Choices affecting my lifestyle
Christ it's been a weird week.
Briefly - and o! What a magnificently ineffectual word this is in the present context - I got laid off from my job at Hannaford, but immediately offered a new position in another department. I dunno, it seems like the store is awful all around - but maintenance isn't so bad, especially considering the increased capacity for evading crazy customers.
Still, it's time to polish and send the ol' resume around once again. Maybe I'll get lucky this time and pick up something based around my actual talents.
But, yeah. In other news, I switched to Linux - Ubuntu 7.10, specifically - which is a pretty odd development, considering how staunchly I've opposed it for all these years. But it's absolutely worth intoning that this was not a result of irrational hatred; merely that my experiences pre-Ubuntu were profoundly negative. But that's all changed now - good for everyone, really, considering Canonical seems determined to make their little OS everything Windows Vista would like to be.
Seriously, there's no touching the UI on this one. Mac got nothing, bra.
The only real problems I've had have been the impossibility of getting versions of Paint Shop Pro more mature than version 7 running in Wine; getting my TV-Out running as well as it does in Windows; and getting games working.
To solve problem 1, I got PSP9 running through Virtualbox (which is a full system emulator with seamless mode - so even though I'm running a full copy of Windows XP inside linux, all I see is the taskbar (which generally hides behind the Ubuntu bar unless I specifically invoke it) and the PSP window, which functions entirely on its own like any other application in linux.
The TV-Out issue still confuses the hell out of me. I have to keep the resolutions close together; if I run my main monitor at 1600x1200 and the TV at 640x480, the primary monitor still only runs at 1280x1024 but I can "scroll" around the desktop to reveal more area. If I run the monitor alone, Linux displays in 1600x1200 no problem. If I run the monitor at 1024x768 and the TV at 640x480, the TV works fine - but recently (the first time I decided to actually use it for video instead of merely testing) it ran in black & white.
In the words of the great and inestimable T-Rex, I thought computers were supposed to be deterministic.
As for games, I've sort of reached a compromise - Ragnarok runs in VMware (another virtual machine) just fine, and almost everything else that I play does not. Fortunately, other than Shaiya (which I actually dislike strongly, but I digress) everything I play I'd be running fullscreen anyway so there's no real drawback in hibernating and booting into Windows.
So I guess that realistically, I'm batting 1 for 2 right now. Even so, the usability of the system is more than impressive - and although I haven't had the best of stability with this setup, the vast, vast majority of my lockups and crashes have been because of fucked up shit I've been doing to my video configuration.
Briefly - and o! What a magnificently ineffectual word this is in the present context - I got laid off from my job at Hannaford, but immediately offered a new position in another department. I dunno, it seems like the store is awful all around - but maintenance isn't so bad, especially considering the increased capacity for evading crazy customers.
Still, it's time to polish and send the ol' resume around once again. Maybe I'll get lucky this time and pick up something based around my actual talents.
But, yeah. In other news, I switched to Linux - Ubuntu 7.10, specifically - which is a pretty odd development, considering how staunchly I've opposed it for all these years. But it's absolutely worth intoning that this was not a result of irrational hatred; merely that my experiences pre-Ubuntu were profoundly negative. But that's all changed now - good for everyone, really, considering Canonical seems determined to make their little OS everything Windows Vista would like to be.
Seriously, there's no touching the UI on this one. Mac got nothing, bra.
The only real problems I've had have been the impossibility of getting versions of Paint Shop Pro more mature than version 7 running in Wine; getting my TV-Out running as well as it does in Windows; and getting games working.
To solve problem 1, I got PSP9 running through Virtualbox (which is a full system emulator with seamless mode - so even though I'm running a full copy of Windows XP inside linux, all I see is the taskbar (which generally hides behind the Ubuntu bar unless I specifically invoke it) and the PSP window, which functions entirely on its own like any other application in linux.
The TV-Out issue still confuses the hell out of me. I have to keep the resolutions close together; if I run my main monitor at 1600x1200 and the TV at 640x480, the primary monitor still only runs at 1280x1024 but I can "scroll" around the desktop to reveal more area. If I run the monitor alone, Linux displays in 1600x1200 no problem. If I run the monitor at 1024x768 and the TV at 640x480, the TV works fine - but recently (the first time I decided to actually use it for video instead of merely testing) it ran in black & white.
In the words of the great and inestimable T-Rex, I thought computers were supposed to be deterministic.
As for games, I've sort of reached a compromise - Ragnarok runs in VMware (another virtual machine) just fine, and almost everything else that I play does not. Fortunately, other than Shaiya (which I actually dislike strongly, but I digress) everything I play I'd be running fullscreen anyway so there's no real drawback in hibernating and booting into Windows.
So I guess that realistically, I'm batting 1 for 2 right now. Even so, the usability of the system is more than impressive - and although I haven't had the best of stability with this setup, the vast, vast majority of my lockups and crashes have been because of fucked up shit I've been doing to my video configuration.