Breaking Camp

Been a significant gap between postings, I know. Chalk it up to a bit of work getting done (first installment of Reality, ReMastered goes live next week or the week after, I think), a lot of other work not getting done, and, once again, the ill-advised decision to buy a laptop from Dell which has brought me nothing but grief. (For those of you recently arrived at this blog: never, ever, ever buy a Dell. My other computer is a dual-boot dual-core Linux machine which I cannot wait to get back to.)

The sandhills are in the rear-view mirror now. In their honor, a few pictures once again courtesy of Dan Brooks. This diptych, perhaps, thumbnails the whole experience most effectively:


Keep in mind that it took two days for the first picture to turn into the second. (And back again, too, a couple of weeks later.)

This is what you’d see from the porch if you were crazy enough to get up at five in the morning:


And this is either me, or Seth Brundle after an unfortunate accident with a telepod:


Don’t worry: this is not the shape of things to come. I’ll be dumping the travelogue pics and returning to the usual rants and research once I’ve got back home and cleared the decks. I just figured I should post something in the meantime, and stills from Frisky Dingo would have probably infringed copyright.



This entry was posted on Saturday, May 24th, 2008 at 8:51 am and is filed under misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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Keith David It's-a-Taylor-Series! Smeltz
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Keith David It's-a-Taylor-Series! Smeltz
16 years ago

Admission of bias: I have used Linux almost exclusively for ten years.

One month ago, I thought only coders used Linux. Then my boss (not a coder) decided to build his own supercomputer and announced he was learning Linux because “Windows isn’t well enough supported”.

I laughed for two days.

And you, you even dual boot! May I ask which distribution?

Roland Dobbins
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Roland Dobbins
16 years ago

Hang it up and go for a MacBook. I switched from Slackware Linux 5 years ago, and it’s great – I have the power of BSD *NIX without the hassle of sysadminning my own laptop. You won’t look back.

Raymond Neilson
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Raymond Neilson
16 years ago

First:

OSX. Is. Not. BSD.

I’ve heard this out of too damn many Macheads’ mouths. OSX is a Mach-based microkernel, completely different architecturally from the monolithic BSD kernel, and without many of the security features it provides.

Second:

Slackware is for masochists. And I speak as a Gentoo user. Modern desktop distros (Fedora, Ubuntu, Opensuse) require a bare minimum of self-sysadminning, mostly the same basic make-sure-you-use-the-software-updater way as OSX. The only trick comes with multimedia, and Opensuse has their new nifty one-click service that makes it a snap.

Third:

There isn’t anything short of a Mac Pro with the best graphics card available that can game properly. Apple insists on stuffing a dedicated graphics card in every mac other than a mini, but generally doesn’t keep up with the times with the models included (took them forever and a fucking day to make an Nvidia 8800 series available at outrageous cost).

Raymond Neilson
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Raymond Neilson
16 years ago

Addendum to preempt flames:

Yes, I’m aware Darwin (OSX’s non-graphical environment) borrows heavily from (and often include whole) BSD’s userland tools. I also know that the versions of most GNU tools included are well behind the current releases, often a major version back, and everyone who administers Xserves has to compile way too much shit from source.

bec-87rb
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bec-87rb
16 years ago

i like me some travelogue, personally.

Branko Collin
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Branko Collin
16 years ago

(For those of you recently arrived at this blog: never, ever, ever buy a Dell. My other computer is a dual-boot dual-core Linux machine which I cannot wait to get back to.)

What’s the story? A quick google pointed to this entry and a late 2007 one about your phone company.

I just ordered a Dell laptop, seeing how some of my customers are happy with them, but was planning of making it an Ubuntu one with perhaps Windows running in a VM.