Jay’s Life

Staysea and I had to postpone our wedding planned for next summer; but you can help us have our wedding this summer at the CNE! We have been selected as one of the 10 finalists, and it will be an awesome party!

Vote for us here: http://www.northamericanmidway.com/motm/cne/weddingvote.aspx

So while Jason was away with Paul, Mark, Aman and John up at his parents place I had to get out of the house to keep myself from falling asleep. I headed down to HomeSense to spend a couple of hours browsing and getting ideas for our place. I do this quite frequently, and a couple of months ago I came across these dishes, fell madly in love with them and bought every one in the store….which was only two sets. After many ebay searches and google searches I was never able to find more dishes, even Janine looked in the stores up near her place. So I resigned myself to only having two place settings….UNTIL TODAY! I walked into HomeSense today and SCORE!! they had two whole sets (16 place settings)! I picked up 6 more place settings to complete my set at 8!!! I’m pretty darn happy about it, there was no way I wanted to spend that kind of money today but it was an opportunity not to be missed. Yay!

I used to read BoingBoing but no more. After 3 Goatse references in 4 days. I don’t care what is said on the blog at all. That’s enough, it’s a horrible thing, and if you don’t now what I’m talking about then I suggest you DON’T go looking for an answer. They are done in my RSS reader.

This weekend I finally got a motherboard back from ASUS RMA that actually worked (took 3 tries) and I went on a quest for a new operating system, XP was getting old.

I started with Vista Beta 2, the next generation of operating system from Microsoft. Being a cautious individual that I am with my data, I decided to install Vista to a separate hard drive. No go. It couldn’t copy the files from my DVD that I burned from their download. Try number 2, use the DVD that I ordered. Nope. Went to reboot back into my XP install, and found that the other drive had been corrupted some how. After much swearing and fear of loss, I managed to do a partition recovery with Active@ Partition Recovery v 3.0, yay!

For the Second attempt I tried SuSE 10.1, a very nice distribution helped out by the good people at Novell. The installer had some problems, when it got to the choosing which drive to install to. After some troubleshooting it turned out, that the recovered partition table from my Vista attempt was not all that it should be. In fact there was now an extra 5 mb partition at the end of the drive. Why? I have no idea.

So, instead of installing SuSE, I reinstalled XP, copied all the files off of the original drive, to my new drive, except of course for the ones that where unreadable. Disk check did not solve any problems nor did it find them despite XPs’ unwillingness to copy said files that Disk check said where okay. Anyhow, 10 hours later, data all backed up, completely wipe the partitions from the drive and ready to install.

Back to installing SuSE. It installed. It updated. It was rather disappointing, and I had issues getting it to recognize that my ATI X1300 Pro graphics card had 2 outputs, so my computer looked more like a ridiculous stereo-scope rather than a nice dual desktop system. I couldn’t figure out how to get the package manager to install unstable packages where all the good stuff is anyways. I also found it S-L-O-W. So onto my next choice.

Enter Fedora Core 5. Now this may have been a mistake from the beginning, but it was what I had downloaded and sitting on install disks, so I gave it a shot. Success on seeing that my video card should have 2 outputs. Failure on actually installing the ATI drivers. But faster than SuSE. But still not good enough, if I was going to give up Windows I needed at the very least faster and dual monitor with proper 3D drivers.

Enter Ubuntu Linux, or to be more precise Ubuntu 6.06 Desktop Edition. Now, here was a nice install. The CD booted into the operating system, not an installer. I was able to try out everything, get a feel for the layout and the possibilities before installing. Six step installer was clearly labeled on the desktop, merely asked my name and where I wanted to install the system. ATI drivers installed without a hitch, dual desktops where up and running with them both showing their own information (opposed to mirroring on both screens). I have to say that I like it. Nice and fast.

So 3 days and 5 OSs later, I have a working machine that I’m happy with. I look forward to getting to know more about the system as I use it. Most of my experiences with linux have been in the terminal world on servers, so this is new to me.

Technorati Tags: linux, Ubuntu, Vista

This week we had to say goodbye to Vegas and Martini. I loved them both very much and miss them every moment.

I’ve had Vegas for about three years now, he was one of my first rescued birds when Jason and I decided we couldn’t be a foster home to cats and dogs anymore but we could find room in our home and our hearts for budgies. He came to us with Glacier from a home where they’d been pets for a three year old child. He’s always been very special to me and a very important part of the ever changing flock, he played a major role in integrating new birds to the flock, he had a very friendly manner and was never timid or afraid to dive bomb me when I had treats for the birds. He was a very special bird and I miss him sorely.

Martini came to live with us last summer, she was part of the eight very sick and badly ‘damaged’ birds we took in. I named her after Melissa and Paul’s cat because their generosity gave us the means to save her life. She had a very slow and heart wrenching recovery and for months I worried for her health, but despite her terrible condition she pulled through. She stayed on with the rest of the flock and became a permanent resident of the bird room because her recovery was an inspiration to me. I would watch her fly and play and know I was watching a miracle. Now this summer I’m praying for another miracle in order to save the rest of my birds for this terrible disease and with the help of our very dedicated veterinarians Dr. Mackenzie and Dr. Jakes we are doing everything in our power to fight for their survival.

There is an effort being made to make a registry of Linux users, in order to get some sort of estimate as to how many users there are out there. I’ve been using Linux since 1995, primarily as a server platform for routing my home internet, and hosting my mail and web services. If you’re a user, you can help out and register yourself.

Via Digg

Register here

Technorati Tags: linux

Staysea and I went to see Superman Returns at the IMAX in 3D. It was a fantastic movie. It picks up some time after the 2nd movie from the original series, before they made the crappy movies. The 3D was nice, it’s not the entire movie, but there are 4 scenes, where the 3D really gives a different perspective from traditional movies. I particularly enjoyed the performance Brandon Routh as Superman. He worked in a number of the subtle expressions that made the character so outstanding when played by Christopher Reeve. At the same time he had a fantastic presence that made me believe that he was invincible.