The lecturer who graded the work that forced me to install Ubuntu on my PC seemed to like it.
At the end of it he asked “How long did it take you?”
We were all like, “Um…. we started immediately after assignment 2?”
After the presentation ended one of us recalled that when asked if we’d started informally a while ago, all of us were shaking our heads.
…well as long as he liked it.
So I finally had to do what I’ve been putting off, and since no amount of hemming and hawing could’ve gotten me out of it -
I went and did it.
I installed Linux on my desktop PC.
I managed to put it off during my networking modules - just do all the assignments in the lab! Fedora Core 5? A passing acquaintance, pleasant to work with and thoroughly professional, although generally very reserved and not exactly very friendly.
I managed to put it off during my database modules - again just use the labs! Red Hat? Another passing acquaintance, middle-aged and dignified, with a somewhat archaic demeanour, and even more reserved than FC5.
But then, what flavour for my desktop? One came to mind - one of the younger distributions, said to be good looking, amiable, kind-natured, and always glad to help - yet still of fine pedigree - highly capable, effective, and reliable. That distribution was Ubuntu Linux.
Meticulously, I set to work collecting information about how to best go about making room for her on my faithful pc. I have 2 drives - one IDE and one SATA, and while my boot partition is on my IDE drive, Windows XP resides comfortably on the SATA drive. I look up guides on the internet, and in preparation I free up one of the partitions on my IDE drive for my new OS. With my preparations done, I insert the LiveCD and prepare to welcome Ubuntu.
I must say that my first impression was an excellent one. Unlike a certain other OS, Ubuntu loaded up off the CD and greeted me with a warm and very friendly user interface (Gnome) - I look around and realise that she was actually running off the CD. I was provided with tools to manage my drives, Firefox (the network was fully functional), as well as a nice big icon on the desktop saying “Install”.
In what I hoped was a display of bravado I gallantly double clicked the icon.
My Pioneer whirled for a bit, and I was presented with a few questions regarding my install:
What language did I prefer? (Apparently Ubuntu is quite multilingual)
Where am I? (Ubuntu wanted to make sure of the time)
And finally, I was asked which partition I wanted to put her on, so I pick the partition I had prepared before hand…
but wait … Ubuntu absolutely had to have a swap partition, and quite adamantly insisted on me creating one.
Well fine, I thought. I’ll give you 2gb of space for swap - what’s 2gb anyway! So I try to create another partition on my IDE and realised I was at the maximum number of physical partitions (4), and could not create any more. No room for a swap partition here. My SATA was mostly full and had a logical partition I could use, but it was also almost full-up and I had no room to back up the data, nor the inclination to create a new swap partition in that one (which would mean erasing the data, and then making the new partition). I was in a dead-end, with no visible way to continue with the installation.
Ubuntu offered me a way out - she’d shrink the logical partition in my SATA and then create a new one of the space created after the shrink. I’ve read horror stories about data loss after people did similar things with a windows re-partitioner but had no other choice, and with a heavy heart I accepted. A window came up informing me that the process may take quite a while depending on the size of the data, and the thought of the loss of whatever data I had stored on that partition clutched at my heart every minute of the process - but after a while a “operation” complete window came up, and Ubuntu’s swap partition was created.
I’m posting this now on Windows, and I haven’t noticed any data loss.
The installation was almost ready to proceed - and I see on the “confirm options” screen “GRUB will be installed on (hd0)”. The guides I consulted said to not install GRUB on the Master Boot Record - GRUB is Linux’s bootloader and is used to load the OS. One guide emphatically notes in large bold text:
DO NOT INSTALL GRUB in the Master Boot Record (MBR)! If you install GRUB in the MBR, all bets are off…you’re on your own.
(hd0) was cryptic but didn’t look like MBR to me - but to be safe I look it up on Google, and it turns out that IT WAS THE CODE FOR GRUB TO REFER TO THE DREADED MBR. I had to change it - but how? I could find no guides on google regarding the grub-code, save for the fact that (hd0,x) referred to partition x on hd0. Ok, I thought. Now I can put GRUB on my linux partition.
Except I had 2 hard disks. Which one, then, was the one my Linux partition was on? I google it again - no dice. Fdisk -l reports that my IDE is hdc and my SATA is sda. I trawl through some support threads and see that hd0 is the first boot device, so I cancel the installation, go into BIOS setup, and make sure my IDE drive really was the first boot device. It wasn’t, of course - I had to boot from CD-ROM in order to install Ubuntu. Deciding to do what I could I set it to the next best thing - the second boot device, and restarted the install.
(hd0,x) is the partition x where I wanted GRUB installed, and since Linux is on the fourth partition I warily type in (hd0,4) and proceed with the install. Ubuntu hums along, the installer proceeds to about 90%, and notifies me that it was setting up GRUB…
and then it informed me that (hd0,4) was an invalid GRUB code, and threw a large “Installer has crashed unexpectedly”, followed by a terrifying “This is a fatal error” and a crash dump.
