Well, finally, the weekend is here. I’m sitting here in front of my PC, listening to some mixes by Jonah and Gabriel, you can check em out at http://stickybeatz.com/wordpress/ for the awesome funky/tech/house mixes they post online. My favourite at the moment is Stickybeatz Volume four, about 37 minutes in. There’s an awesome tune that still gives me goosepimples!
Anyway, the babe came over tonight, we watched some Simpsons, had dinner together, and just talked about a few things I’m not going to type here. That was cool, great even. Got to go and photograph some hedgehogs tomorrow afternoon, but before that, my favourite weekend activity (church excepted) - Mountain Biking!! There should be a group of us, so that will be good. It’ll be good for me if this blooming headache goes away!
The nervous thing is that I’m meeting the girlfriend’s parents this weekend. That could be interesting, and we’ll see what happens. My parents seem to have taken to my babe, and they ask after her, how she’s doing. They’ll probably get her something for her birthday no doubt. It’s something of an occasion for me to have a girlfriend, so I’m sure they’ll do something. No worries if they don’t, but that’s my personal hunch. If my parents are reading this, don’t stress about that last part!!
Today in work was cool, just trying to figure out some custom code to do dynamic dropdown searches on specific table entries in MySQL. What do you mean that’s easy? Try that with someone who’s had to do a ‘Teach Yourself PHP in 24Hours!” in order to figure this out. One day I’m sure I’ll be figured out for a sham. I’m not a trained Web Developer, but I’ve self-taught myself what I needed to know. It’ll be interesting meeting one of our clients soon - he’s a Linux user! Hurrah! My first real contact with another human who uses Linux. Although he was surprised that I use it for a desktop environment - he asked me if I did everything on the command line!! I said I do a fair bit there, but also a fair proportion graphically. That’s the beauty of Linux, especially Ubuntu - you can choose to do things the graphical way, or dive into the machine and command line it all the way.
Anyway, my beer’s finished, and I’m going to bed.

Here’s a question for you geeks out there. Why doesn’t Microsoft has a rolling development on Windows? In Linux, the OS is constantly upgraded. Even after installation, you can upgrade the OS without having to use a new disk, re-format, etc. Just chance the sources.list and hey presto! Upgrade the OS. Incremental updates and major updates all in one package, no loss to your data (95% of the time

Windows - new OS - new install. Migrate your data? Pah! Don’t make me laugh. I’ve now spent two days trying to migrate data on 2 pc’s. I’m still doing it.

Windows will never have an easy upgrade policy because it’s a bad business model. The upgrade options of Linux doesn’t make anyone money, so Microsoft will never allow such an easy, user-friendly OS upgrade path. Plus, Microsoft has to restructure the filesystems each time because they’re flawed. They don’t separate the root and /home partitions, something Linux and Unix have done since the dawn of decent computing.

Sorry, just a little annoyed at Microsoft. Please don’t send the cyborgs to kill me, Mr Gates.

I’ve got Compiz working on my PC. It’s great. I can flick between desktops as easily as alt-tab in windows, and guess what? - it’s free, and it’s cool. Way better than Vista.

Anyway, took my babe out for dinner to a local Indian restaurant, cost me more than I expected, but it was a great afternoon/evening. Talked about loads of stuff, and that was cool too.

Spent too much time looking at geek stuff on the net until way past my bedtime. Red Vs Blue rocks!

I’ll admit one thing - I am a fan of Linux. I prefer Ubuntu’s distribution of Linux, it’s great. Simple, yet if you need to do heavy, command line stuff, then go right ahead. Not like many other ‘friendly’ distros (a term for each distribution of Linux), which insist on trying as much as possible to hide the nasty command-line and hardcore Linux functions from many people.
So with that in mind, what have I done? I’ve installed Ubuntu 7.04 aka Feisty Fawn, applied the Compiz effects, which I actually use productively, cube switching your apps across workspaces makes sense. You can see the app’s information without actually having to alt-tab to it. Expo view allows you to organise four (configurable +/-) desktops with the windows of your choice. Make it rain too. Well, the last one was a bit useless, but it sure looks dead cool when it rains on your four desktop cube.
I’ll be doing a lot of PHP development on my machine, something that is required more of in work. So my home PC is not some monster gaming rig, but it does make use of the £50 graphics card (an NVidia Geforce 6600 AGP - 256mb RAM if you must know).
Lovely.

