Blog of Billy

The most time-consuming hilight of this week, and itself a reason that this post was not up in time for bored Labor Day-ors, has been Keers' quite generous (as he generally is) gift of a slightly used Compy K7. After much heater inner debate, I decided to name the new system Grimlock, as it is tall, not quite as fast as the current standard, but much stronger than I am used to. I loaded up Gentoo to play around with it, but didn't want to have to deal with figuring out what chipsets each card had, and make the kernel want to play, so I wussed out and used the ridiculously easy installer on Fedora. It took me a few hours to get used to yum and pick out a decent media console, but I'm now in love with the whole thing. It's gloriously fast, and all kinds of stable. Yum is now about my favorite program as with 1 command, I can update (almost) every application on my system, not just the core stuff. Imagine if Microsoft let you upgrade from Word 2000 to Word 2003 with one command. For free. I know that apt and portage are both right about as easy and helpful, but I'm kind of fond of binary packaging. Either way, I'm pretty pleased that this is the direction Linux is taking. My last set of thanks to nVidia for supporting drivers for its video cards in Linux. Now if they would only release the source code, everything would be peachy-keen.

Coincidentally, I and Doug had a similar problem, me with my motherboard, he with his TV. They both suddenly decided to turn everything green. I figured out later for mine at least that the sync channel button got pushed, and had flotzed everything, but I don't know if Doug's TV does something similar or not. I'll have to let him know how I fixed mine, sometime while I'm trying in vain to de-mystify the integral.

Kind of bizarrely, I've been finding myself listening to more and more country-type music. It started by getting bored with my current CD collection, and just letting the radio scan while I was driving. I came across a clever little ditty on a late-night country station called "Billy's got his Beer Goggles On." I couldn't resist. Ever since then, I've been getting (back?) into old country and western stuff. B. Moyer introduced me to a ridiculously good bluegrass band, and they may have convinced me to learn fiddle, much to Denise's dismay.

Nathan is gone, which means that time with Denise will be more frequent and much less lame. I'm sure he's enjoying himself up in chilly Intellectualland.

Dogwood flowers aren't very big.

Debate work is going well, but this week has been spent trying to make sure that I will have an upwards-of-decent GPA for the semester. Nick is working out quite well. We might actually have an argument or two for people to talk about at Georgia.

And if I die in Raleigh,
at least I will die free.