…then it hit me. The count starts from 0. Partition 4 is (hd0,3). How do I noobed this up?! AND WHY ARE YOU SO UNFORGIVING UBUNTU LINUX?! … you could have…. told me to input a new code, you know, instead of crashing in my face *sniffle*
To play it safe I reboot my PC and restart the installer, and the install proceeded smoothly this time. After it completes I am told to reboot my PC, and I follow the rest of the steps in the guide to get NTLDR to recognise Ubuntu is installed. I create the entry and successfully load GRUB …
… and realise that Ubuntu had recognised Windows XP during the install after all, and had a created an entry in GRUB to boot windows XP.
… D:
(In all fairness, a new user who hadn’t consulted any guides and who’s installing on a fresh system wouldn’t have run into any of these issues. Quite simply, I shot myself in the foot by following outdated guides. LET THIS BE A LESSON TO YOU ALLLLLLLLL)
So apparently, Cornell’s library has had their online services set up for quite a while.
Considering that ARPA Net was first wired up in 1969, this is really an unbelievably hardcore achievement. I’m so proud of you, Cornell.
Has it only really been just a month?
Of course, I’ve known you for much longer than that. In the few months I’ve been here, you’ve grown from being just “that cute girl in Lit class”, to “Jamie’s friend”, to “Jamie’s friend who played Chrono Trigger and Xenogears zomg!” to “Jamie’s ‘friend’ “, to “girl who asks dreadfully pointed questions that threaten to pierce that veil I always put on”, to “late night/early morning email buddy” to “girl sleeping on my futon” to “‘Oh gawd am I just feeling lonely and on the look out for a rebound’ girl” to… what you are now. Someone I truly love, someone whose eyes I gaze into and think “Ahh, but to look at you till the stars themselves go out…”. Someone whose hand fits so nicely in mine, someone whose pointed chin I always welcome atop my head, someone whose embrace never fails to send waves of pleasure coursing through my veins. Someone whose smile remains ever bewitching and capable of reducing me to a quivering mess.
Someone whom I hope remains here, smiling at me, for the rest of our lives.
Indeed, sometimes it’s hard for me to believe that we’ve come so far together. All of it really did start that day, a month ago, when you decided to come over to cook me a meal in return for that mishmash of meat, scraps of vegetables and left-over rice I call fried rice that I cooked for you. As you lay there on my futon, so unabashedly defenceless in the presence of a guy you only kind of knew, something clicked, some mechanism in the fibre of my being fired up, and the possibilty of me falling in love with you became a question mark, as opposed to an impossibility. That question mark slowly lost its curious arc, shedding its tail and solidfying into a full stop as you and I exchanged emails through the night, as we traced the outline of each other’s psyche, probed this way and that on past loves, family, spectacles, life, death, and everything in between.
As a rule, I generally don’t talk much about things I don’t know. One of the things I *do* talk a lot about, however, is myself - after all, who really knows me better than myself, right?
And yet somehow, in the midst of your questioning, your inability to let my oft-rehearsed answers brush aside your need for understanding, I found myself reexamining the things I’ve accepted as part of my being. Things I’ve held onto as central to my being for years now have had their layers of lazy reasoning peeled away by your inquisition, and as I struggled to defend my position in faltering Japanese, I began to recognize how much of it was just pure word games and lofty language, and how much of it remained firm and unbending in the face of critical inspection. Still, it’s a refreshing feeling, having to justify the crazy hotch-potch of half-baked ideas and naive philosophy I hold dear as my own. It’s a refreshing feeling, to know that you really do care, that you really do want to understand why I think the way I do, why I view life the way I do.
That you seem to already know me so well in so short a time surprises me as well. You catch me off-guard when you seem to see right through me, telling me I’m afraid of losing your love, predicting that I wouldn’t know how to respond to a dirty joke coming from a girl. I’d even go so far to say that sometimes it seems you might know me better than I do, as you call me out as being someone who craves affection, despite me normally regarding myself as the direct opposite. You might know me better than I do, and yet, even now you still say “I still don’t know much about you”.
I am naked in your presence, all my flaws and shortcomings lay bare, bereft of the protection of the armor I usually wear to keep the world at bay. The poses, pretences and canny one-liners that normally work so well at maintaining an arm’s length distance slide off you like water off a duck’s back. Your smile, that mischevious glint in your eyes only further serve to further disarm me, till I can do little but hold you in my arms and hope you never leave my embrace.
You are my one girl in all the world. And I hope that never changes.
I’m back in Singapore for a few days as my brother gets hitched over the weeked. Holy crap, but it’s been, what, 10 years now since he got together with his soon-to-be bride. ^_^
Will be busy with wedding stuff and whirlwind rushes to meet old friends.
I’ll be back in Japan soon, but until then, 元気でね。
A friend had an assignment where he had to prove that RTTs and ping were affected by distance.
