About a year ago a switch tripped in my brain and I became a Techno convert. I started easy with Soma.fm’s Tags Trance channel, then discovered Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music, then, hallelujah, discovered Di.fm, and first heard a DJ Doboy mix. God Damn this is good, good, good mixing.
I’ve been spreading, virally, my enthusiasm for Doboy. I listen to his mixes continuously while I’m hacking. The music, the hacking, the confluence of brain waves, all builds an awesome coding mind space.
Where do you find DJ Doboy? You’ve got to dig it out of the Web yourself. He retired in 2007. Just hop on Goodle and ride, Baby.
Talk about falling into a Worm Hole and disappearing forever… Have you ever tried to configure your Linux box to display your desktop on two monitors? I have. I’ve succeeded when I had the right graphics card, but the rest of the time I want to howl at the moon.
It’s that bad. I’m not one of those Idealistic Save The World Free as In Freedom Linux Fan Boys. I just want something that works with my two big monitors. In my work I use lots of operating systems: OS X, XP, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, and (picture me barfing up in an alley) Vista. As long as I have Vim and grep, and lots of screen real estate, I’m a happy hacker.
It’s just that all of my Intel boxes have that crapulous Windows Vista on them. I tried to live with it for a while. My benchmarks (mostly Ruby scripts and PHP) run fine. Great multimedia software, and my printers all work. Nicest of all is that it’s trivial to use multiple monitors (and I’ve got a stack of them on my desk!).
You’re all set up, then it happens. You try to shutdown the machine, and it auto-reboots endlessly. You try to kill a runaway Firefox process and you can’t, not without rebooting. Hey, it feels like 1995 all over again. All you can think about is getting that cancer out of your hardware.
So I get fed up and pull out Gparted and carve out an Ext3 partition and spend three days installing Linux on my Thinkpad. I start with Ubuntu—it can’t see my windows partitions, so I download Fedora. Same deal. Then SuSE, and Debian. They all suck. One can’t see my wireless card. One can’t see the disk. When I’m about to give up, I try Mandriva and everything works…except there’s no way to display the desktop on two monitors. Of course, it does mirroring, but what a waste of expensive hardware.
I’ll be glad when operating systems are extinct, like dinosaurs. After the last three days I’m totally ready to move to a Pacific Island and read detective novels for 10 years or so. I’ll bring my Raymond Chandler collection… Anyone want to join me?
I’m not really a Republican or a Democrat, but I thought this might be appropriate for this political season.
I worked Saturday. As usual I took the train down and back. Most of the time the ride gives me a few moments to day dream, think the unexpected thoughts, and read the news on my iPhone. Thanks, Steve. Nice job. Too bad the Version 2 update slowed everything to a crawl.
On the way back the platform was nearly empty…only a few Stanford students heading back toward the City. But the train was packed with high school twerps. I looked into the next car and saw that the inmates of Bedlam had been released into the world, so I sat among the Dopers.
Every school has Dopers…the future vagrants and pregnant teens who impress each other with how much they can drink, smoke, and steal. The conductor made a lame attempt to check their tickets, but shook his head and passed through the to check the tickets of the adults on the car. During the week the conductors persecute and publicly humiliate the business travelers who have an expired ticket. That citation is a $250 dinger. But Saturday the Lovefesters rode for free.
Conversation in front of me:
–Dude, I’m on probation. If if smoke up today at the Lovefest, will it show on my drug test next week?
–Fuck if I know. Look what I got here. (He pulls out a strip of blotter paper.) I’m gonna cut this Dude. Everyone gets to see the lights tonight! Hey, assholes! Who wants a square? Drop a square of be square.
–Fuck you, Dude! That’s awesome. Have some! (Sweet looking girl passes a bottle of whiskey to cool Acid Dude.)
–Man, you gonna do that now? On the train, says red-faced drunken twerp.
–Fuck yes. Right here. In plain sight. Why the fuck not?
–Ohh! Man, your shit don’t stink…(Lots of laughter from twerps. Old people on train look alarmed, shocked, and outraged.)
–Man, you need a knife to cut that? (Red-faced twerp pulls out wicked looking commando knife and hands it to felon twerp.)
–Dude, if I handle this blotter, will Acid show up on the drug test??? Studid question, I know…
–You are stupid, you dumb fuck…
–Aw, fuck. Fuck those asshole PAs. They’re fuckers and I’m just having some fun doing my thing…
–Getting ready for the Lovefest! Arrggh!
Just like the 60′s, I thought. Getting high, thinking about Mother Earth, Politics, The War, Fighting the Man, Raising Consciousness…that’s what it’s all about. Oh, damn… I mean, it’s Lovefest, Dude. It’s all about paaartying and selling booze. Thank you Booze Companies for providing the Lovefest Generation with some faux Good Old Days.
Riding the train on weekends. Think twice before you do it.
