Curse you, rain

Well, not really.  We need the rain.  But it’s messing up my weekend.  We have flag football on Saturday morning, and my mother-in-law will be in town from far away, and wanted to see the game.  My mom was going to come from less far away, and everyone was going to watch.  But since it’s been raining for two days now, and isn’t expected to stop until Saturday afternoon, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that we’ll be able to play.

This probably also doesn’t help the wife’s plans to take her mom around the city tomorrow.

On the bright side, it’s been so long since I’ve actually seen rain that it was really kind of nice.  It wasn’t raining that hard when I was outside, and it’s still warm enough to be pleasant.  As I was waiting to cross 16th Street yesterday, I watched the rain run down the windshield of a Ford Explorer that was blocking the crosswalk as the light was changing.

As I stood there watching, I wondered if anyone had ever uttered the phrase, “The warm rain running down the windshield of your 1993 Ford Explorer is hauntingly beautiful.”

Then I wondered if I had accidentally ingested some drugs without knowing it.

But then I decided that it’s just my subconscious getting ready for Nanowrimo.

Anyway, we need the rain.  But it sure would be nice if the fields were dry enough to play on this Saturday morning.

Date Night – Half-Birthday Edition

On Monday, the wife took me to Perrys in Adams Morgan to celebrate my half-birthday.  Yes, neither Perrys nor Adams Morgan has an apostrophe, according to the web site.

Half-birthdays are a wonderful tradition that my mom did for us.  We got a little present and maybe a cupcake.  We being my brother and sister and I.  Anyway, because the wife is so great, she has continued this tradition for me.  In addition to dinner, she got me a t-shirt from Design by Humans and some bamboo boxer shorts from Shirts of Bamboo.

Anyway, Perrys.  We ate on the open-air roof overlooking the top of 18th Street.  It was great.  The weather was perfect for it.  And the food was great.  We started with some edamame, which had too much salt on it, but was otherwise good, and a bottle of French grenache-syrah, which was also good.  It was a screw cap bottle, which I’ve almost never seen outside of New Zealand wine.  But the screw caps are getting more popular, and I’ve heard from at least two people who should know that even a lot of wine snobs are okay with the screw caps.

Then we had assorted sushi, which was quite good.  The spicy tuna roll was great, and the fatty tuna nigiri just falls apart in your mouth.

Overall, it was a great restaurant experience, and I would definitely recommend it.

Meat and potatoes for dinner

Tomorrow, my seafood-and-vegetables-only-eating wife is going out to dinner with a friend.  I think I’m going to take this opportunity to cook some french fries and a large slab of red meat for myself.  Not that she opposes me eating red meat and I have to do it while she’s not home, but it seems silly to cook two dinners.

Anyway, I’m not sure how to prepare it.  I think we have some four-year-old steak seasoning in the cupboard.  But that’s not really exciting.  What’s an interesting and not too complicated way to prepare a steak?  My cooking skill level is a bit above average, I think.  I can follow a recipe, and I can do a little experimentation outside of a recipe, but I’m never going to be on tv for my cooking skills.

OMG it worked!

PicturesWe finally got some pictures hung.  It was a huge pain in the neck.  Have you ever used a hammer drill?  If not, don’t.  It taps as it spins the drill bit, and it makes the most awful noise.  It makes a nice hole in the cement, though, so that was good.  We picked up a roll of aluminum flashing, which they use for something or other.  Then we got a cheap piece of molding, painted it, and screwed them both into the wall.  I even made an attempt to countersink the screws, and it almost worked.

Anyway, it looks pretty hot.  And now that we know we can do it, we’ll go back and get some more wood and hang some more pictures.

By the way, the photo on the left was taken by the wife on the honeymoon in Melbourne, and the one on the right I took in photography class in college.

Gutsy first impressions

Overall, I’m really happy with Gutsy.  I find myself spinning the desktop cube just because I can.  But I haven’t done much yet.  Today I think I’m going to create a separate partition for my /home directory, and I’m going to pull the pictures I took yesterday off my camera and see about uploading them to Flickr.

I have some small issues.  First, the gnash free flash plugin doesn’t really work for Firefox on a 64 bit system.  The proprietary flash plugin is fine.

My panel icons are displaying at the center of the panel, not all the way on the right like they’re supposed to.  I haven’t really searched for a solution to this yet.

Other than that, this is a pretty slick OS.  Wireless has been perfect – the only setup I did was selecting my network and providing my WPA password once.  The frequent disconnects I got on Feisty have not happened at all.

