Basking in JP.

Fucking-A. I’m sitting here listening to Judas Priest’s British Steel album and it’s just as killer as the last time I heard the whole thing about 23 years ago. Next up is Point of Entry, and then Screaming For Vengance followed by Defenders of the Faith. Actually none of these albums I’ve listened to in entirety since the 80’s.

Good ‘ol Metal. Nothing quite like it. Eventhough it was like a guilty pleasure during the years I was so punk it hurt I cant help but recall going to the record store to buy Defenders when it first came out when I was like 12 years old. I still remember the liner notes on the sleeve that broke down the order of solos between Glen Tipton and K.K. Downing.

I never thought I’d live long enough or be so lame as to appreciate nostalgia. And here I am, a hair away from 36 and I’m just like my mom was with spinning that goddam Fleetwood Mac Rumors album up until she passed away in the early 90’s. Or, worse yet, maybe I’m like those fucking people who listen to the Grateful Dead or something.

Its true though. I actually tried when I got out of prison to try and check out some newer bands. But, with the exception of a very few like Fucked Up, Municipal Waste and my new guilty pleasure The Mars Volta, plus maybe three others…well, nothing really sparked my interest much. Not as much as stuff I was into decades ago. I cant even begin to describe the joy I felt at finding Christ on Parade’s Sounds of Nature ep and a Poison Idea discography.

And this, of course, some classic Judas Priest. Which I need to go bask in rather than writing a stupid post at this utterly pointless blog. Oh well, at least I’m not writing about Linux.

Regress, no way?

So it finally came down to it. I had a desktop loaded with Ubuntu 7.10, and I just got another one for my birthday loaded with Windows Xp. I also was given a laptop loaded with Windows home premium, which I quickly wiped and set up with Ubuntu 8.04. I was figuring I’d strip the one machine of Xp and load it with one Linux distro or another and use it to run a wireless router.

Well, here’s the thing-I’ve been running Linux on my computer since December, and y’know, at first all the configuring and whatnot was all cool and charming and made it a neato D.I.Y. project. It wasn’t particularly hard, and usually no great amount of work. But it just starts to wear after awhile, and by the time I went through configuring the wireless card on the laptop I really didn’t look forward to doing the same with the goddam router.

But I gave it a shot. And got nowhere using an old router we had laying around. So then I decide to go buy a new router with all the software and everything then just install it on the Windows box and run it from there.

And it worked. Not without some hitches, but it worked. So now I’ve slipped back to using Windows on one of my computers. I dont like it all too much, but until I figure out how to make the router run off my Linux desktop I guess I’m officially a double agent or some shit.

My New Toy.

So here I am typing away on my new laptop. Having the most awesome wife in the world has its benefits; she gave me two computers for my birthday.

I actually attempted to give Vista home premium a try, but after six months of using Linux I just couldn’t stand windoz. So I’ve been running Ubuntu 8.04 on the laptop and its basically magnificent. Took a little work to get the wireless performing, but by work I mean posting a question on the Ubuntu forum and copy and pasting some terminal commands.

So I’m quite stoked to say the least.

BLAG is a go. Well, almost.

So I gave BLAG Linux a try. I don’t rightly know what made me do it, I mean I’d seen it mentioned a couple of places but all I really knew was that it was Fedora based. Maybe it was just because it shared the same first name as that dude from the Dwarves.

At any rate, I went to the BLAG website to download it and was greeted by a simple declaration:

blag - le brixton linux action group

works to overthrow corporate control of information and technology through community action and spreading Free Software.

<!–

–>blag - blag linux and gnu

blag is an operating system. blag has a suite of graphics, internet, audio, video, office, and peer  to peer file sharing applications. you can replace a windoz installation with blag. if you would like to install and run blag, download and burn it to cd.

No array of selling points making it out to be the best Linux distro on the planet or anything, and the fact that they seemed almost a tad bit militant, made me definately interested. I also had the feeling that they might be anarchists, a feeling that was confirmed by following some of the links on the main page. So I downloaded the iso and burned it cd then went about installing BLAG on my old assed, cantankerous machine.

