Adam’s Cerebral Spillage

Just a quick catch-up, I realised I hadn’t posted in here for a little while. Where to begin though? I’m very much enjoying my new green belt, although it still looks odd in the mirror wall at Truro’s sessions! It’s starting to dawn on me now though, that each and every grading and the lessons in between are going to require more work, more patience and more learning on my part. I’m looking forward to it all so much though, and it’s great to be doing a form other than Pyung Ahn Cho Dan in the lessons . Tonight’s the start of the Falmouth classes which I’ll attend while they get numbers up, and with the possibility of popping along to see the local TKD club and training with them on Wednesday, it could well mean 4 days training in a row – gotta love it!

Last week saw the release of version 7.04 (feisty fawn) of Ubuntu (my linux distro of choice), and I decided to upgrade from my current version of 6.10 (edgy eft). I’m not normally an early adopter of upgrades and major patches – they seem to break more things than they fix – but I had a few little niggles with edgy which I wanted to see if they’d sorted for feisty. The upgrade servers were rammed and so after a day of trying that method, I instead went for a torrent of the alternate install CD which does the same job (and only took an hour to download!). Everything went very smoothly until the the first reboot, where my X session would start and I was left with the command line. Thankfully the error log pointed me in the right direction, and changing the xorg.conf file to use the generic Ati driver rather than the custom fglrx one I had installed fixed it. Most importantly the upgrade didn’t break my wifi card, which was my main concern! So now everything’s back to normal, working fine, and looking good.

On the CD player, I’ve been alternating between the symphonic metal stylings of After Forever, but mostly the rather excellent Swedish industrial metallers Deathstars. I really didn’t think I’d like them, but I love every track on both albums – it’s been a while since I could say that about any band.

And finally, my latest review for ntsc-uk is up. Click here to read about the rather lovely Kororinpa for Wii.

..and I have feasted upon its mighty chocolate shell. I’m feeling pretty crap for it too! Ate and drank way too much over the last few days, but on the plus side I’ve managed to get a bit of sun on my skin and to take my first dip in the sea for the year. By Jiminy it was cold!

This coming Saturday sees a double celebration. Firstly during the day I have my 6th Gup grading. It’s pretty tense stuff, and I’m really feeling the nerves already. It’s the last lesson before it all happens tonight, I need to make sure everything I need to know is already in my brain and fixed there. It should all go well though, I’ve worked hard and paid attention, so I see Saturday as a reward and a chance to show what I know. Later that evening, it’s my friend’s 30th birthday party at the Old Ale House. That should be a great laugh, and now the first of us has hit 30, it won’t be long until the rest of us follow suit.

There’s nothing to really report on the Linux front – my install is still up and running and working perfectly, I’ve had no problems to speak of and I do everything I need to without hassle. I can see it being a permanent fixture on all future machines.

I now have a new mini-obsession to research furiously (me???). Bikes! I went out on a hire bike for a few miles on the weekend and realised how much I still really enjoy it, so I’m definitely going to be investing before too long. I went along to my local place this lunchtime, and had a chat with the people in there. It seems it’s going to be a Hybrid/Road bike for me, which suits me just fine. Now I just have to agonise over which one I want, and what I’m going to want to do to it. I’ve had a look at some Kona, Marin and Trek bikes, and will have a chance to try some out at the weekend with any luck. I’m getting quite excited now

Quite a big update that was, I wasn’t expecting to write that much to be honest. Oh yeah, the new Type O Negative album is awesome!

I’m off ill today, after having come home ill from work yesterday. I’m not sure what’s up, but I feel utterly drained. I’ll pop along to the doc’s soon, see if they can figure out what’s up. This is the first time I’ve missed training for as long as I can remember, and it’s really frustating.
I kept myself busy this afternoon playing about with the Ubuntu install. I’ve got automatix on there now, which is like the Synaptic Package Manager, but it contains more of the sort of software that you wouldn’t expect to find built in. Things like DVD rippers, torrent clients – that sort of thing. It’s really handy and is now a permanent resident.

I then went through my old PC games, and found Neverwinter Nights, and rather spiffingly found that there’s a native linux client! I set it up, updated and then ran it and to my grateful amazement, it worked perfectly first time. No sound issues, not graphics problems, it just works. And faster than it did in windows for that matter!

More of my continuing adventures in non-MS land soon. Hopefully feeling a lot brighter too!

I just got back from Paintball for AJ’s birthday, which was a really good laugh. I’m feeling utterly shattered now though. However, I’ve got to pick myself up and wake myself up over the next couple of hours to go training

My Linux install is still going strong, I haven’t found anything that’s totally stumped me yet, and it’s looking great (being the big aesthetics fan I am ). I’ll get around to trying some more stuff with it this week, but so far it’s been good. I even got UT2004 installed, updated and running without too much hassle.

All in all last week was a good one, it started badly, but quickly got really good. I went to bed extremely happy on Friday night. Should someone I know read this, I’m gutted for you to have got ill and missed your grading. I know you though, and I know you’ll bounce back better and stronger, and really show them how it’s done.

Spring’s well and truly here now, thank god! Long may things continue to go well!

Well well well. Guess who got home, sorted out his partitions, installed Ubuntu 6.10 AND got his pain-in-the-ass wireless card to work? That’s right muddy funsters, ME!

I’m writing now from FIrefox (which needs updating) within my fresh Ubuntu install. At first I just could not get the wireless working for the life of me, but thanks to a few useful threads on the Ubuntu forums – and a reboot as a last gasp effort – it’s now up and running just fine.

Synaptic is running in the background now updating things, and I’m about to go find out how to get mp3 playback easily. The adventure begins here

I’ve not posted for a few days now out of pure laziness, so here we go.

First up, training! It’s been quite hard lately, and we’re really knuckling down and tweaking everything for the forthcoming grading. Last night saw one of the most exhausting warm-ups we’ve ever done – thanks Ben! We worked hard on one-steps, and have been hammering out our self-defence too. Next will be ironing out the grading forms and then we should be ready! I’m really looking forward to it now.

Secondly, I’m going to make a real concerted effort to switch my main PC at home over to 100% Linux. There’ll probably still be a small XP install left, for Emma and for any really annoying little things I need Windows for, but other than that I’ll be ‘catpain lunix’ for the foreseeable future. I’ve used it plenty in the past in spates, but this will be ongoing if I can possibly manage it.

When I thought about it before, there’s really nothing I do with a PC any more that I couldn’t do with linux, as I barely play any games any more, and even if I fancy it I guess I can still have a bash with wine/cedega. I’m going to chronicle my attempts on here, so I can a) look back and laugh at my patheticness b) possibly help people who stumble here looking for help with similar things, and c) look back and say oh yeah, I tried linux again

At the moment ubuntu (well, kubuntu to be precise) is looking to be my distro of choice, but I will do some more reading too. Last time I started with KDE and ended up with Fluxbox as my window managers, what happens this time remains to be seen

(and yeah, I’ll try to include lots of links from now on )