musings

By the Great Cthulhu, I proclaim my hatred for WindowsXP! (I hate all flavours of Windows, but today XP has earned my ire.) All I wanted to do was share a directory so that I could pull the files from it off my laptop and onto my Linux machine. In NT/2K, I could right-click on the directory and pick “Sharing…” from the menu and I’d be able to share that directory. In XP the same action gets me a dialog box that bitches at me, telling me sharing could compromise the security of my machine (duh) and bullying me into running a stupid bloody network setup wizard. Like a total idiot I ran the stupid wizard. The wizard didn’t seem to do anything except obfuscate my network connection – it added a “Network Bridge” and routed my wireless adapter, wired adapter and firewire card through it. Oh yeah, it did one other thing too. It totally hosed my network connection. It took me nearly half an hour to get things straight again. In the end, I just fired up an ftp server on the Linux box and ftp’d the files from the laptop to the desktop. Should’ve just done that in the first place. Gah.

I feel like a total dumbass today. See, I got home from work, and decided to cook a bit. Make some lunch for tomorrow. I’m chopping away, like a whirldwind. Tomatoes! Carrots! Shallots! >slice<. That didn’t seem right. That wasn’t shallot I just sliced. Nope. Not shallot. Thumb. Before you get panicky, it wasn’t a big cut, nor was it deep. In fact, all I did was slice off a chunk of my thumbnail. Of course, thumbnail is attached to thumb, so in the process of hacking off a bit of my thumbnail I hacked off a bit of my thumb with it. There’s a dull annoying pain at the end of my thumb now, which is interspersed with little jabs of pain whenever I manage to put pressure on the (I stress again, small) wound. I probably wouldn’t have done this had I actually owned a sharp knife, but since my knife is dull, I was putting quite a lot of oomph behind it. So, let this be a lesson to you – use good quality tools, and be careful with them. If you don’t, you’ll be like me – a dumbass.

So it was my good friend Cyrus’ birthday yesterday, and we arranged a bit of a surprise party for him. We started out at a nice little place in Yorkville called Hemingway’s – decent food, nice place to sit and talk, and really cute wait staff (always a good thing). After Hemingway’s we headed off to a place just off the University of Toronto campus called The Madison (or Madison’s, whatever). The Madison was, for me, a total nightmare. Really. The second floor, which is where the group wanted to go, is a piano bar. A piano bar where singing along is encouraged. It’s a piano bar where the average age of the crowd is 21. I felt like the bloody chaperone in the place. And to make it all worse yet, it’s a piano bar (with piano bar music) where the piano player/singer is only tolerable at best. I’m sure that in the deepest depths of inebriation the place is great, but I’m not what you’d call a drinker, so I wasn’t ever likely to reach the point where I’d actually enjoy the music. We got in there, and the first thing I heard him play was some crappy old tune by John Denver, followed by Simon and Garfunkel (okay, I don’t mind Simon and Garfunkel, but it’s really not Saturday Night Party Music) some other song I can’t remember and then Sweet Home Alabama. I hate that damn song. I hate it even more when the performer makes mistakes playing it. As far as I’m concerned, being forced to listen to that song is like being stabbed. Hearing it played badly is like being shot. I was begging Paula to kill me, or at least present me with some form of escape. Fortunately for me, that sentiment was shared by Paula, Sandy and Cy, so we booked out of there as fast as our feet could carry us and made our way to Funhaus where the music and crowd was much more to our liking. It was really great to spend an evening with Cyrus, Paula and Sandy. The four of us hadn’t been out together at a club in something like five or six years. I’m looking forward to doing something like this again soon.

Moved furniture into the new office yesterday.
Got up early to get into work this morning.
So tired.
So very tired.

I am a happy camper today. See, I’ve got this great notebook computer – an eMachines M5310 (it appears that said machine is no longer for sale, in favour of the new M5312, which seems to be the same machine with a larger hard drive). It’s a great computer, but it comes with WinXP. Now, I hate WinXP, but it does offer me a very convenient way to get photos off my digital cameras (I’ve never been able to get either of my cameras or my flash card readers to work reliably in Linux.) Unfortunately, I need the notebook to be a Linux box for work. The machine came with a 40G drive, which I was going to dual boot, but I was afraid I’d smoke the existing partition if I tried Partition Magic or some similar software, so I bought a 60G drive and swapped it for the one in the machine. I then used the eMachines “rescue” cds to restore the original software to the machine. Turns out, it’s a 3 cd ghost image that just gets restored to the drive. So now I’ve got a 60G NTFS partition on the drive. Great. Exactly what I didn’t need. I don’t have Partition Magic, and I didn’t want to shell out big coin (hey, I’m self-employed so $69.95 USD is big coing right now) and buy it for what would be (I hope) one use. Fortunately I found the System Rescue CD, which is a Gentoo Linux based Linux boot disc that comes with a whole host of great system tools like the excellent QtParted. QtParted is a partition editor that groks all kinds of partitions including NTFS5, the WinXP variant. So now, I have a 25G WinXP partition (more than enough to process my digital photos, and even enough room for a game or two) and a 30-something gig partition that’s just waiting for a Gentoo install. Cheers to Gentoo, System Rescue CD and QtParted crews for making my life just that tiny bit easier.

I’ve nothing new to say.
Okay, something new. I’ve updated the link to XianMrtyr’s blog so that it points directly to his LiveJournal, and I’ve added a link to Boing Boing in the sidebar. Yeah, over in the top right.