Well, a year must be up as it is time again for me to re-build my work PC–Windows XP Pro SP2–yet again. The deciding factor this time? Registry corruption, GUI degradation, and over all system instability. Precipitating factor was likely the remote install of an SMS client. This is one of the reasons why I gave up on Windows at home, I am much too rough on OSes and Linux seems to handle a solid beating better, though I am very curious to see what kind of pounding OSX can take.
All is all, it isn’t such a bad way to spend the day. I am able to sweep out all the cruft that has built up over time and get focused again on the applications that I use the most. The only drag is setting Firefox back up the way that I like it; a real nicety would be making the profile portable because having to re-install some 20 extensions and countless greasemonkey scripts is a drag.
Back to the grind…
Life has been a touch hectic but I am managing to stay afloat. The campaign project is coming along slowly but I am beginning to get the hang of the syntax of Ruby and Rails. Hopefully, I’ll have something running in a week or so.
My writing is coming along. I’m still battling the roadblock of self-censorship, likely because I am digging up old skeletons and making them dance and I’m worried what people might think, particularly my wife. However, a really good friend of mine gave me a much needed slap up the back of my head and encouraged me to plow ahead and deal with burning bridges when I reach them. Solid advice that I am very grateful for. Again, I’m shooting to have some short works posted in a little while.
Feels good to get creative again.
Well, I had ambitions of being highly productive on my little break with lots of tasks and goals outlined for myself yet I only managed to realize one: relax. I spent much of the week sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee sans pants while catching up on the goings ons of the Internet. Here’s a quick breakdown of what I actually got done:
- Pots of coffee drunk - 4
- Lines of story written - 10
- Hours of video games played - 4
- Sites surfed - Too many to count
- Loads of laundry washed - 2
- Loads of dishes washed - 2
- Hours napped - 8
Coming up in the untouched category is this site, yard work, and generally anything involving me putting on pants and assuming a wakeful state. Well, I suppose that there is always time to do really productive things on the next break I take.
… how folding my wife’s panties leaves me feeling slightly naughty.
I’m back on my House and Global Groove kick and have been listening to…
Nitin Sawhney’s Philtre and All Mixed Up: Philtre is an interesting blend of downtempo and house influenced look at the marriage of Bollywood to deep south blues. While it sounds like a bad match ala Mississippi
Masala it actually is a fascinating listen. All Mixed Up, is as it sounds: other artists re-mixing Sawhney’s work, which is another great global groove album.
System Recording’s Club Life v1: four on the floor deep house and trance. Not for Kit, but anyone looking for an album that will help them get and stay in the zone this is it. For me, these albums are great when I need to concentrate on mentally intensive tasks like coding or writing because of their non-intrusive meditative nature.
Susumu Yokota’s Sound of Sky: More deep house goodness from the master. While it was released over 3 years ago it is an excellent follow up to his ambient leaning 1998 and disco fueled house extravaganza 1999. Sound of Sky slips into the space between those albums combining the rigid beat structures of house with the long languid sounds of chill out and ambient.
When we signed up for SBC Dish back in October they sent us along some rewards certificates, in this case Dish was was worth about $100. We had figured that it was going to be damn near impossible to redeem them because of the likelihood that the offerings were going to be limited to telephones, answering machines, caller IDs, and various combinations of the the aforementioned. To our surprise they offered three models of Creative MP3 players, including the 6GB Zen, something that Management wanted for the car and office, particularly after she realized that her 1GB iAudio only carries about 14 albums–to which I say, “Hello? All you ever carried about in your car was 10 CDs at a time!”
Anyway, the Zen is a great little player and it works like a charm under Ubuntu 5.10 using Gnomad2, which easy to use and fairly speedy reading from and writing to the device. One minor tweak, though, it needs to run with gksudo (from Ubuntu Forums):
sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/gnomad2.desktop
and the line that says:
Exec=gnomad2
i replaced with:
Exec=gksudo gnomad2
With everything all set up Management derailed my pantless coffee drinking day to impress me into service ripping CDs so that she could fill the player up a bit particularly since her eMusic collection sits at around 1GB. Here’s what we have ripped so far, some of which has made it’s way onto my player for nostalgia’s sake.
- Air - Moon Safari
- Armand Van Helden’s Sampleslaya - Enter The Meatmarket
- Bad Livers - Horses in the Mines
- Burning Spear - Chant Down Babylon The Island Anthology (2CDs)
- Ekova - Space Lullabies and other Fantasmagore
- Foo Fighters - There Is Nothing Left To Lose
- George Acosta - Next Level
- Hooverphonic
- A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular
- Blue Wonder Power Milk
- Presents Jackie Cane
- The Magnificent Tree
- Juno Reactor - Bible of Dreams
- Moby
- Radiohead
- The Chemical Brothers - Surrender
- The Future Sound of London - Dead Cities
As this slight list took some 5 hours to rip I shake with fear thinking of the task ripping the rest of our collection which stands around 400 discs. I’m guessing it would take 1000 hours of non-stop ripping and to think of the horrors of tagging.
