Change is hard

cmoates — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 05:51:16 +0000

After mucking around all morning with Fedora 11, I ended up putting Ubuntu 9.04 onto a disk so that I’d have something to work with tomorrow.

It’s not that Fedora 11 is bad, but it’s different. Different in that way where you switch which cabinets have the cups and plates, and you’re just annoyed that you keep looking in the wrong place for something. I didn’t erase the Fedora 11 disk, so I’ll try it out some more some other weekend, but I needed a workable system for tomorrow, that wasn’t causing me grief.

In other news, I purchased Left4Dead on Steam, and I see why people like it. It’s a bit gory for my tastes, but man, it’s just a lot of fun to knock down wave after wave of zombies with an assault rifle.

Maggie (my wife) finally figured out what pictures she wants in frames, so I spent half the day cropping, printing, and framing. Now we just have to decide how they go on the wall.

So many tasks, so little time

cmoates — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 06:54:57 +0000

I spent a good chunk of today finally repairing some WPC driver boards that have been sitting around since Thanksgiving of last year. The parts I needed arrived, and I was able to get them off my plate. Being that most pinball machines owned by individuals these days were at one time on a location on a route, there’s some significant “hacking” that takes place on some of these boards. One of the boards today was no exception. I’ve seen worse; I have a board in my hands that was on fire. Short of that though, this is pretty close.

Since I’ve a failing drive in my “work” workstation, I decided to replace it and reinstall today. We’re using Fedora 10 on the VM box, so I thought I would give Fedora 11 a try. While I’ve no major problems (a few niggles not worth complaining about) it’s really funny to me how easily you get used to your desktop being a particular way, and Fedora’s defaults are definitely nothing like Ubuntu’s. Fonts, window behavior, it all just feels a little “off” and that’s frustrating.

Maggie bought me a Korg nanoPAD for Valentine’s day. It’s a slick little device. Using Hydrogen (a drum sequencer for Linux) the device worked out of the box, with no configuration required. How’s that for user-unfriendly? If you’ve ever wanted to play around with drum sequencing on a computer, the nanoPAD can’t be beat. The price is right, at $59, and it’s USB, so you don’t need MIDI adapters or anything like that.

Left4Dead is half price this weekend on Steam. While I don’t have time to play it yet, it seemed like a good time to pick it up. I’ve noticed a lot of my friends who play Team Fortress 2 with me play Left4Dead quite a bit as well, so hopefully it will appeal to me.

Chris Moates' adventures in the land of Mox » Gaming

Change is hard

So many tasks, so little time