I lost my wedding band for about an hour last night. We thought it had come off in the meatloaf when I was mixing/mashing it up, but we didn't find it there (we ate very carefully). I ended up finding it under the oven. That sucked.

As per the recent standard, I am having very bad luck with my desktop PC. It's randomly freezing. The forums and such claim that my specific problem is fixable, but none of their suggestions have worked. I'm debating between setting up WinXP immediately or just sticking it out and waiting for the new version of ubuntu to be released next month. I'm also thinking I should ditch ubuntu and go back to linux mint. Ubuntu is working like a champ on this laptop though. Super stable. In the words of Method Man, a demolition crew couldn't wreck it.

Stephen may be getting past his shy stage. He had a lot of fun with Steve last night and he showed no trepidation around my in-laws this weekend. He's doing lots of cool stuff. He's having a lot fewer tantrums now, and he can suddenly keep himself entertained for long periods. His favorite "toys" are still ridiculous, though. A pen inside an empty coke bottle. A carabiner with an empty key ring on it. Remote controls are still near the top of the list.

My wife's fantasy football team is a perfect example of the manipulative ability of wives. She's been softening me for six months. It started off as "Will you help me with my team next year?" This would receive a definitive response of "Hell no. I hate fantasy football." Then she would whine even though the draft was 6 months away. That behavior kept up the same for a while.. then as the draft approached she was always asking me what she should do (like I know). Then, during the draft, she didn't want me to go on a beer run because she couldn't possibly make any picks without me. Now it's the beginning of "who should I play?" every week. I found myself staying up until after 1am last night to see the conclusion of the last game of the week so I could make sure my wife's team won (they did, even though Ray Rice and her receivers completely sucked). Why am I constantly doing things I don't want to do? Oh, that's right--I'm married. I'm starting to see where all the cliche wife/husband jokes come from.

Well, I installed two distributions of linux today, national nerd day. I upgraded my desktop computer to the newest version of mint this morning. I had only one major problem, and fixing it involved temporarily moving my desktop computer upstairs so I could plug into the internet while I looked up a solution before Stephen woke up.

So, after I got that straightened out, Jaime brought in the mail, which had a replacement DVD-ROM drive for this laptop. I reformatted it and put Ubuntu 10.04 on it. Things are going well so far.

What a disaster my computer situation has been.

Three day weekend for working folks. Going to Jaime's parents' house tomorrow, and planning to do music stuff with Steve on Monday. Extra days are nice.

I was on such a roll yesterday. I accomplished so many nerdy things that I never thought I'd have the ability to accomplish.

First, I exported all my old livejournal entries and converted them to WordPress posts. This was all handled within WordPress and was all automated. There are some minor issues pertaining to formatting and some other things, but I'm all done! My old pictures (2005-2008) can be seen in the lj category: here. There are pictures from my wedding/honeymoon, new hampshire, all kinds of good stuff. It even imported all the old comments. Pretty happy about that.

It's interesting for me to see that, in many ways, I had no idea how to edit/optimize photos back in 2005-06, but I still managed to post a lot of good shots. I think that's because my original Nikon "coolpix" e5700 was able to do so many things on its own. Excellent macro support, RAW support, and a movable screen with live view made it a perfect "starter" camera. I often wonder what would have happened to my interest in photography if I had gotten a different camera at the time. I definitely miss being able to shoot in macro mode.

After that I spent quite a bit of time trying to understand style.css sheets and how all the different .php files come together to make all my pages/categories on this blog. I have a very simple layout on here, so I think I may have actually learned how it all works. I changed the sidebar on the right, gave it a grey background and got rid of the dividing line between the main section (here) and the sidebar (over to the right). I also took forever to make that custom search bar with no "search" button to click, and made a few pics for my "about me" section. A few steps in the right direction. Now I just need a banner at the top, and a few other things. This is easier than I thought. I've been so scared to edit anything (last time I learned anything about HTML, style sheets were not in use, and now they determine the entire look of your site) that I've avoided it all, maybe a bit too much.

Then, since I was on a roll, I looked up ways to make Ubuntu faster and ended up editing 4 config files (blindly trusting some people's blog posts and forum responses I found via Google). Still up and running in Linux, so I didn't break anything... I don't think. I'm starting to drink the Linux cool aid a little bit. It breaks down to two basic things for me. First, you are immune to everything Windows isn't. Shady website? Might have viruses? No big deal, I'm immune to all viruses in Linux. Second, if you care enough, you can make Linux do anything you want. For instance, when I receive an instant message (AIM service), my computer reads my messages aloud to me. It took a lot of work, but I hooked my AIM client through the "accessibility" text-to-speech synthesizer. In Linux, you have unfettered access to even the most sensitive files, so you can always fix whatever is wrong. If you care enough.