I noticed an obvious solution and proceeded to explain it to him. This is because I’m a nice person.
Here’s my solution:
[21:09] me: let me give you the easiest proof
[21:10] me: i attempt to ping the moon
[21:10] j: no no. they say must be us site. w
[21:10] me: it’s farther than england right
[21:10] j: er, europe. w
[21:10] me: so it’s very far away amirite?
[21:10] me: and the ping never comes back
[21:10] me: amirite?
[21:10] j: chuddup. no pc on the moon for u to ping
Obviously he wasn’t convinced. But I’m also a very patient person, so I provide another proof:
[21:10] me: also you can try to ping the sun
[21:10] j: i tried pinging krypton. Host cannot be resolved
[21:10] me: but you must be very careful when you ping the sun
[21:10] me: if you try to ping it in the daytime, the packet will burn up
[21:11] me: because the sun is very very hot
[21:11] me: so, you must ping it at night
I was even nice enough to give him precautions, but he goes and tries to ping Krypton instead.
Hmph, obviously that won’t work - we all know Krypton doesn’t exist!
I’m not THAT nice, so I’ll let him find that out by himself, hah.
Wrote up these two reviews for the Orochinagi forums, in a spate of boredom/running away from actual work. ^_^
So. I know I often complain about my life, and me, and the suffocating madness that threatens to overwhelm me.
But sometimes, I get reminded that my life isn’t that bad.
It’s the New Year.
Happy New Year, everyone~. May 2007 turn out to be a good year for you.
As the title suggests this is going to be a lot less focused than what I normally write, so don’t worry if nothing makes any sense.
Nana 2 is a mess. Don’t bother watching it. The subtitle for the movie should probably go something like “Hachi sleeps around and makes a mess of things”. The music is also noticeably poorer than the first movie, which is a huge let down. As for the acting… Miyazaki Aoi turned in such an inspired performance as Hachi last time I kept thinking during the entire movie “Urrgh. I don’t like this new girl very much”. The other replacements are a mixed bunch - Ren just looks like he’s pissed off 24/7, but the replacement for Shin was very welcome, as his youth brings back what was missing from the last actor. Nakashima Mika, however, still gives a very strong performance as Nana, but, as can be guessed from my suggested subtitle, there really isn’t as much place for her to shine this time. Overall, to re-emphasize the point - this isn’t worth seeing. Give it a miss.
So I also went out to town to see if there were any sales around. It turns out that unlike Singapore, everything (or a lot of stores anyway) friggin’ close on New Year’s Day, and the sales start tomorrow, on Jan 2nd. Already there are lines forming outside places like Shinjuku’s 109 - so who says only gamers are crazy enough to queue up in the blistering cold for hours, hmm? :P I reckon I’ll pop by the Zara store tomorrow to see what they have too, I guess.
I like fish. A lot. And Tokyo is a great place to be if you like fish. Waiting till 9.30 at night and pedaling on my bike to the nearby Ito-Yokado for 50% discounted sushi/sashimi/fish etc is something I do pretty often. Like I was telling Xephyris just now:
” You know what? This is remarkably shallow, but to me, right now, happiness is 2 packs of nearly expired Tuna sashimi bought for 300 yen, with 2-day-old-left-in-the cooker-rice for dinner.”
*20 minutes later*
“Uh oh.
I feel rumblings in my stomach already.
Watch as half an hour later my happiness turns into “Oh gawd, why was I so stupid to buy nearly expired sashimi. AND TO EAT IT WITH 2 DAY OLD RICE”
I still haven’t finished FFXII yet. Why? Because I’m nearing the end game and the GAWDDEMN INSANE AMOUNTS OF FARMING THAT NEED TO BE DONE ARE PISSING ME OFF RARRRGGGHHH!!! RANDOM TREASURE CHESTS ARE BAD! BAD BAD BAD BAD!!! YOU WILL GIVE ME THAT DAMN EXCALIBUR AND STOP MAKING ME RUN ACROSS THE FRIGGIN’ MAP!
I think deep down I’m actually a pretty simple person. I don’t spend my free time thinking deep thoughts, and while I can appreciate people taking the time to reflect upon things, I’m too much of a believer in the “Let people think whatever the hell they want” school of thought to care too much about any single person’s opinions, especially if they differ from mine. So yes, you can tell me you’re a complex person, but there’s little you can do to make me think your point of view isn’t complete and utter garbage.
In other words, yes, I am hopelessly self-absorbed and think I am always right MUHOOHAHAH.
The end.
SS, 2006/12/30 10:16:44:
btw WaxLy is 404ing on me
xephyris ::, 10:16:47:
?!!
xephyris ::, 10:16:59:
that’s weird, it works here
SS, 10:17:52:
I see the header, then an Error 404 where the content should be
xephyris ::, 10:18:01:
wtf
xephyris ::, 10:18:04:
i can’t reproduce
SS, 10:19:10:
w
SS, 10:19:15:
that sounds bad taken out of context
