Finally

Db0

My replacement [tag]firestaff[/tag] arrived yesterday. I was a bit disappointed by the silicon grip however. Where the old one fit snugly and had nice ends, this one seems to have space between it and the shaft and its ends are fixed with fed duct tape. The whole item seems a bit hastily done but I guess I can’t complain. Things could have been a lot worse (namely not getting my staff back). At least now I have the old shaft as well and can at least try to fix it someway.

Anyway, after I received it my first order of business was to go out and practice some because I have almost a month to touch the skill. Unfortunately it was raining lightly but I hoped it would abate until I reached my training grounds. On the way I bumped into an old friend of mine, Χρύσα (Translates as Goldie) who was taking a walk. After the necessary greetings I told her to come with me and we went towards the Alexander statue.

I always had a soft spot for her, I always hopes something happened between us at some point but I don’t hold much hope for it nowadays. She seems so preoccupied with other stuff all the time and does not seem to be interested the same way. Pity.

Anyway, on the road we talked about the summer and stuff like that and after I mentioned my Poseidi experiences she was dying to find out more. I ended up storytelling the entire trip to her mounting joy. Glad to be of help 🙂

She also caught me by surprise by telling me that my current haircut was the best she’s seen on me. I did not expect that comment from her and that says a lot.

I did not manage to do any serious practice unfortunately. The port area was even more windy and rainy than downtown and I could barely practice my moves between chatting and the constant wind. In the end I took her to the bus stop where she decided to walk (!) so we said goodbye (without kisses) and parted ways. I headed for home and saw some Samurai Champloo before going to sleep.
simple hit counter

This I had to post

Db0

This is just precious:

—-
HEAVY METAL: The protagonist arrives on a Harley
Davidson, kills the dragon, drinks some beers and
fucks the princess.

GRIND METAL: The protagonist arrives, screams
something completely undecipherable for about 2
minutes and then leaves…

POWER METAL: The protagonist arrives riding a white
unicorn, escapes from the dragon, saves the princess
and they make love in an enchanted forest.

TRASH METAL: The protagonist arrives, fights the
dragon, saves the princess and fucks her……. easy
and quick.

FOLK METAL: The protagonist arrives with some friends
playing accordions, violins, flutes and many more
weird instruments, the dragon falls asleep (from all
the dancing) protagonist leaves without the princess.

VIKING METAL: The protagonist arrives in a ship, kills
the dragon with his mighty mighty axe, cooks and eats
it, rapes the princess to death, loots the castle and
burns it down before he leaves.

DEATH METAL: The protagonist arrives, kills the
dragon, fucks the princess and kills her, then leaves.

BLACK METAL: The protagonist arrives at midnight,
kills the dragon and impales it in the front of the
castle… then sodomizes the princess, drinks her
blood in a ritual before killing her… then he
impales the deflowered princess.

GORE METAL: The protagonist arrives, kills the dragon
and spreads his guts in front of the castle, fucks the
princess and kills her….then he fucks her dead body,
slashes her belly open and eats her guts, fucks the
carcass for the third time, burns the corpse and fucks
it for the last time.

DOOM METAL: The protagonist arrives, sees the size of
the dragon and thinks that he never could beat him,
gets depressed and commits suicide… the dragon eats
his body and the princess as well.

PROGRESSIVE METAL: The protagonist arrives with a
guitar and plays a solo for 26 minutes, the dragon
kills himself out of boredom, the protagonist goes to
the princess’ bedroom, plays another solo with all the
techniques learned in the last year of the
conservatory… the princess escapes, and is now
looking for the “HEAVY METAL” protagonist.

GLAM METAL: The protagonist arrives, the dragon laughs
at the guy’s appearance and lets him enter, he steals
the princess’ make-up and tries to paint the castle in
a beautiful pink color.

INDUSTRIAL METAL: The protagonist arrives wearing
greasy overcoat, makes obscene gestures towards the
dragon, and gets escorted out of fairy tale land by
security guards.

CHRISTIAN METAL: The protagonist rides in on his way
home from church and sings a mushy power ballad to the
dragon about how much Jesus loves him and that the
dragon should turn to Him. The Dragon is immediately
converted, and when the princess wants to “thank” the
protagonist he replies, “sorry, but I don’t believe in
having sex before marriage.”

TECH METAL: The protagonist plays a whole tone riff
switching between 11/16 and 23/16 with his left hand,
while he taps a descending chromatic pattern with his
right hand. The dragon suffers a massive brain aneurysm
and dies, and the princess runs off to music school so
she can understand what the protagonist was playing.

Monkeysphere

Db0

Recently I read a short article on the concept of the Monkeysphere. You can read it yourself if you wish. Anyway, despite the deceptive title and humorous attitude, the article does indeed make sense.

All of us have our own monkey sphere, it is built into our brains and there isn’t much we can do about it. It explains why and how people can withstand the sheer amount of suffering around them. We just don’t care. They are outside our monkeysphere. It is a defense mechanism to prevent us from becoming depressively catatonic and it is also the reason why worldwide suffering persists.

The factory manager does not care for the people his heavy pollution affects. They are outside his monkeysphere. The oil-grabbing capitalist does not care for the millions of people his schemes have uprooted and made miserable. The religious fanatic does not see the heathen he is killing as a human being but rather as an object.

Let me make an example. Most people have some minority or archetype that they tend to dislike. Be that another country, nationality, skin color, religion or whatever. Think about what yours is; Even if you think you are open minded enough, chances are that due to various factors (personal or external) you have some faction you wouldn’t miss as much. Maybe black persons have robbed your apartment three times and now you secretly think that they are all thieving bastard or maybe you were raised with the belief that all Jews are worldwide evil scheming conspirators.
Whatever it may be, think that you meet such a person and get to know him, his interests, his hopes and dreams, do you think you could feel that same way about him? Maybe you continue to feel the same way as the rest of his “kind” but not for him. You mistakenly think that he is different, some kind of exception. But he is not. He has just entered your monkeysphere.