I started off trying to learn how to modify this crap so I can get my wife's blog (in the works) going, and in the process of learning how to do a few things, I took a 6-8hr detour and worked on my own site all day.

I'm getting back into a non-tv phase. This is a good thing--a very good thing. I used to watch cartoons all morning with Stephen, and then leave it on ESPN's endless loop of Sports Center all day. There is no reason to watch ESPN at all anymore since football is over. Without Merril Hoge, there is no analysis worth watching. Merril Hoge is the best post-game analysis personality, in any sport, on any channel. You have to ignore the fact that nearly all of his predictions are wrong; that is not his thing. I love all of his little "inside the play" replays.

I should just cancel all of my DVR recordings (PBS' Nature, FRONTLINE, Nova) and stop downloading documentary specials. I don't watch any of them. I just watch 60 Minutes every week. That's it. I'm listening to more music as a result, and writing more blog entries. (It's not all good, however. I spend a lot of time on link sites).

The verdict is that I really like Linux Ubuntu. If something goes wrong or does not work "out of the box," things get very difficult, very fast. For instance, my Logitech webcam was working in every program except Skype, but after searching a lot of forums, I found that the webcam works in Skype when I load it by typing "LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype" instead of just typing "skype." It was a pain to figure out, but now that I know, it's not a big deal. It would be much harder if I wasn't running GNOME. This old laptop doesn't even have enough power to run Skype video chat in Windows XP, so I don't actually have any other options.

Speaking of that, I spent about a hundred bucks last night to repair/upgrade this laptop (Dell laptop from 2004). This old battery lasts 7 minutes when unplugged, and the keyboard is kind of destroyed, so I spent about 50 bucks buying replacements for both of those. Hopefully replacing the keyboard is as easy as it looks. I also spent 49 bucks on 2gigabytes of memory. I'd like to extend the life of this laptop for at least a few more years. Running linux is already helping me turn this little pony into a fast horse, and upgrading the memory should make everything run smoothly even though I like to keep lots of software open (and 10+ tabs in my web browser).

Now that my photos site is all debugged and displaying properly, I have no excuse not to finish it. Still need to finish my little bio/profile/about page, and I'm going through several years of photographs, finding a few of the best ones to add. That is where they have been/will be some photos on here recently from a few years ago.

Well, I'm composing this post in linux (Ubuntu 9.10, to be exact). Now I can be an elitist. Yay.

They make it so easy to set up a dual boot. You can download a "Windows Installer" that automatically sets up a partition and the dual boot screen when you restart. It also leaves Windows XP as the default boot option (something that doesn't take over your PC, how refreshing).

First and foremost, when you set up a new computer or operating system, you try to get on the internet. Well, that didn't work for me. After reinstalling Ubuntu three separate times, printing about 50 pages of forum nonsense, and typing "sudo [command]" about 200 times, I finally got Ubuntu to recognize the WiFi card in this laptop. I was immediately introduced to the negative aspects of linux. Supporters of linux say "It's not linux' fault that manufacturers don't make drivers for linux!" I had to use ndiswrapper to convert Windows XP drivers into linux drivers. Finding the correct drivers was a snap, the rest is entirely linux' fault. They have to know that a lot of people are going to encounter the same problem that I did, and they do absolutely nothing to make it intuitive to new users. I had to download 4 packages (installers for utilities/software) on another computer, burn them to a cd, install them in Ubuntu, and then figure out how to use the wrapper. Then I had to diagnose what the conflicts were and remove the other...... okay, I'm bored typing this, so I can only imagine how it is reading it. I'll stop now.

The point: it is definitely linux' fault that this nonsense isn't at all accessible. I am in at least the 98th percentile of computer users, and it took me 8-10 hours of work to get the internet on this sleek, modernized installation of linux. There is nowhere I can go and click "disable all default WiFi drivers," for instance, which would have saved me a lot of time. At least do something to try to make it intuitive for new users. From what I read, my problem occurs in a large percentage of Ubuntu installs, yet there is still no easy (or even reasonable) fix.

I guess it's just a different mindset.

There are some advantages I have already found. You update all your software from one window. Just a few clicks, and all the software on your whole setup is updated at once. Also, Ubuntu natively supports a desktop that is twice as big as your monitor. Just scroll over, and you have the space of a whole other desktop. It also natively supports scrolling by dragging with two fingers at once on the trackpad (like a MAC). That's something that could get addicting. I already use it kind of naturally when browsing. No need to find the scroll bar to browse further down on a web page. We'll see how this pans out.

Also, all software downloads files to the same place. Adjusting the colors/theme of your setup takes effect on all installed software.