Gutsy supports my Nvidia video card much better than Feisty.  I just had to choose a different driver in a drop down menu and then reset the screen resolution.

Anyway, if you’ve been thinking about trying out Ubuntu, now is the time.

Liveblogging the Gutsy install

I have the alternate cd now. This is going to work. I can feel it. Even better, the wife is cooking some weird cake for dessert. I’m sure it will be delicious.

So, the keyboard layout detection wizard is kind of fun. I don’t have most of those keys, though. I feel a little left out.

It can’t configure the network. That’s probably not a big deal. I’ll do that later. Now we’re setting the computer name to “calvin”, as in “and Hobbes”. And now I’m formatting partitions. Since I don’t want any remnant of Windows Vista, and I’ve backed up all the files I need, I chose to reformat the entire drive. Some may not want to do that. But really, who wants to dual boot Vista and Ubuntu? On one hand, you have an OS that pretty much everyone has acknowledged is a giant mess. On the other hand, you have the first real alternative to Windows and Mac OS that is getting some real traction and publicity. So, goodbye, Vista.

I know my brothers-in-law, and some of my other readers are probably aghast at my dismissal of OSX. But Macs hate me, and Windows hates everyone, so I don’t feel bad.

The alternate installer is pretty easy to use. Sure, it looks like something from 1989. But that’s okay. Just so long as it works. It’s installing software now. That’s probably a good thing.

And the wife is beating something in the KitchenAid. Probably eggs. Actually, it’s butter and sugar. I know because I just checked. And the software installation is stuck on 6%. Hopefully that’s not a problem.

There it goes. It jumped up to 18%, and now 22%. Things are going swimmingly.

Ooh, now it’s installing the GRUB boot loader. “You’re a grub boot loader”, the wife would say.

Now I’m restarting. This is exciting.

Okay, I’m all booted up. Unfortunately, it’s at 800X600 resolution. Let’s see if we can fix that.

It looks like I’m missing the latest Nvidia driver. Clicking the little icon between the network icon and the volume icon doesn’t seem to get me anywhere. Wireless works, though.

So, let’s run some updates. sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade sudo apt-get dist-upgrade sudo reboot

Don’t know if this is working at all. Going without a guide is a little harder than following in someone else’s footsteps.

I just tried to change the video driver to “nv”, the open source Nvidia driver, in Administration->”Screens and Graphics”. I chose the driver, hit the “Test” button, and now have a blank screen. Sweet. “

alt-ctrl-delete

I feel like I’m running Windows.

I went to System->Administration->Restricted Drivers Manager and enabled the NVIDIA driver. Now it’s downloading. This reminds me that there is no way my dad or my sister, who have both expressed interest in Ubuntu, are going to be able to install this. I think they’d like it if someone else installed it, but this requires more comfort with a computer than either of them has. I hate to bash the install process, but it’s just not going to work for people who aren’t computer geeks.

It’s asking for a restart now, so I’m obliging. I’m hoping for some sweet graphics to be enabled now. That would rule.

Well, that didn’t really work. But you know what does? “

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Go through the wizard, reboot, and then go to System->Preferences->Screen Resolution, and you can choose 1280X800. I think I can actually get a better resolution out of the video card, but this will do for now.

So, things seem to be working. Wireless was painless. In fact, I’ve never had an easier time of connecting to a wireless network. This is groundbreaking.

Gutsy is definitely an improvement – this install took me much less time than Feisty did. I’ll have to update you all when I get a chance to play with things, but I’m currently pretty happy. I haven’t tested anything, like hibernate, or the sound, or any of the software. But I’m just going to assume that everything is awesome. I think the wife is feeling a little neglected, so I’m going to go wake her up and tell her that she’s more important than the computer. With any luck, she’ll believe me.

Seriously, Ubuntu

_I’m sort of live-blogging my Ubuntu install.  The following would probably be more interesting if it actually, you know, worked. _

So, we just finished some delicious Saag Aloo, and now I’m going to install Gutsy while the wife watches Law and Order: SVU.

I’ve got a black screen so far. That’s not good. BTW, I’m writing here on my old laptop while I install on the new one. Just FYI.

I just got a warning, telling me that Ubuntu is running in low graphics mode. That’s not cool. I chose 1440X900 from the “generic” monitor resolution list. Now it’s running local boot scripts. This doesn’t seem good. I was kind of hoping it would just boot up without my input. I’m staying postive, though.

