The new chapter (“A Journey in the Dark”) begins here. More to come.
linux again
Windows doesn’t work particularly well, though there are some advantages to using it. It supports a lot of hardware.
That’s about all I can think of right now. I had always intended to go back to Linux at some point, but inertia is powerful stuff. But then I saw an ad for a new way to use Linux: a bootable flash drive containing the Mandriva distribution. It will run right off the flash drive, not disturbing your Windows installation at all. No repartitioning of the hard drive needed. If your computer doesn’t support booting from a USB device, you can make a CD to boot from. All your Linux files are saved on the flash drive.
So far, it works great. It doesn’t support my USB modem, but it likes the serial modem I moved over from my ancient desktop box. It supports my printer. I thought it didn’t have an FTP client (that’s how I move files from my computer to the website), but it turns out you can use Konqueror (sort of the Linux equivalent of both Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer) as an FTP client. Just open two windows, one on the local machine, one showing the remote machine, and move files back and forth.
music
This was from something I posted on a friend’s LiveJournal:
1. Top Five Bands
– Poco
– Roxy Music
– Leonard Cohen
– Tori Amos
– David Bowie
2. Top Five Songs from Band 1 – Poco
– Magnolia
– Dallas
– If I Needed Someone
– Bareback
– Rose of Cimarron
3. Top Five Songs from Band 2 – Roxy Music
– Remake/Remodel
– Editions of You
– Out of the Blue
– If There is Something
– Serenade
4. Top Five Songs from Band 3 – Leonard Cohen
– The Future
– Anthem
– Traveling Lady
– The Stranger Song
– Waiting for the Miracle
5. Top Five Songs from Band 4 – Tori Amos
– Take to the Sky/Muhammad My Friend (from the DVD)
– Sugar
– Caught a Light Sneeze
– Horses
– Marianne
6. Top Five Songs from Band 5 – David Bowie
– I’m Afraid of Americans
– Under Pressure
– New Killer Star
– ‘Heroes’
– Kooks
7. Top Five Favorite Songs
– Bury Me Standing (Ratdog)
– Absolute Beginners (David Bowie, from the BBC Live CD)
– Rattlesnakes (Tori Amos)
– Cassidy (Bob Weir)
– Throwing Stones (Ratdog)
8. Top Five Most Hated Songs
– Total Eclipse of the Heart
– Making Love Out of Nothing at All
– I Will Always Love You (the Whitney Houston version)
– My Heart Will Go On (Celine Dion, with the dialogue from the movie Titanic)
– any other song with dialogue from a movie in it
9. Five Desert Island Albums
– Boys for Pele (Tori Amos)
– Bareback at Big Sky (Poco)
– Concert for George (various artists)
– Firebird (Paul Cotton)
– Hissing of Summer Lawns (Joni Mitchell)
(I think multi-disk “best of” compilations are cheating on a “desert Island” list.)
10. Guilty Pleasures
– Does Alanis Morissette count?
