Ok, so we went to play Halo 3 on XBox Live today. Yay, Halo. Well, we never bought the $10 Heroic Map Pack on the grounds that we already payed $60 for the game, which was pretty awesome; why should we pay extra for 3 maps we really didn't need?
Well, so we go to sign on today to go beat up on prepubescent children, and to our extreme annoyance, we found we could not enter Big Team Slayer because we didn't have the correct maps.
Fuck, we thought. Stupid Microsoft. Making us buy the map pack in order to play.
So fine. We're adults; we're used to getting screwed by the system. So we went to go pay the stupid $10 for the stupid map pack.
Download...Free, said XBox Live.
Sweet! Knew there was no reason to buy that thing in the first place. Wait long enough, good things come to you for free.
That's how we got our living room lamp, our 3rd TV, most of our furniture...
Volcanopele, upon finding out he had purchased the map pack for nothing, proceeded to swear in an annoyed fashion. Fenner (the cat) started licking his head.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Who needs the candy store?
I made nougat using this recipe:
http://www.candymaking.net/Nougat.html
It was really easy. My mom would never allow me to cook candy when I was younger; she figured I'd mess up the kitchen and come out with a sticky mess. The one time I tried to cook candy in her kitchen, that's exactly what happened. It wasn't until years later that I figured out why I couldn't cook candy in my mother's kitchen, and why she had never successfully cooked candy either:
YOU NEED A CANDY THERMOMETER.
Duh. So now I can cook candy. It's remarkably simple; you just do what the recipe says and take it off the heat at the right moment.
I love cooking candy. Some recipes you read through and you can imagine exactly how the food will turn out. Not so with candy. These recipes you read through and think, "How in the world will that mess turn into the candy we know and love?" But it does. Egg whites turn into froth; syrup turns into sticky solid stuff; put them together and it turns white and becomes nougat. Amazing.
http://www.candymaking.net/Nougat.html
It was really easy. My mom would never allow me to cook candy when I was younger; she figured I'd mess up the kitchen and come out with a sticky mess. The one time I tried to cook candy in her kitchen, that's exactly what happened. It wasn't until years later that I figured out why I couldn't cook candy in my mother's kitchen, and why she had never successfully cooked candy either:
YOU NEED A CANDY THERMOMETER.
Duh. So now I can cook candy. It's remarkably simple; you just do what the recipe says and take it off the heat at the right moment.
I love cooking candy. Some recipes you read through and you can imagine exactly how the food will turn out. Not so with candy. These recipes you read through and think, "How in the world will that mess turn into the candy we know and love?" But it does. Egg whites turn into froth; syrup turns into sticky solid stuff; put them together and it turns white and becomes nougat. Amazing.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
The hazards of open windows
Note to dog owners: Yelling at the barking dog only encourages that behavior. You are barking with the dog. Barking is a self-rewarding behavior anyway, and barking along with the dog makes it even more fun for the dog.
Much, much less fun for your sane, cat-owning neighbors.
(when i get a dog it will not bark. says i.)
Much, much less fun for your sane, cat-owning neighbors.
(when i get a dog it will not bark. says i.)
Monday, March 17, 2008
Red Hat on a Crappy Old Compaq
Ok, so in a misguided effort to be less dependent on the monstrosity that is Microsoft (and because we were sick of the damn thing bitching at us that our version of XP Pro *might* not be genuine), we put a Linux partition on Roni's laptop.
Thoroughly unnecessary backstory:
This laptop used to be mine, but the hard drive went bad and I got my desktop. We cannibalized Roni's old laptop that the cat destroyed to give my old laptop new life (larger hard drive, more RAM, etc) so that Roni would have something to use. But the XP Pro install went bad, and eventually the thing just kept BSOD-ing completely at random. We determined it was either a bad stick of RAM or a bad install. So we tried swapping out the RAM but it kept having the same problem, so we tried reinstalling XP. Unfortunately, we had lost the serial number on the XP disk (assuming we ever had one for it, which is an interesting puzzle), so the install didn't go too well.
