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musings of mark since 2001

Moving day again tomorrow, the nomad is coming down off the mountain and getting a little closer to the sea. A bit of irony in it too, as I’ll be living with the owners of the Bowen Island Marina and working at the USSC Marina

Nice temporary home, Norma is one of the neighborhood Moms where everyone knows your name and anyone is welcome anytime and she heard of my predicament. Got a nice little room with a window downstairs and the rent is something I can afford finally afford on Bowen and the Great Little Car doesn’t have to put on miles going up and down hills to work every day. Being right in the Snug Cove, everything is within walking distance and the place itself is on a private-like dead end road while still being right on the water.

Found someone for the old place too, the landlord won’t be out anything which should make her happy as before I came along this mountain aerie just sat empty. Nice guy, he has a four wheel drive so the road and parking is no problem and he’s looking forward to moving in.

Will be interesting 25 years from now to see how this all panned out, but for now the saga of 9/11 just gets curiouser and curiouser. According to the Associated Press reporting on Bush at a campaign rally today, when two planes violated the 30 mile airspace and were escorted to the ground: “The F-15s were in the air at the time, a standard practice when the president makes an appearance.”

Except when the President makes an appearance on the day the planes dove into the WTC; on that day the plane that hit the Pentagon flew around for an 1-1/2 hours without a fighter jet in sight. Someone told NORAD to stand down that day, curiouser and curiouser.

It will be an interesting election, there are groups of people that never get polled, the ones using only cellphones, the phones in the dorms, and practically all young people. CNN and NBC don’t watch or listen to Eminem, but lots of others do and here’s his Get Out the Vote video that they are watching.

Most of the Linux installation horror stories I’ve heard didn’t come true for me. I downloaded an evaluation iso.image of Lycoris and plopped it in a computer that wasn’t being used for anything but reinstalling windows interminably. The last time it took forever to get it connected to the internet, all the while telling me my network card was fine. After downloading every driver variation known to man for the model I had with nothing working, I installed a new one and voila, Windows was wrong again. I had *nix running in a partition on this box before, but this time when asked I let the install CD use the whole disk and wiped out Windows entirely on that machine. Best thing for it, what was once a crappy HP version of Windows that never worked is now a box that doesn’t ever want to shut down.

Using DHCP with my router, so it was a snap to connect to the internet with the Lycoris version of a Linux distribution. Using a hub or switch seems just as easy as you just manually enter the IP assigned by the hardware and click or Enter. To create a shared folder for the Windows machine that has been the workhorse so far, it’s pretty easy to open a command terminal and create a samba server share. On the Windows side, nothing is different there either as you just need a workgroup name and identity and you’re good to go after password protecting your shared directory if desired.

Every thing else in the install went just as it should, the right monitor was detected and it let me choose a number of screen sizes and refresh rates until I got the nicest looking one. The Desktop interface by the way is very nice, the icons are WinXP-ish but the folder windows have more of an industrial, but still rounded look. Sound card works, still haven’t checked the CD burner but it’s been recognize and suspect that will work too. Pretty nice for a freebie donated machine, gotta love Linux.

Just a week to go in this month, and looking hard for a place to live. Saw a real nice one with Donna from Gifts on the Pier, three bedrooms and Lindsay would make up the three’s company scenario. Good location, price and everything but the owners want it for July and August so we would be camping out for two months of the year.

This place on the hill is starting to get hard to heat now, something else unforeseen back when the weather was nice. Have blankets hung in the doorways but the two tiny electric baseboard heaters go full blast just trying to keep up. Layered clothing is the key for now, heavy socks and slippers for the cold floor. Lots of spiders around too, coming up from the bottom floor no doubt, never did go down there to see what was in it because of the bee nest but sure it’s full of mice and spiders and other creepy crawlies.

One of the great things about living in a small community is how many people know you. After leaving my debit card on the counter of the General Store, it wasn’t too long before getting a phone call from them informing me of my loss. It can also be a not so good thing, as there are so many Windows XP computers out there that aren’t behaving properly and inevitably a phone call comes for me to help someone clean the viruses out of their computer or fix something else that isn’t running properly.

It’s not the people that are a problem to me, it’s the Windows and am slowly coming to the conclusion that I don’t want to do WindowsXP anymore. The latest “upgrade” for XP is a case in point. Seems many people don’t have the Auto Update feature running, either for good reasons or they just don’t know about it. Helping someone out yesterday, Outlook Express is deciding that it wants to hang and not load anymore, so asked when was the last time they went to Windows Update web site and the response was typical – ”…updates? We’ve never done that, what are those anyways?”. The download time in this case was going to be 12 hours and 35 minutes to upgrade a product claimed to be the best yet, but containing what they call themselves critical flaws.

So I’ll show the person how to click Start > Programs > Windows Update and the look on their face when they see the size of this upgrade can best be described as crestfallen. They have all either had to upgrade their older computer or buy a new one with more RAM, processing power and disk space already; all along being told how computers were going to make their lives easier etc. So now, it’s not only costing them more money, but the time factor just to be able to use this expensive software has increased exponentially. And then they find out that this is just the start, if running anything on M$’s long list of software affected by the jpeg of death there is yet another session of “upgrades”.