Everything went smoothly. Installation was a snap and blag auto detected all of my hardware properly except my sound card which took all of about 90 seconds to fix. I just loaded the standard repositories on install-though it gives the option to add additional repositories-so, though I didn’t quite have a mass of software to choose from and only stuff that was free in both senses was included, there was still plenty enough choices for my needs. In fact, I doubt I would have even needed to add additional repositories.

The desktop enviornment was GNOME, though I’m fairly sure I could have also loaded KDE or Xfce (I’m not totally certain on that though) and the browser was Firefox. It also included the Mozilla Thunderbird email application. Everything was working fine, I immediately liked BLAG once it was running on my box-only there was one problem I ran into. The stock Bit Torrent client was weak, however Azureus was included in the software repository (oh, and let me mention-this was my first experience with using an Red Hat Package Manager add/remove. It was a little slower than I was used to but quite easy to use) so I loaded that and went to go download me some torrentage. No go, I just couldn’t seem to connect for shit eventhough my ports were properly forwarded and everything.

After trying everything I knew to remedy the problem I went to the support forums. People suggested it might be a problem with my ISP, so to check I took a blunt insturment approach. I installed a different distro and ran Azureus-this time with success.

However, tomorrow I’m putting BLAG back in. I got a couple more responses at the forum with some suggestions on how to possibly fix things so I’m going to give it a shot. Overall though, I’d like to stick with BLAG Linux if at all possible-if for no other reason than after months of trying out different distributions I finally found a non-Ubuntu family one thats a snap to install and configure and basically works like a charm. Also, I’m heartily in agreement ideologically with BLAG and I think that counts for something.

Hardly.

Well, I’m back after a few days of trying to recover from my Hardy Heron adventure. I’m not going to outright claim that the latest Ununtu release is utter crap, it just had some problems that made it, for me, basically unusable.

I was all excited waiting for the release, I’d been looking forward to it for a while. So, on the first day it came out I tried to upgrade from the Gutsy Gibon version I was using. No go, the servers were getting murdered that first day so I just decided to download the iso and do a fresh install from a cd.

All was well at first, the only noticable hitch being a screen resolution glitch that left me having to use 1280×1024 resolution. Then, of course there was some bigger problems. I was unable to unpack and install tar.gz files-the odd thing was bash just apparently didn’t recognize some standard commands and neither would it acknowledge the existence of entire directories. And there’s more-I also was unable to delete or trash any files. Not via the GUI, nor the terminal even when logged in as root.

So I tried some blunt insturment approaches, eventually winding up installing Kubuntu 8.04 (basically the KDE desktop version of Hardy) which worked in that I didn’t have the previous problems…however my sound wouldn’t work.

So I just went back to Gutsy, and pretty soon I’m going to give BLAG Linux a spin.

Through all of this though, I’ve never thought of going back to Windows.

The Floater.

So, this afternoon Dee and I went down to the waterfront to feed the birds. We had a couple of big bags of bread, and it was a beautiful day outside, everything was shaping up to be a really swell day.

Well, there’d been a bunch of geese and ducks hanging out in this giant puddle type thing off to the side of where the road goes out to Dobbins’ landing. We’d fed the birds there before, but as we walked down today we saw that the puddle/pond had dried up and the birds had moved a little ways and were waddling around off to the side by the parking lot next to the Maritime Museum. So we went over there and fed a bunch of them. Dee even had some ducks eating right out of her hand, and I was able to hand feed a bunch of geese. It was pretty cool.

So then, after the bread ran out and all the birds were stuffed we walked over to a dock to look at the fish (There’s always schools of minnows and some baby perch and bass swimming by the dock). We stood there looking at the fish for awhile, and I said to my wife jokingly, “Hey, look there…whats that, a hand?”. She was just like “Stop trying to freak me out. Wouldn’t that be weird though?” I agreed, it would be weird to see a body floating next to the dock like that, and we headed back up towards State street. On the way up I looked and saw an ambulance back down by the landing but thought nothing of it.