I just ctrl-alt-deleted. It wasn’t doing anything.

I tried the default 800X600 resolution this time. Now it’s running local boot scripts again. I’m not optimistic.

This Live CD stuff just isn’t working. I’m downloading the alternate install cd now. I’ll be back in an hour or so.

Gutsy or Bust

So, I’m going to install Ubuntu 7.10, Gutsy Gibbon. It’s going to be awesome. You may have already seen my guide to getting 7.04 onto a Lenovo Thinkpad T61. Well, this time I’m doing things a little differently. First, I’m going to try the Live CD install rather than the alternate install, because I just have faith that it’s going to work. Then, I’m completely blowing away Windows. Vista is stupid, and I haven’t missed it since I got the Thinkpad. Which is good, because I broke it installing 7.04.

Anyway, I’m going to install a second partition for my /home folder, which lots of people say you should do. And everything is going to be awesome. I just know it.

First of all, though, let me complain about downloading the stupid ISO. I tried it yesterday, release day. After two hours, I was at 2%. I killed it, and tried again later. No dice. I even tried wget from the command line, thinking that maybe without whatever overhead Firefox introduces to the process, it might be better. No dice. So I tried again today. My ever-helpful brother-in-law (I should probably write down the euphemisms I use for my various brothers-in-law so I can keep them straight, but whatever) suggested that I might have better luck with BitTorrent. That seemed like a good idea, since a huge number of users slows a download but speeds up a torrent.

No dice again. Why? Because Satan’s ISP (Comcast) has decided that P2P=BAD for all values of P2P. Never mind that what I’m doing is downloading totally free software and saving them bandwidth at the same time. I mean, I won’t get into illegal downloading and all that. But what I’m trying to do is TOTALLY LEGAL and encouraged by the creator of the intellectual property or whatever we call software these days. But Comcast can’t allow it, because some people use P2P for illegal things. Up yours, Comcast. If it wasn’t for your dirty monopoly on cable internet here, I would have cancelled your service today.

Anyway, my laptop is currently sitting two feet from the router, plugged in by wire, because my wireless is being finicky and I don’t have any long ethernet cables anymore. It’s maybe 1/3 done with the download.

If all goes well from here on out, I’ll have this working tonight. If all goes as expected, I’ll polish off this bottle of scotch trying to get it to work.

Ill make you famous

Okay, probably not that famous. But I’m looking for some names for my Nanowrimo novel, and I’m terrible at thinking of good names. I used names from my Gmail spam folder last year, but last year’s novel was a little more fanciful than this one, which is going to be serious literature. Written in 30 days.  I mean it.

Anyway, I have a couple of characters already named. I still need names for:

  • A thinly veiled Barack Obama.
  • An equally thinly veiled Mitt Romney.
  • The hero. Actually, I think it will be a heroine, because I’ve always had trouble writing women (It’s hard to write what you don’t understand), and that seems like a good challenge. She’s the partner of a cop who dies early in the story. I’m not sure yet if she’s the partner in the cop sense, or partner in the romantic sense.
  • Random characters. These characters aren’t planned yet, but will undoubtedly pop up.
    That’s all for now.  If I use a name you suggest, you’ll get credit in whatever form this is published in, which could be Lulu, a real publishing house, or just the Writing folder on my hard drive.  TheWriting folder is a really strong bet.

Since context may help, a little background on the story.  It will contain political intrigue and violence, but also a homeless guy named Shake and Bake.  Think Christopher Buckley meets John Woo, then they go smoke pot behind a dumpster.

Suggestions welcome in the comments.

This is beautiful

Inhabitat » SOLAR DECATHLON 2007: Technische Universität Darmstadt

Combining the manufacturing expertise of Volkswagen with a stunningly modern design sensibility, the Technische Universität Darmstadt’s wowed the crowds this week at the 2007 Solar Decathlon with their gorgeously innovative Solar Decathlon home.

I’m not exactly sure why I haven’t gone down the the Solar Decathlon.  They’re announcing the winner today.  Maybe we can stop by on the way to flag football tomorrow.

Anyway, the house I linked above is beautiful.  It looks like a little beach house.  And it’s totally solar powered.  Imagine dozens of these set just off a nice clean beach, accessible by foot or bike, and maybe a hybrid bus, but no driveways or street parking.  Maybe there’s a few Sunfish pulled up on the sand, and a lost flip flop next to a path paved in crushed shells.

If that doesn’t make you nostalgic for your childhood, then I have to ask what the heck you did growing up.