I suppose I could have ignored all that for the good links I do sometimes find, but those links are few and far between, buried amidst all the noise of articles about how dumb Sarah Palin is, or the antics of some religious group, or stories about how the police tasered a guy who may or may not have attacked them first. I know what you’re thinking. “Cody! Unsubscribe from the politics, religion, and atheism subreddits!” I did, and somehow political and religious links still snuck in, under the guise of the funny subreddit or the WTF subreddit. It just wasn’t worth sticking around if I wasn’t getting what I wanted out of the website. What did I want? Interesting links, complete with intelligent discussion of said links. What did I get? Uninteresting links, complete with unintelligent babble about how the government is going to take over everything and use religion and Tasers to force everyone into submission. The gradual transformation into a mainstream version of /b/ didn’t help, either. Yeah, there were some pretty awesome memes (100 pushups, anyone?), but memes aren’t a good substitute for worthwhile comments and there are a lot of meme comments on Reddit.

My absence from Reddit probably won’t last. I doubt I’ll create another user account, but I did get a fair bit of my news from Reddit. Maybe the community will get better sometime in the future. Maybe not. I suppose I can’t avoid what I don’t like forever.

I suppose it’d be useful to explain why I don’t have an Internet connection. My family is in the process of moving into a house closer to town (okay, in town). Unfortunately, utilities like television, phone, and Internet service aren’t due to be hooked up until the 20th. Until then, I’ll be spending my time watching Farscape on my laptop and playing Mass Effect. Well, during the time that isn’t spent packing up my entire life and moving it to a smaller house. Fun.

And the month isn’t even half over. In about a week, I’ll be starting my summer job with the county (working for Parks and Rec). Exciting, huh? Yeah, not really. I’m going to be one busy guy, but I’ll be sure to make time for a rant every so often. After all, this isn’t the Mad Silence of a Raving Genius, is it?

I took the chance to try out the latest beta version of Ubuntu, which is due to be released in about 8 days (as you can see by the nifty counter in the sidebar). Compared to past versions of Ubuntu I’ve used, 8.04 is amazing. Sure, the actual interface doesn’t look or act much different (it’s a little shinier, perhaps, and the new search function is pretty cool), but the main difference I noticed is that I didn’t get a debilitating error upon start up. See, with older versions of Ubuntu installed on my Dell laptop, the wireless and graphics cards would not work, and the alternate drivers Ubuntu tried to use would break the system, forcing me to drop into a command line interface to install a special script. But with 8.04, everything actually worked upon start up, displayed in my native resolution of 1280×800 (instead of a rather blurry 1024×768). I had to do some minor configuration to enable the non-free graphics and wireless drivers so I could use my graphics and wireless cards to their full extent, but it was much less work than before.

I’m definitely pleased with this version of Ubuntu. I still doubt that I’ll like it enough to abandon Windows, but at least I haven’t needed to wrestle with it just to make it work right. Hopefully it’ll just get better once it’s out of beta next week.

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.

I’ll just say it right now: it’s awesome. Seriously. A very much needed upgrade from my old phone. It was a good ol’ phone, but its time had come. Now it’s off to be recycled, while I enjoy the awesomeness of my iPhone.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s a funny monologue, though the drawings accompanying it are…strange. Anyways, there’s a part in there where he’s talking about people writing on bathroom stalls. This is why I thought it awesome when I used a bathroom on my college campus and saw this:

References like that crack me up. Like the number 42 in strange places. Sure, it could just be a random number. Or it could be the Answer to the Question. You know what Question I’m talking about. If you don’t, you suck. Just like Metallica does.

I suppose the burning question is who did I vote for. It may surprise some of you, but I actually voted for John McCain. This is all about the nomination, after all. On the Democrat side, it’s going to be either Obama or Clinton, and I don’t particularly care for either of them. On the Republican side, however, it’s still pretty wide open. I’m thinking it’ll be either Romney or McCain winning the nomination, as Huckabee is falling far behind and Ron Paul is…well, the very definition of “fringe candidate”. So, since I had to choose a party (either Democrat or Republican), I decided to throw my vote behind McCain, since I’d much rather have him as a nominee than Mitt Romney.

Luckily, though I had to basically become a temporary member of the Republican Party for the nomination process, I’m free to vote for whoever I like come November. Washington State doesn’t have party registration, which is nice. The drawback is that we have to pick a single party for the primary and caucus and stick with it. I don’t know if other states do it differently, but I know it’s a rather unpopular policy here. Heck, I might have the whole deal wrong. I honestly don’t know how things work. I just followed the instructions on my ballot.

So, who will I vote for in the election? I don’t know. It all depends on who the nominees are. I highly doubt I’ll vote Democrat, though, unless Mitt Romney gains the Republican nomination. Otherwise, I’ll probably vote for a third party. Or write myself in. I’m kidding about that last part. I don’t want to be president. That is, not until I’ve completed my plans for world domination!

I just thought I’d share that little bit of nostalgia. I wouldn’t have even known it was the 50th anniversary if it wasn’t for Google.

DISCLAIMER: There’s no such thing as a Lego. It’s a LEGO Brick. Copyright dilution and all that. Whatever.

So, I will deal with the flood of political news in the media, but aside from that, you’ll see no posts related to the primaries and I won’t look further into the issues. Once the parties choose their nominations and things really start to matter, I’ll come out of my hole. Until then, I’m ignoring politics like I ignore that Britney girl. And hygiene.

Instead, I’ll renew my interest in football just in time for the Super Bowl. A warning: I’m rooting for the Patriots. Let the hate mail commence!