Second Nature

For almost a year, now, both the Georgia Tech and Indiana University MEPIS mirrors have been unsynchronized with the rest of the mirrors out there.

I'm happy to tell you that both are current again.

My thanks to the IT department at Indiana University for being so responsive to my emails.

This week, the 5^th through the 8^th actually, is our time to do the mandated California Stanford Achievement Test, Ninth Edition (otherwise affectionately known as the "SAT/9 Test") for all children, 11^th grade and under.

This usually means that Daddy (that's me) spends 4 or 5 days at a randomly-selected, inconveniently-located, testing site being bored out of my mind for the majority of the day. What the heck. It's never more than a week per academic year...I'll survive.

Not this time-around.

I happen to be typing this up, sitting in the foyer of a church in Long Beach--the testing site. It is certainly inconveniently located, but somebody in this area--perhaps the church itself--provided me with a wireless Internet connection with which to amuse myself today.

Maybe this explains why today was the very first time I was compelled to bring the notebook with me...Kismet...Fate...Luck...abject fear of boredom.

My money's on the latter.

Actually, I brought a CAT-6 cable with me to "plug-in" if I encountered the unattended 8P8C jack or two; but that didn't happen....not a network jack in sight.

This notebook doesn't run windoze, of course. What kind of Open Source advocate/apologist would I be if I actually used a windoze-based machine?

Not that I've ever been tempted--I haven't. I genuinely do not understand how or why you people put up with one travesty after another out of Redmond. If somebody can explain it to me without sounding like just another windoze fanboi, I'd be interested in hearing the logic behind it all.

It ran SimplyMEPIS 7.0 for quite a while...well, that is, until SimplyMEPIS 8.0 went final; then I installed the latest and greatest back on the 22^nd of February.

Something I learned about running SM7.0 was this: Wireless is still a bit of a pain to configure and get working on multiple access points in the same, glibly promiscuous way that comes so naturally to windoze.

windoze is also so trivially hammered by the most ridiculous of threats, that it's comforting--not to mention far more economical--to use a secure Operating System and put up with a bit of a hassle here and there. My instinct is not to use wireless, because of security concerns; so we don't use it at home.

Under SimplyMEPIS 7.0, I would occasionally configure wireless for this place or that (on a case-by-case basis); when I couldn't get a jack to plug into; but it was inconvenient enough to largely relegate the Atheros-G adapter on this machine to relative disuse.

When I installed SimplyMEPIS 8.0 on this machine, the radio was turned off with the hardware switch--out of simple habit. When I brought the machine with me this morning, the switch was still turned off.

Not having a jack to go for, I flicked the switch, thinking that I could go through the manual steps to install the chipset drivers and configure the card for this specific location, not looking forward to having to re-configure the machine to use the hard-wire back at home.

The radio light went on, and KNemo popped-into the panel to tell me that I had been leased an IP address.

I didn't have to do a thing.

This is a Toshiba Satellite A60-S166 notebook unit.
It was originally sold with xp on it, and it needed a reload image, complete with drivers specific to the hardware inside its plastic covers. A retail version of xp would likely have required significant hand-holding, driver installation, updating and configuration just to get it to work.

I loaded SimplyMEPIS 8.0 from a generic CD, and everything works.

No configuration and no driver installation necessary. Indeed, this is the first time I turned on the b/g radio since before installing SimplyMEPIS 8.0.

Whoever said that windoze was easier to use was lying.

[UPDATE]

Several people told me that they were not able to utilize the same wireless network connection, despite having the same band coverage on the wireless adapters, in their windoze notebooks and laptops.

The only difference that I can identify is that they had windoze machines.

Now...wait a minute...windoze, as I mentioned before, is billed as being glibly promiscuous in its ability to connect with wireless access points and ad hoc network shares. Imminently exploitable, mind you, but fall-down easy for the user to get an Internet connection with.

However...every windoze user I spoke with complained of the same thing: "There is no wireless connection available!" with various hypotheses as to the suspected state of my sanity. But I am the one who was surfing on the wireless connection possessing an SSID that consisted solely of the churches complete name.

That's the way it's being discussed this week...Susan Boyle's dream.

I bypassed actually watching the video because it was force-fed to me ahead of a La 5ª Estación video search result; so I presumed it to be more eye-rolling search SPAM to promote that Simon character that nobody cares much for.

That's what I don't understand about how people react to Simon...by their own admission, they can't stand the man, but they watch him anyway. Most people seem to actively seek him out to see what he'll do to his next victim.

