YAC

I have succumbed to ordering yet another computer. It seems that there is competition for the two computers we have functioning. A few weeks ago Jeanette and I cleaned out the old computer gear that was around the house. A box of computer cables and some old disk drives and the laptop. The battery in the laptop did not work but for a few minutes. When you would use the laptop on your lap the heat was just too much to handle. I sent it with the other stuff to Goodwill.

I want another laptop. I decided I would try a Dell with Ubuntu preloaded. It is amazing how fast computers have come to be a commodity item. It seems that every household has a computer. I will have to wait for a week or so for it to arrive.



One of the criteria I had when we moved into this house was that we had access to broadband internet. My desktop computer has more disk storage than the entire building where I worked in Littleton 10 years ago. My desktop computer has more computing power than some of the old supercomputers that were purchased for tens of millions of dollars.

Computers are a wonderful tool, but a terrible job.

My new 'puter

I have mixed feelings about my new computer. We bought it for a couple reasons.

1. I wanted it
2. I thought I had enough money

I bought our previous computer from TigerDirect for less than $300. It seemed like a bargain. It has served us well for the past few years. It was the first time that I truly got irritated at Microsoft enough to abandon their operating system. I bought a new computer and added memory to it. I had to re-authenticate the operating system for putting in memory. I tried to do the update online. It would not let me. I tried to call in the update and I was required to read out a 40 character code and write in a new 40 character code. I decided I did not need to be treated like a thief for something that I had just bought. I formatted the hard drive and installed Suse 10.0.

With my previous success at buying from TigerDirect I decided to chance it again and buy a system. I acted in a fashion akin to going to the store hungry to do shopping for food. I bought all the things that sounded like dessert.

The new systems has a dual core 64-bit AMD cpu. I chose AMD because Intel is starting to act too much like Microsoft and put the dollar before the customer. Money was still a consideration, so I did not buy the latest and fastest.

I added in a monitor, because the old monitors I owned were big and clunky. I have a flat screen monitor at work and I like it. I went for the 19" monitor. I works well.

I wanted more disk space. The 40 gigabytes on the laptop and the 80 gigabytes on the desktop were just not enough to hold the music and pictures that I wanted. I decided to go for 500 gigabytes -- twice. One TERABYTE.

The machine came with the option of getting either XP or Vista. I opted for XP. Debra received a portable player for Christmas and wanted to use iTunes. I thought it would be easier to just use XP and avoid the horrible things I have heard about Vista. I am glad that I avoided Vista.

I had enough disk space to put more than one operating system on the new box. I opted to try kubuntu. I like it. It is awesome for installing applications. There is a program called apt-get that accesses the internet, downloads the package(s) from a server, and installs the program with all the dependencies. It is wonderful.

While I was at it I bought a pair of speakers and a webcam. The speakers are in use frequently playing music, but the webcam gets little use. Maybe as time goes on I will find a use for the webcam. Maybe I can do videoconferencing with mine bruder if we figure out how.

Now comes the task of using up that 1 terabyte of disk space. I started loading on all the pictures that we had in electronic format. That used about 2% of one of the disks. I ripped cd music to allow for playing on the computer and that used up another 2%. We have several DVD movies. I thought that I would rip some of those and make them available to play on the computer. That ate up 200 gigabytes in a hurry. Most of them were cheesy b-movies in sets. Maybe I will do more over time.

Now I have the computer booted into linux almost all the time. I don't trust Microsoft.

Broken then fixed

The picture below tells quite a story. It is cool outside. I am busy at the computer. Eric is engrossed in his computing endeavors also. And I am at the end of my effort of getting my computer going again.



Yesterday at about the time I wanted to appease my addiction to the internet I was rudely interrupted by a computer problem. I had some sort of a problem with an application crash and was having trouble getting things working right. I decided to reboot my computer. It would not come back up in linux. The boot record had been corrupted somehow. I suspect I was the recipient of a malicious piece of code on a web site. I had someone post a link on my BLOG a couple days ago. I thought that it would be safe to just see what it was since I was not running a Microsoft Windows machine. I was wrong.

I decided to moderate all my messages. It was annoying. I changed it back. I am not sure where I will go with it now, but I hate (yes, I used the H word) what some jerks are willing to do to others as they remain anonymous. Maybe it is best they are anonymous.



I am back in business now. I have the webcam going. Flash works in Firefox. Thunderbird is working. I can now BLOG again. I can post one-liner comments to others BLOGs. I can post long responses to BLOGs too. I feel refreshed, sorta. But I am tired and need some sleep.

I guess I will have to wait until tomorrow to do something profound and significant. I am glad I was able to get my machine going again in just a couple hours. I didn't even lose any data.

I need to remember though. Backups are my friend. Backups are my friend. Backups are my friend. Backups are my friend. Backups are my friend.....