CheezyOranges

So its Thursday, the day I stay late at work and close up. I get the luxury of coming in late on Thursdays, which is nice. I always stop by Pita Pit and pick up lunch on my way into campus. And I normally have to consider where I park, because Thursdays were the nights I’d give Jason a ride back to Pegasus Landing. But, its been a week since his funeral, and the Faculty Center is still sort of reeling from the whole thing. Jason’s computer is back from the shop and we’re going to have to hire someone to take his place. We haven’t done any public memorial about him, but our 10th anniversary is coming up and we’ll probably do something for that. After all, he’s the second person (I think) to have passed away who worked here. Its still just a stunner. I keep thinking, maybe this is all a bad dream and I’ll go to work and he’ll still be here. But I know it isn’t. He was a really good friend to a lot of people, and we miss him a lot.

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About 6 months ago, I installed Ruby on Rails on one of our web servers at work. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the proper time or resources to get to know the development platform very well, and so the server fell by the wayside. I found out yesterday that it had been deleted from our virtual server repository. So it got me to thinking again on trying to learn how to use Ruby at work.
Only problem is that work won’t see it as an asset because they’ve been through the ‘application built in a language only one tech knows who then goes somewhere else and can’t maintain said application’ thing. We have an inventory system which is in need of updates and its written in C#. No one here knows anything about that language, so the system sits and breaks and we can do nothing to fix it but start from scratch.
I’d like to learn it if only for the joy of knowing another language (plus it may help me get a job someday) and it looks really cool. Especially when used in tandem with AJAX things. That looks like a lot of fun, and it looks like it could take some of my web designs from functional to really useful. Isn’t that what every web developer wants for their sites?

I found out this morning that Jason is dead. He died on Friday morning, before I even had the chance to say his name for Misheberach at services on Friday night. I’m just.. I don’t even know how to deal with this.
I’ve never faced death like this. He was my friend. He was my “closing buddy” as he put it when we worked together. He was always so kind, and so happy. He didn’t deserve to die. He was too young.

So, I installed Linux on my Dell Inspiron 9100.

Firstly, I have to say its one of the easiest installs I’ve ever sat through. I installed Ubuntu from their liveCD, which was really convenient because you can play with the OS while its installing. Before I took the plunge, I read up on problems I could expect with my computer.

First and foremost, this article has helped me greatly, as have the Ubuntu forums. Pretty much everything the guy in the article went through with his Inspiron, I am experiencing. Unfortunately for me, some of the assistance links in his article are outdated, so I’ll tell you what I’ve done so far. Because, so far, this computer has been a beast to get working.

That being said, I *want* to have linux working. This is one of the only operating systems I’ve really never dealt with in any way. My computer not working is just one way for me to further my knowledge of how this weird Linux thing works. I’ve had to delve into the terminal and do all sorts of commands that I don’t understand. Of course, in most of these instances, I just copy the code I’m given verbatim and it seems to work, but yeah; I’m learning slowly. (Note: the links below worked on my Dell Inspiron 9100 with an install of Ubuntu Edgy 6.10)

The OS installed with only one hitch - after installing, it was supposed to restart itself. The computer hung, so I restarted manually and the computer booted up fine. So, awesome, I thought. I have Linux! Yay! But no, the first problem quickly presented itself. Like the article I was guiding from, my wireless wasn’t working at all. Turns out, its a problem with the card and the drivers. After trying numerous methods to get it working, all of which I found were outdated, I stumbled upon the method here, and it worked! Apparently, the problem is so widespread that a tool has been specifically written to *make these cards work with Linux*. But every time I restarted my computer I had to re-initialize the drivers. This is apparently because of some weird bug on computers that have more than 1GB of memory. Crazy. That wouldn’t do.
I reinstalled the OS from scratch (much easier than windows!) and started fresh from the steps I knew worked, and viola, wireless and WPA.

The next hurdle is getting the sound card to work. I’ll write about that once I’ve experienced it

Step 1
Right click on your taskbar. Uncheck Lock Taskbar and check Toolbars > Desktop.


A copy of your desktop will appear, most likely smooshed over next to your system tray. Right now it gets cluttered, but soon it will be pretty!



Step 3
Hover over the edge of your taskbar until the sizing arrow appears. Then drag the taskbar up until it contains two layers of icons.



Step 4
Grab the handle on the desktop toolbar, and drag it up and over toward the Start button so that it layers on top of your task buttons.


Step 5
Right click on the word “Desktop” to open the options for this toolbar. Uncheck Show Text, Show Title and then make sure Show > Large Icons is selected.


And that’s it! It isn’t so perfect as a Mac toolbar, but its as close as Windows can come natively.

Thanks World of Warcraft. And sleeping in too much on Sunday morning, too. I didn’t wake up on Sunday until 2, so I couldn’t sleep last night. So I didn’t get to bed until 3. I hate having to wake up so damned early for work, but it beats being at the office every day until 9, I guess. Anyway, 9-5 job gotta do what you gotta do. I just wish that Greg would wake up earlier so he didn’t come home from work at 9. I feel like I see too little of him even though we live together. But, were I to change my schedule so I could go in at noon every day, we still wouldn’t see more of each other. Just we’d both wake up later, so the time to spend “together” would be spent asleep. So it doesn’t work. Though it would make things a bit easier on my brain on Monday mornings. Grah.

Friday night was spent at a Party!
Greg’s friend Charlotte threw a party on the occasion that she was back and visiting from England. She lives in a *very nice* townhome in Sanford. Though I didn’t know any of the people, save Greg, at the beginning, suprisingly I felt not too out of place. At first, I was wary. The people that were there and that showed up were not really my type of close friend person. At least on first impressions. After a while though, they all turned out to be really cool people. Especially once they all started drinking. I was Greg’s DD so I didn’t drink but one or two things early on in the evening. Unfortunately I completely ruined my diet by snacking on all the chips and chocolates. Blah.
So that was an interesting departure from the norm.
Over the weekend, I was bound and determined to ride by bike again, but I didn’t do it because Saturday it was cold and rainy and Sunday it was just cold.
Good thing is that my pants this morning weren’t *quite* as tight, so diet seems to be working, if annoyingly slowly.
Keep at it. Blah. Sleepy.

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