Upgrade day
So, last week the *buntu people released 8.04, Hardy Heron. When I went to grab the torrent for the install iso that day, their server was so slammed that it didn't want to load for me. So I shrugged and decided I could wait a week. Yesterday before work, I snagged the torrent file, and queued it up in ktorrent to grab for me when my downloads started automagically at 10pm. The download had finished around midnight. :) I burned the CD this morning, just in case the standard upgrade failed (like last time), and started the upgrade from Adept Manager. It went swimmingly this time, actually. I sat and supervised it while pulling grommets from my Babyland shirt that I put aside because it'd frustrated me over a stupid mistake I made. Now the shirt's ready to get it's retrofit, and I have Hardy Heron all happily installed on my happy little nilpferd.
Once I was done with the upgrade, I decided it was finally time to jump in and make my LightScribe burner do the labeling right and proper, full disc. The labeler that LightScribe offers in .deb form only does a little band of text and decoration, and gives you no room to use your own images or pull a bigger label, so I never bothered to try it out. Another company, LaCie, offers a full label linux labeler, but it's only packages as an .rpm. No help to me being a happy *buntu user and therefore needing a .deb. No source to be found, so compiling it myself wasn't an option either. Thankfully Kubuntu Forums had a couple posts about using Alien to convert an .rpm over to a .deb, so I was able to do that and install the program. The first label I did, I took the spiffy heron desktop image that was released with the standard Ubuntu install, and fussed with that to put it onto the label of the install disc I'd burned before doing my upgrade. It didn't come out as dark as I would have liked, but it still looks shiny. I saved the image with the contrast knocked up a couple more levels, and turned on the beta higher contrast burning after that.
I decided I'd try a second label after. I still haven't figured out why my computer can't burn me an audio CD that'll play in any of my CD players, so I borrowed one of the mother's boyfriend's computers upstairs for the data side of the burning (ended up on the Windows laptop because the old iLamp didn't know what to do with the LightScribe disc I dropped into it), then came back downstairs to put together the label. I was originally going to use the cover artwork for the album I was burning (Once by Nightwish), but the design wasn't such that it was friendly to having a big gaping hole in the middle of the image for the CD's hole, so I ended up working with a free label design provided by LightScribe on their website, the Gypsy one, and I added gothic lettering for the album title and artist. It took longer to burn the label this time, but it turned out much better between the starker contrast in the starting image and the beta higher contrast burning. :) I'm very happy, and next I get to take it out to my happy Chiana car, and hope her CD player isn't stupid. The CD played in the Bose radio upstairs, so we should be shiny, as Chiana's played other burned CDs for me without a fuss.
Overall, I've been pretty happy with how my day's gone. Now all I have left to do is balance my checkbook from about two months of neglect, and bake cupcakes to take to my "little" brother* for a belated happy birthday. I did call him and wish him a happy on his birthday, last friday, but I hadn't made it over to see him due to conflicting schedules and my inability to get his birthday present back into my car after I purchased it and brought it home. Also, I'm going to see what the mother and her boyfriend have in mind for dinner, I might offer to go pick up Pizza if they're inclined, otherwise I have ideas of things I could construct that would be tasty.
* Little in this case means he's about a third of a year shy of three years younger than me, but he's about nine inches taller than me.