For those of you wanting to do such beautifying to your machine that will make it sweeter and more configurable than Vista, see :
http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-to-Install-Compiz-Fusion-on-Ubuntu-58113.shtml
Those that read my blog will know that I have spent the last few days configuring a Vista machine at work. Comnpiz vs Vista for eye candy? Compiz wins hands down.

Art and photography. I’m sorry. There is an excuse, but how much of a valid one you think it is, I’m not that bothered. I’ve been busy. Trying to configure a Vista machine at work, then migrating all the data of the old XP machine, reformatting and doing a blank install on that machine, then copying all the data from my XP machine to the old XP machine, and I can take mine home and install Linux again.

Confused?

You should be. I’ve planned this out. I should be sleeping, I was up at 6am and I’m up early tomorrow to go to the beach. But how long is a piece of string? It’s my 3rd month with my girlfriend, and I’m doing something a little special for her. So I’ve no time at the weekend.

Well, I’ve defected from Blogger. That’s it. I’m now out of Google’s trusted circle. I am now a renegade, walking the wilds of the blogosphere with my new found friend, Wordpress.

I’d heard of Worpdress way back in my early Linux days, and the name seemed to have stuck. Now I am a member, with a blog name I am happy with. For those that don’t know, richrock is a nickname handed to me from my local church, as I worked for a company with rock in the name. Hence, Rich, rich rock, richrock. It seems to have stuck, even though I have left that company behind.

So what to make of Wordpress? I don’t know. It seems to early to tell. To most people, a blog is a blog, and there’s nothing that will change that. To me, it’s all about interaction, and the whole Web 2.0 thing means Wordpress has something going for it in that it does support some of the Web 2.0 features.

It’s late, and I’m going to bed soon. I’ll be playing around, getting used to Wordpress over the next few days, so keep an eye out on the changes.

So, I’m running Ubuntu 7.04 (aka Feisty Fawn), on my laptop. Great. It works a lot smoother than Windows 2000 ever did. I usually have Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim, a terminal, text editor and occasionally Gimp or some other main package running. My processor in my Lappy doesn’t even want to wake up. In Win2K, It broke into a sweat just running Firefox. After I had waited 2 minutes for it to boot.
I kid you not.
So, now my challenge is to get a 30sec boot time out of my Linux desktop.
There we go. I’ll post times and info along the way.

Well, I’m now writing this with my computer having had some pretty major surgery. Both my hard drives decided to pretty much fail at the same time. I haven’t had much time to check the other disk, so I finally upgraded to a couple of SATA drives, one 80gb and one 160gb. I think that’ll be enough to get more netlabel music on my PC! Of course, most of my current collectin got wiped out, but having a massive cold allowed me to stay in and feel miserable whilst ripping my extensive CD collection (again) to mp3.
‘But you’re a Linux user, you should be using ogg’ I hear you cry. Well, shoot me down in flames, but ogg’s are, well, not very good. Especially for ambient music. Mp3 seems to hold definition of sound longer, which is great for some of the soundscapes that I listen to. Plus, how many mp3 players out there support ogg formats? Answers above 1 on a postcard please.

Well, my blogger account is open again, I still have a cold, and I haven’t finished christmas shopping. I have to pack for Liverpool by friday, and get ready because some friends are coming to dinner tomorrow.
Argh!

