| Current mood: |  busy |
| Current music: | SEDUCTION - Mega Man 2 Chillout OC Remix |
pre-vacation preparations
Yes, I'm back from vacation. However, I still need to finish the entry for that. In the meantime, I'll remain out of contact. Don't worry, I'll get this done soon. Here's a small entry to tide you over, from May 25th.
I'm a failure as a computer user. I switched from Windows... to Linux... to Windows. Before you techies start bashing me, let me explain. Recently, I had the urge to clean out my computer and make a fresh start. A laptop only for doing work, watching videos, viewing images, listening to music, and downloading more videos/images/music. Notice the lack of "games" in that list. After trying out all sorts of new games during my first year at UT, from Civ 3 to Painkiller to old skool Quake, I feel burned out. I'm still up for a game of Quake 3 or UT2K4, but with the exception of emulators, I've lost the spirit of gaming. Anyways, I figured this would be a perfect time to switch over to Linux. No more unstable OS or useless programs to bog me down. So when we went to Half Price Books to find some Japanese phrase books (more on this later), I found "Linux for Dummies" for 15 bucks (as opposed to 40). Also came with Red Hat 8.0, although I later found out that 9.0 was already out. I went through a Linux tutorial online and looked through part of the book, then decided to take the plunge.
At first, I went for Mandrake. Mandrake 10.0 is out, but the ISOs are available only to those with membership (basically stating that you'll help out financially with the project). They should be available by the end of the month, but I managed to find a website that had the ISOs. During installation, Mandrake did ask for a 4th cd, and I only had 3. Didn't make much of a difference, though. So I was now a proud Mandrake user. Let's fire up Kopete (Mandrake's IM program) and spread the news. Oop. Kopete crashed while connecting to AIM. Let's get the latest version and install it. Oop. How the hell do I install stuff on Linux? I tried installing, but it didn't seem to work. Oh well. Let's install VideoLAN instead.
By the way, VideoLAN is an excellent video program. I think it comes with a whole bunch of codecs, because it plays almost anything I throw at it. With the exception of .rm, .qt, and .wmv files, since those are proprietary. Damn you Windows/Real/Apple.
If there was one program I couldn't live without on Linux, it's VideoLAN. And I couldn't get that to work either. So I decided to bust out the Red Hat cds. While doing Linux-on-laptop research online, I found out that Red Hat had problems detecting the ethernet card on Inspiron 5100s. Unfortunately, Linux couldn't read my CD-RW, and the external hard drive we bought for backup purposes wouldn't work on Linux (except if a network hub was between them). Since Dell decided floppy drives were so last decade, I had to use an entire CD-R for about 100 kilobytes of material. And guess what? I couldn't set up that driver either! From the two procedures I found, none of them worked. So once again, I went back to Mandrake. And suddenly I couldn't get the internet anymore. By now, it was getting late, so I reinstalled Windows and called it a night.
The next day, I found out that our router was acting funky. My mom couldn't get the internet either, but my sister was doing fine downloading stuff on Bittorrent. So once again, I fired up Mandrake and encountered the same problems. Plus, hotplugging (think plug and play for Linux) would hang up my laptop when shutting down. I had no other choice.
The one benefit from all this? I cleaned out my computer. =) I usually have to live with a gig or less of space. I had around 15 gb free after cleaning it out before installing Linux. Now after reinstalling Windows and moving back all my anime/videos/manga/music/emulator games, I have around 20 gb free. woot! Now I have to work on the two desktops... oy.
So why didn't I just tinker with Linux some more? Because tomorrow morning we leave for Japan. 5-6 days there, then Taiwan for about a month. We might hit Thailand sometime between going to Taiwan and going back home. Since I wanted to bring the laptop, we (the whole family) wanted something that actually worked.
Japan. The mecca for anime fans. Although there is a catch. If you don't know Japanese (like some of my friends at anime club), then you won't get maximum enjoyment because you can't understand the stuff you buy. =( I'll probably have to restrict myself to artbooks (since those will be in Japanese anyway) and rare merchandise I can't get here.
Hmm. Getting late. I probably won't be able to finish another topic.
This site is god-like when it comes to anime wallpaper. Heck, it's not really "wallpaper" but uber high quality drawings and CGs from all sorts of artists and studios (from Japanese games and series to Talesweaver and Ragnarok Online).
18 pages down. 147 total. *eep*
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