought me a busted laptop

New Year’s Day, my girlfriend and I bought a Web cam and a USB DVD+-RW drive. For those not in the know, my laptop’s internal DVD+-RW broke in March, and over the last 10 months, I packed an entire 80GB drive of things to burn.

Since the new Skype Linux beta with video support is out, it seemed like a good chance to go pick up a webcam and a drive at the same time.

Of course, shopping for hardware like that when you use Linux is never easy. Boxes have Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac compatibility icons; but a Linux icon? Oh hell no. There is a good reason for that, and anyone who has navigated the jungle of Linux projects would understands why.

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News of my death has been …

I only just yesterday posted that notice about canning Heroine Anthem II and Der Langrisser likely being my final translation. Apparently word gets around fast.

So, before anyone starts with any Hotel California references and my wonderful “quitting” record thus far, let me do a little explaining.

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