Back to the main thrust of the post:
So we went to install Fedora 4 on the laptop, which is a Compaq Presario 1600 that I got back in '00. Unfortunately, as it turns out, the video card on this damned thing (Trident CyberBlade i1) is not supported. I got the OS installed by using the text-only installer rather than the GUI, but then I was stuck. If I tried to start up normally, all I got was a big white blank in the middle of the screen. I tried changing display modes, but all that got me was new and different screens full of garbage. I could kind of tell that a command line was supposed to be being displayed, and I could kind of tell when the mouse was moving, but that was about it. I couldn't see what I was telling the machine, and I couldn't see what it was telling me, which knowing my tendency to blaze forward without really knowing what I'm doing could be a recipe for disaster.
This is a known problem, apparently. I found various workarounds online, but could not make any work.
As you may have guessed, I am a complete Linux noob. My knowledge of this particular OS begins yesterday, when I started reading the book. I grew up on DOS, so I am not unfamiliar with the concept of a command line, but I have not learned the language for Linux yet. It does no good to tell me to modify the xorg.conf file, because I have no idea how to get to said file.
I managed to start up without the GUI, but then I was stuck. I had my little command line; I had an instruction to type in gedit etc/X11/xorg.conf; and I did that and got an error message that it could not be displayed. gedit apparently does not work without the GUI, and every time I got anywhere remotely close to the GUI, I got garbage.
So I called up my good friend the Ethergeek, who has been very patient with my sporadic and usually abortive forays into the world of computing since high school. He had me open xorg.conf using vi rather than gedit, which worked much better and reminded me forcibly of good old PCWrite that I used to type reports on back in elementary school. We edited the driver for the video card to be "vesa" instead of "trident"; exited the editor & tried the GUI. This worked. Yay!
It amazes me that he was able to carry on a perfectly coherent tech-support conversation over an XBox Live chat while playing Guitar Hero on hard.
I don't expect this to help anyone; I just wanted to document what I did before I forgot. If anything seems out of place or nonsensical, I don't want to hear about it.
Thank you for your time.
Thoroughly unnecessary backstory:
This laptop used to be mine, but the hard drive went bad and I got my desktop. We cannibalized Roni's old laptop that the cat destroyed to give my old laptop new life (larger hard drive, more RAM, etc) so that Roni would have something to use. But the XP Pro install went bad, and eventually the thing just kept BSOD-ing completely at random. We determined it was either a bad stick of RAM or a bad install. So we tried swapping out the RAM but it kept having the same problem, so we tried reinstalling XP. Unfortunately, we had lost the serial number on the XP disk (assuming we ever had one for it, which is an interesting puzzle), so the install didn't go too well.
Back to the main thrust of the post:
So we went to install Fedora 4 on the laptop, which is a Compaq Presario 1600 that I got back in '00. Unfortunately, as it turns out, the video card on this damned thing (Trident CyberBlade i1) is not supported. I got the OS installed by using the text-only installer rather than the GUI, but then I was stuck. If I tried to start up normally, all I got was a big white blank in the middle of the screen. I tried changing display modes, but all that got me was new and different screens full of garbage. I could kind of tell that a command line was supposed to be being displayed, and I could kind of tell when the mouse was moving, but that was about it. I couldn't see what I was telling the machine, and I couldn't see what it was telling me, which knowing my tendency to blaze forward without really knowing what I'm doing could be a recipe for disaster.
This is a known problem, apparently. I found various workarounds online, but could not make any work.
As you may have guessed, I am a complete Linux noob. My knowledge of this particular OS begins yesterday, when I started reading the book. I grew up on DOS, so I am not unfamiliar with the concept of a command line, but I have not learned the language for Linux yet. It does no good to tell me to modify the xorg.conf file, because I have no idea how to get to said file.
I managed to start up without the GUI, but then I was stuck. I had my little command line; I had an instruction to type in gedit etc/X11/xorg.conf; and I did that and got an error message that it could not be displayed. gedit apparently does not work without the GUI, and every time I got anywhere remotely close to the GUI, I got garbage.
So I called up my good friend the Ethergeek, who has been very patient with my sporadic and usually abortive forays into the world of computing since high school. He had me open xorg.conf using vi rather than gedit, which worked much better and reminded me forcibly of good old PCWrite that I used to type reports on back in elementary school. We edited the driver for the video card to be "vesa" instead of "trident"; exited the editor & tried the GUI. This worked. Yay!
It amazes me that he was able to carry on a perfectly coherent tech-support conversation over an XBox Live chat while playing Guitar Hero on hard.
I don't expect this to help anyone; I just wanted to document what I did before I forgot. If anything seems out of place or nonsensical, I don't want to hear about it.
Thank you for your time.
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