Me? I avoid watching people like him; which is why I clicked-past the video last night.

Annie pointed this out to me this morning, and I sat down to watch it despite my misgivings about it being worth my time.

I can be wrong.

Anyway, I thought I'd share it with you because it's so very enjoyable: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnmbJzH93NU

OK....admittedly, people had their doubts that Susan could sing:


"OKAY, now. This is going to be fun...NOT!"



"This is a joke, right?"



"I can't quite figure her out."



"No way!"           "Oh de-ah!"



"Oh no! This poor soul is going to be devastated!"


Now...these images define this video in non-verbal terms:


This man was taken totally off-guard.



I will give it to him, he does appreciate talent.



"Oh my word!"



Relief...that has to be relief.


Watching the panel was fascinating:


Is that a tear in her eye?











These people are lost in the song.


Really, now. What else needs to be said?









You watch the video and judge for yourself. This is Susan Boyle, of Blackburn, West Lothian, Scotland.

For those who want a local copy--as if you can't get it from your browser cache anyway--can find three versions below:

.FLV for the folks who like the Flash Video formats--likely the version you already have, if you're a cache-aholic.
.AVI for those still stuck in windows-land.
.MPG for the rest of us.

Interestingly enough, the Internet is a-buzz with news of Susan Boyle, and fans are already lining-up to buy CDs that aren't even in the making yet. Detractors also abound, as they are apt to do when the new awareness of a talent crops-up.

You will hear of Susan Boyle being a one-song pony, unable to apply her talent to other pieces and genres. Well, I wouldn't put too much stock in that kind of talk, my friend.

Back in 1999, Susan participated in the creation of a charity CD, by contributing her interpretation of "Cry Me a River" to the effort. You can listen to the song and make up your own mind:

.MP3 Sorry. I don't do .mp3s.
cry.me.a.river-susan.boyle.ogg Ogg Vorbis Format
cry.me.a.river-susan.boyle.wav Waveform Audio Format (LPCM)

Susan is being billed as "The Scot Heard 'Round The World" and "The Woman Who Shut Up Simon Cowell", both worthy titles, if you ask me.

As to Simon:
I detest his character, and was willing to believe that his on-screen persona--what little I've seen of it--was genuine; yet, that doesn't ring quite true with me now. If you scroll back-up and take a look at him in image numbers 07 and 11, the man appears to be totally, unguardedly, himself.

Simon's a good actor, and probably darn-well paid to put-on the caustic cloak that he wears on the talent shows. Word has it that he's actually a pretty nice guy. It's all the same to me, since I don't care for his character, so I won't be doing much in the way of watching his shows.

Word also has it that he's affiliated with the Sony BMG record label, and has already spoken seriously with Susan about a contract--before this BGT series has even run its course.

A tip of the hat goes out to Simon for having the savvy to pursue this promptly; and I do hope that Susan is treated fairly.

My thanks goes out to Susan for having a thoroughly enjoyable talent to spread-about a bit of light in this world of ours. As one of the BGT judges, Amanda Holden, said, "It was a complete privilege listening to that."

This evening, the girls had problems with their school computers--these are, regrettably, xp machines.

To cut to the chase, Lia needs a new CD-Rom drive, and Anya probably needs a SYSRES.

Both girls needed DirectX updated, so I hopped over to my machine (which has nothing but Linux gracing it) to get the latest DirectX redistributable to load onto their machines.

I found myself on this page, whereupon you can see that my machine will not jump through the hoops microsoft wants their customers to hop through so that I can download:

Quick Details

File Name:                        directx_mar2009_redist.exe
Version:                           9.26.1590
Date Published:                 3/17/2009
Language:                         English
Download Size:                 92.4 MB
Estimated Download Time: 3 hr 46 min 56K

It's hardly likely that, since all the machines in the house are in use, I'm going to kick somebody off a machine so microsoft can invade our privacy because of corporate paranoia--like they don't make enough money already.

It's also ridiculous to consider installing an xp dual-boot partition on my machine to get things like this downloaded...xp is just too crappy a product to waste money on--take my word for it.

So, on a lark, I Googled for "directx_mar2009_redist.exe" and came up with a hit that was very interesting to me; and gave me the ability to

Right-Click & Save Link Target As... directx_mar2009_redist.exe.

...Straight from microsoft's own servers.

The girls' DirectX issue is now solved.

Anybody need internet exploiter 6 to install under WINE?

It's just cute.