We got home and later switched on the local news. The big story was that the body of a middle aged woman had been pulled out of the lake next to the landing. I shit you not, the ambulance I had seen was used to transport the body. There we were not a hundred yards from where a dead body was floating joking about seeing a floater, totally oblivious.

…and for the cockroaches; it is armageddon time.

The little fuckers came back. After about three months of seeming victory they stormed the gates and we spotted five in one day. So much for the ultrasonic roach repellant boxes.

So, today I got a barrel o’ poison off the maintenance d00d and set about to drenching the premises. As I sit here typing the fumes are near overwhelming and I can’t help but wonder if the whole scheme will backfire with me winding up pickled with roach poison fumes, laying on my back my legs kicking wildly in the air as I gasp my last breath. Well, as the old song goes, if you’re going to die-die with your boots on.

Lets see if I can do this in under 23 minutes.

Well, its been a good day so far. Went to Hamot (the hospital near fullmetalgerbilHQ) with my wife and I got an EKG. Some minor problems with my insurance, so now I’ll have a few hundred dollar bill to pay or whatever. These bills just keep racking up. I take medication that requires blood tests and an annual EKG, but my insurance only pays for inpatient hospital stays. Kind of odd considering I’m on disability and my having to take medications, and therefore be tested, due to that disability-while my medical insurance comes from the same place I get my disability payments. Whuteva. The American healthcare system is so advanced.

Fuck, y’know, I was sitting here a little while ago and I decided to write so I figured I’d put on some music. Well, I’ve learned a very important lesson. Do not try to blog while listening to 9 Shocks Terror. Great fucking band, its just like trying to type amidst a goddam jetliner crash.

Chelsea Clinton was here again today, apparently just a few blocks away in Perry square campaigning for dear old mom. Hm, I secretly wish some of the regular park dwelling homeless would have been there panhandling or passed out on benches, but I’m sure the authori-tays made sure all the homeless types would remain invisible during her visit. I wonder just how many homeles people are going to vote in November. I think we should just give them guns.

So I done went and started a secret squirrel blog elsewhere where I can sort of blow off rant steam. Its secret squirrel so I’m not about to divulge the URL. Big Brother will just have to track me down and throw me in Guantanamo the hard way on this one. Surely, I jest. I would never speak ill of the Homeland and government in a public forum. Gawd Bless State and Capital.

Well, looks like I ran a little over my 23 minute mark. I really should be able to knock out a post like this in ten minutes-I mean obviously my writing doesn’t necessitate much thought on my part-but I type slow and I’m often sidetracked by lighting cigarettes and staring at the lights on my computer trying to ascribe some sort of weighty existential meaning to it all.

Revamped n’ shit.

Nothing important here, just a notice that I changed the name of the blog and the theme again-which should be quite obvious. I guess since I do this so often I dont get the “branding” effect of staying with the same thing for like, ever. Well, it mattters not. I just wanted to go back to a darker theme but dont ask me where I got the new title from, basically its just my WordPress user name with a .duh tacked on for all those who just dont get this whole thing.

I guess I really should get around to registering or something.

Here and there I’ve made certain comments here about the upcoming presidential election. Hopefully I’ve made it clear that I’m not even all that sure that I’ll vote. I mean, really none of the candidates represent what I would call my interests-that being a stateless, classless society sort of like the Smurfs had. Voting would be lending legitimacy to the state and money-commodity economy while encouraging the whole big, evil exploitive System that is pushing our species towards extinction. Or something like that.

Really though its more like inertia from years and years of believing that stuff and not voting. I dont particularly think it makes all that much of a difference one way or the other-who one votes for or whether one votes or not-however, for some reason the current political spectacle has me rather in thrall. And thus I’ve been thinking of actually voting this time around. Just thinking about it.

But of course were I to vote I would first have to be registered. As my wife reminded me this evening. She then went on to remind me that since I’m not registered I cant vote and therefore really have no buisness writing about electoral politics and saying I might vote.

So now I’m just going to say I might go ahead and register then decide whether or not I’m going to vote. Or if I’m just going to go meet up with the underground barbarian anarchist hordes and join the revolution.