My holiday has been screwing around with my mind. I do actually like the night, sometimes I’ll be up as late as I can, other night’s I’ll want to sleep. Tonight’s a mixed night. I’ve been up till 3am the last couple of nights, and haven’t felt the worst for it. Although I have been getting up about lunchtime. It’s mixed because I want to stay up and go to sleep. Not much choice really. I’m downloading some updates for Bibletime, an open source bible reader for KDE, and may go to bed once that’s set up. Got some ambient music going, namely Spheric Lounge, two notable tracks called ‘Strongyle’ and ‘Sunrise Ahead’. Both run around 20-22 minutes, and are great. Strongyle has this wonderful guitar melody, whereas Sunrise Ahead has a great rhythm and pace to it. Plus some awesome vocal samples taken from the real world…

I watched a lot of Simpsons today, and some episodes got me thinking about my current spiritual state (i.e., non-existent). It’s not to say that it’s there in the back of my mind, but yesterday I wanted to give my faith in God another chance. Only if He decides to talk to me a bit more than occasionally. It’s hard to explain what or how for trying to rationale how God speaks, but He’s able to. I just need to stop being so big-headed and listen to Him. Maybe I’ll give church a go this weekend. It’ll be strange. After two months of not going, it’s gonna be real strange to get into the building and meet loads of people I’ve previously refused to speak to recently.

Depression doesn’t help either. Still I’m on meds, and getting therapy. Something struck me which I’ll share with my counsellor : I watched Hulk this last week. Some people may hate it as a film, but I quite like it. It wasn’t ‘AWESOME!!!’, but it’s a darn fine effort. The effects of emotional repression that Bruce Banner had to go through are similar to what I have done. My life is one misunderstanding of human emotion, except on a fairly basic level. I can show happiness, fear, excitement (just get me watching some motorsports), but my biggest downfall is intimacy and compassion. I can do these on a very limited level, but I never feel sorry enough for those whose relative die, for example. Death of a relative is a fairly abstract term to me, and based on my life, and those who know me, the experience of losing a loved one has been diluted.

I remember splitting up with my girlfriend many years ago. I was initially angry (she finished with me), even though to her I had been agreeable, tried to resolve what was causing the split. My initial anger (which I hated) gave rise to a six-month depression. That’s my only experience of personal emotional pain. Still, I am convinced I can grow from this, and move on. Get my life in order, and start to actually acheive.

You might as well know, I am somewhat socially awkward. As I explained before, certain emotional responses I don’t have. Like a replicant (!) … So I am on an internet support group for Avoidant Personality Disorder. I hate being in groups of more than one or two. Church is awkward when trying to talk to people (everyone’s talking in large groups), and if someone I don’t know comes along, I want out, I want to leave in the other direction. I’ve lost cound of the times I’ve just left church straight after a service because I didn’t want the hassle of talking to people. Still, this is an area I need to improve. I don’t know how. Some of this blog will be about getting on in a world where you think everyone knows everyone else but you…

Other times you’re convinced they’re talking about you.

It’s been a long post, Bibletime’s nearly finished, I’ve got a glass of Vodka to finish, and then go to sleep.

BTW Spheric Lounge - check out the site.

After the obligatory cup of tea, I decide to sit down at the PC again, fire up Amarok (Linux audio player - awesome software!), and try and write another entry. Currently playing through some music downloaded from Sutemos www.sutemos.net - namely IJO : Computer Pop EP. It’s quite a nice eclectic mix of sounds from ambient through to laid back electronic funk/jazz. Think Baby Mammoth on Pork recordings, and you’re almost there. It’s free to download, and available under the rather wonderful Creative Commons licence.
Now fuelled by caffeine, I’ll settle down and do something productive on here. Let’s review the EP I just mentioned.
I chanced upon Sutemos completely by accident. I think I got the link from the hyperreal ambient email list, and only just got round to looking at it. The EP starts of with a track called Coral Sea, which has a nice, drifting floaty feel to it, almost ideal as a starter track, letting you know that this music is for relaxing to. The second track, Gartenn, ups the vibe without altering the laid-back feel. A wonderful jazz guitar sound, disco-esque drums and calm electronics create a sense of pure ‘on the beach in the evening’ calm.
Minor Street, the third tracks, drifts into an almost IDM feel, with glitches in the rhythm, but not designed to grate on the ears, with a Plaid-like melody and electronic pianos providing some solid grounding to this track.
Planetary 4 is probably the most funky by far. Lots of electric pianos, great basslines, and drums that make you bob your head. You can’t help it.