So what can we do about it? This is not something that can be changed, except maybe by science fiction-like genetic engineering. It is hardwired into our brains.
What I want to know however is if there is a way to curb it, keep the good parts (denial, blissful ignorance) and soften the bad ones.

First order of business is to spread the knowledge of the monkeysphere and then find ways to lessen its impact.

Suse

Db0

I finally found a system I could work with. I took another m/b from work and installed it on my system. I will return the older one tomorrow. This P4 m/b fortunately has DDR slots. Unfortunately it has only 2 and my 512 ram is fubar 🙁 It recognizes it as 512 but it kills the system in DT time.

I decided to discard the fedora installation to try something new and my original thought was Debian. Completely open and volunteer powered. Unfortunately, even though the original set up was done and I managed to find what to install with aptitude I was stuck at configuring the Xfree window system.
Until now I’ve been using x.org and xfree was kind of different and thus I couldn’t find the configs and even after I found them I coudln’t figure out why the system wouldn’t boot. After a few tries I gave up and tried OpenSuse 10.

Installation went flawlessly (although I would like a DVD version so as not to change installation mediums all the time) and I booted into my new system with all the bells and whistles on (even amarok 1.3.1, I was impressed at the cutting edge) with only one problem. The network would not work. At this point I had to leave to go and play board games with a few friends so I left it for the night.

At about 3am that I returned home, I tried setting up the ips, gateways and dns but nothing seemed to work. I tried disabling firewalls, switching cables, rebooting dsl routers but nothing. I knew that I was missing something because of fatigue so I left it for the other day. Fortunately amarok worked off the box (and finally without crashes) and I could hear some of my own music.

Today I found out what the problem is, it seems I had confused the default gateway with the DNS. I need to put the firewall as a default gateway (duh) and the dsl router as DNS. I can’t think why I didn’t try this before.

So anyway, now I’m in Suse and letting things work by themselves for a while. I’m tired of tweaking and prodding things to work and not know how to fix them so I’m taking a break from Gentoo (that still refuses to boot the kernel). Maybe when I have enough time to waste on my computer I’ll return again.
simple hit counter

Is this unbelievable or what?

Db0

2 friggin’ days after putting another m/b on my PC and yesterday I come home after playing some warlord and find the system halted. No response to any key combinations so I restart only to find out, to my dismay, that the system will not boot and the speaker does a beeping sequence. I originally thought that was the sequence for RAM error, so I take out the two dimms and it does another sound. I change their position, put them in again and it does the first one. Not RAM error then.

I take out the VGA, boot, same beeps. Put it in, boot, same beeps. So I figure it’s that. I take it to my workplace, test it on another PC. It boots fine. FUCK! What is it then? It can’t be the M/B unless for some reason the AGP power feed has shut down for some reason and I can’t fuckin’ think how that would happen.
I plan to take a VGA from here to my PC to see how that works out.

What I really want to know however is it that has jinxed me.

Limping Back

Db0

I’ve managed to get a system running for now.
Yesterday I took an old P4 apart while at work and installed it on my box. Unfortunately too late did I notice that the old-crap p4 motherboard used SDRAM dimms and DDR, that means of course that not only do I work at 1700 MHz but I also lost 133 MHz from memory.
Of course yesterday I did not have SDRAM chips available so I had to make do with Knoppix as best as I could (and It wasn’t much let me tell you). So today I borrowed some dimms as well (2×256 to be exact) that I plan to return when I gather the money for a new system and took them home to install.
Luckily that went fine.

Gentoo, as expected, will not start, it’s got the march=”athlon” flag and until I find how to override that I’m stuck at Fedora, which is not bad now that I see it again. I’ve forgotten of that GTK look. Anyway, some settings are not working correctly over here and I need to do some more tweaking.

If only I had enough money 🙁

Still off

Db0

Computer @ Home is still dead. After some testing I have decided that the CPU has died and there’s not much I can do about it. What I tried is, I unplugged everything and left the MB only with CPU and Power and it won’t start (even the PSU fan), however the power led on the MB starts which means it is still getting power. I then removed the CPU and booted it again, the led still lighted which is the same effect as before. Ergo the CPU’s dead.

I’ve been using Knoppix on the Smoothwall Firewall to have at least basic internet access but it is dead slow. I mean KDE is unusable and icewm is only marginally better. How could we even work on these thing 6 years ago? Has our OS bloated so much? Anyway, problem is that my optical mouse is USB and that antique does not support that, so I settled for keyboard manipulation, which is fine if you know the shortcuts. Unfortunately I didn’t and it was hell…

At work now, I have taken an MB from work to test it. I hope it works without too much hassle because I do not have money for upgrades even at this time.
simple hit counter

Bootbootbootboot…nah.

Db0

Crap, I came home yesterday and found my PC shut down. I tried to start it up but it refused. This sometimes happens when the power goes out in the house and back up again and until now, the solution had been to take off the power for a while (until the MB is uncharged) and put in back again.
This time however it wouldn’t boot at all. I would boot, the fans made a small jerk like starting the get power and then stopped. Another boot didn’t do anything until I removed power again. I tried a few things, mainly taking out all power except to the MB but it didn’t help either. I am afraid this might be an unrecoverable MB short-circuit and I’m seriously lacking the funds to have an upgrade at this point.

Now the error is either with the MB, the power supply or most unlikely, the CPU. All I can do at this point is change the power with one I’ll take from my job temporarily.

At least that made me do something else other than spend time in front of the screen which in my case was to sleep and prepare for the Evernight campaign.
simple hit counter