[snow]vembr

Well, it seems as if winter is finally here!

First things first: You probably noticed that there's something different about this site. If you can't put your finger on it, then you are probably 1) senile or 2) colorblind. I redid the color scheme to look wintry - you know, green, brown, gray, and white - just like the woods in the wintertime! Tell me what you all think. If I get an overwhelmingly negative response, then I'll put it back to the way it was; I copied down the hex values for the last theme's colors, so it won't take but a few minutes to fix.

These last few days have been pretty interesting.

Saturday morning, I got my beloved laptop back from Acer! It was a really good thing that I had backed up all my data - they wiped the hard drive and installed Vista again. Being a good geek, I immediately started doing a Windows XP reinstall.

The reinstall went fine at first - my laptop had XP on it when I sent it off. Then, after I started to install the drivers, stuff just stopped working. I'm not even sure why - I didn't do anything that I haven't done before. But when I tried to drag and drop an icon from my Start menu to the desktop and it didn't work, something clicked inside of me and I realized that I had enough.

I had been planning on dual-booting XP and Ubuntu 8.10, but I threw that plan out the window (no pun intended). To be honest, the only reason I was keeping XP around is to produce music, seeing as how the digital audio workstation I have been using, Image-Line FL Studio 8 XXL is Windows-only; and right now, I don't really have any sort of time to be working on music. So, I decided to go all Ubuntu.

I am having the time of my life.

So far, the only thing that isn't working is the Wi-Fi, and I plan to have that resolved by the end of the night. Everything runs faster, crashes / freezes less, and is just so much more of a joy to use. My productivity has increased exponentially - GNOME's interface is very easy to think logically within. (I tried fluxbox, and it isn't for me - it's too minimalistic for my likings, but that may change.) I feel less limited in what I can and cannot do, and as a result, Just Doing It is getting to be a lot easier.

On Sunday, I woke up in the morning and there was a few inches of snow on the ground. I absolutely love snow. Snow is to me what catnip is to cats... it makes me incredibly euphoric for no reason other than that I am around it. I like the way that the light reflects off of it. (Also, I don't like sunlight or other yellow / orange colored lights; i.e., the light that you get during spring, summer, or fall.) I like how the light filters through the clouds and takes on a beautiful shade of gray, and how that light is reflected off of the white snow. Seriously, it makes me really really happy. So of course, Sunday was a really good day for me.


After church that night, Lynn and I went outside to engage in some photography. Lately, I've been doing a lot of black and white photography; I am finding that I love black and white. There's a subtle beauty in a black and white picture that color can't come anywhere close to capturing, in my opinion.

And while I'm blathering on about photography, I encourage you to check out my Flickr. I updated it tonight for the first time since last May or so. I think I'll be using it a bit more often here in the immediate future.

Monday was... interesting. I had a dentist's appointment, so I had the day off from work.

I spent most of the morning working on getting Ubuntu running smoothly (which, to be honest, wasn't all that hard to do). After that, it was off to get drilled on. 0.o

I'd never had my teeth drilled and filled before until yesterday. I must say that I do not like any part of the process one bit. My mouth is very upset at me at the moment for an incident involving me thinking that I was dislodging a wisdom tooth when in reality, I was crushing the inside of my cheek. (I was on oral painkiller for the first time, too.) :P

The rest of yesterday was pretty meh, due to the unhappy condition of my mouth.

But today has been a different story altogether.

Today, I woke up and got ready for work. As I was on my way down the road, my mom happened to check her voicemail on her cell phone. There was a message from my boss's wife - they were having a slow day at the shop, and they weren't going to need me. So, I got the day off!

After I got home, I accomplished a rather amazing feat.

For years, I've been hoarding old computers and old computer parts. I've been keeping them in my shed. At first, it was just a hard drive here and a monitor there. Then it was "Oh, we have these 5 old computers here with Windows 98 on them, 4 of which aren't even marginally functional. Would you take them to the dumpster?" to which I replied "I SHALL HAVE THEM FOR MY VERY OWN!" This sort of thing kept up for a few years... and none of it was ever thrown away - I have a very strict policy about not throwing away electronics. (Some people save the whales... I save the old hard drives. It's all about whatever you're into, y'know? I'm like the PETA for old electronics!)

Today, I realized that those computers were so obsolete that they were more or less totally useless. (Actually, my mom kinda convinced me, but it didn't take much convincing.) Goodwill has this partnership with Dell; you bring any amount of old computer parts to Goodwill, and Dell buys it from them and recycles it.

So, I decided to lower the back seats in my van and load it up with all the old computer parts that I had.



If this were the Cold War, I would have been able to build a very functional bomb shelter out of those parts. Seriously, the entire back end of the van was FULL TO THE TOP, and that stuff is solid! I figure that I could protect at least three people from death by a nuclear bomb. 0.o

Then, this afternoon, I sold my kayak. In a relatively wacky series of events, a few years ago, my mother won an Old Town Otter kayak. I have been meaning to take it out every summer, but I've just never managed to get around to it. Well, I need a ton of cash to get my snowboarding gear out of layaway, so my mom gave me the kayak to sell on Craigslist. I posted it yesterday... a few hours later, I got a call on it, and I sold it today. :D

We dropped the computer gear off at Goodwill and headed over to the library, where I ran into Lynn. We chitchatted and made fun of kitschy books for a few hours... then I did some stuff in town with my mom, came home, did some stuff on the computer, and started typing up this massive blog post.

So life has been treating me pretty awesomely lately.

In other news... trance heavyweights Daniel Kandi and Robert Nickson have dropped a new track - Rewire. Click here for a Mediafire download link, courtesy of yours truly. Download it, listen to it, and if you love it, head on over to Audiojelly and buy some of their other tracks and support these guys! (I am not saying that as a hypocrite, either, because I paid for Rewire - all $2.45 that it cost me (actually, $2.75, counting the $.30 charge for using a debit card.))

Wow... this has been a long and epic post. I hope you all have enjoyed reading it, 'cos it's been really fun to write!

-K