Monthly Archive for April, 2008Page 2 of 2

B0rked

Published
by
Cody
on April 8, 2008
in Personal and Technology
. 0 Comments

This seems to be a theme with me. I get my computer to perfect working order, and then I decide to mess with it. Why? I don’t know. Some kind of weird compulsion, I guess. Whatever the case, I broke my computer. Again. Well, that’s not completely true. It was only partly broken. For a while, I’d been dual-booting Windows Vista and Windows XP. In case you think that’s odd, I’ll explain why: I use XP for games and Vista for everything else. Games played in Vista tend to have a lower framerate than when they’re played in XP, so I’m sticking with XP for my gaming needs. However, I prefer the Vista interface, which is why it’s my primary operating system.

I recently bought a 320 GB hard drive for my laptop and completely reinstalled everything from scratch. Everything was going great. Then I tried to install Linux. Again. Honestly, I can’t tell you why I have to try this time after time. Maybe I figure that I’ll like it this time, even though I haven’t the past 17 million times. At any rate, it shouldn’t have been a problem to resize one of my Windows partitions and try out a new distro of Linux I downloaded (the beta release of Kubuntu with KDE 4, ’cause the screenshots looked pretty). Turns out, it was a problem. Vista didn’t want to play nice, so I turned to GParted. That stalled out, so I booted up XP and tried out Partition Magic. That completely corrupted my Vista partition, making it impossible to boot into it. Luckily, XP still worked fine, so I was able to go into damage control. Damage control failed horribly (even when I turned to the Vista install disk’s repair function).

Luckily, I had, in my infinite wisdom, completely backed up Vista the night before. Since the only important information on XP was saved games and a few documents, I backed up a couple of folders on XP and wiped the hard drive clean. This time, I was going to reinstall everything and include Linux with it. But I abandoned Kubuntu and went with plain ol’ Ubuntu 7.10, which has worked for me in the past. In a couple of weeks, Ubuntu 8.04 will be out, so I’ll be able to easily upgrade.

The problem now is that I still need to copy over all my documents to the reinstalled Vista. And then I need to reinstall all my programs. And fix all my settings. And update everything…

I just did all of this a couple of weeks ago. It’s killing me.

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Slightly disturbing

Published
by
Cody
on April 3, 2008
in Random
. 0 Comments

So, apparently, a group of third graders at Georgia school got upset with a teacher and plotted to knock her out, tie her up, and stab her with a steak knife. No, really. They actually brought supplies (a paperweight to knock her out, handcuffs and tape to bind her hands) and assigned different duties (one student would have covered the windows, another would have cleaned up afterwards). Nobody knows if they really intended to harm the teacher, but it’s kind of scary that they even got this far. Luckily, they were outed before they implemented their plan. It makes me wonder what would have happened, though. Third graders can be persistent buggers, and I don’t know if I’d be able to withstand 9 of them attacking me with blunt objects.

But it certainly shows a lot about kids in the 8 to 10 age range when you look at their motive: they were angry with the teacher for scolding one of them for standing on a chair. Wow.

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Abuse of power

Published
by
Cody
on April 2, 2008
in Rant
. 0 Comments

The Bush Administration isn’t especially known for playing by the rules. However, the most egregious abuse of power yet has to be the legal waivers the government is using to bypass more than 30 federal, state, and local laws preventing the Mexican-United States border fence from being completed. Until now, the government has mostly been stopped by landowners unwilling to allow the government to build on their property. Turns out, the government doesn’t need their permission. Eminent domain at its worst…

Continue reading ‘Abuse of power’

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Peanut Butter and Jelly Day

Published
by
Cody
on April 2, 2008
in Random
. 0 Comments

In honor of National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day, I present to you the following video:

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Yes, I have no shame.

April Fools’ Day

Published
by
Cody
on April 1, 2008
in Humor and Random
. 2 Comments

Every year, I tell myself that I’m going to make an awesome April Fools’ version of my blog, and every year I forget about it until the last minute. I remember one year, I was planning on putting sponsors all over my website. That was a long time ago, and in retrospect, it’s a lame idea. A lot of April Fools’ ideas are pretty lame, but I guess it mainly depends on how you view April 1st. For instance, I find it mildly funny that xkcd points you to Questionable Content, while Questionable Content links to Dinosaur Comics, and Dinosaur Comics links back to xkcd. I also find it funny that the Telegraph reported on flying penguins, and Google and Virgin teamed up to establish a colony on Mars (complete with a questionnaire).

Even better is YouTube RickRolling everyone who clicked on a featured video on the front page (on a related note, GameFAQs has a RickRoll poll on the front page), or College Humor getting bought by some MySpace diva. (Unfortunately, they took that down before I was able to get a screenshot and Google’s cached version is just a few hours off.)

As with every April Fools’ Day, there’s going to be funny stuff, not-so-funny stuff, and stuff that’s just weird. And then there’s stuff like Dextre the Magnificent. Actually, that did make me laugh. In a nerdy sort of way. You know, with the snort and requisite pushing up of the glasses.

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Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States