Summer
2008-06-20 13:40
Man, I’m all ready bored. I’ve got nothing to do, but my brother is getting married in a week. And in a week and a day, we’ll be having his reception in my parent’s backyard.
And yet, my brother’s in the next room, playing WoW on his laptop. His engagee is still at her house 100 miles away, and no one’s really pressured into doing anything.
I guess this is why they planned ahead.
In other news, I feel like I want to update the style for this website. Maybe something a little more colorful, more red and yellows along with the standard orange – more sunset flavors.
I like the heat in SoCal. But only when I can breathe. The air is really, really stuffy.
Sabayon
2008-06-13 07:19
This guy knows what he’s talking about. Believe me, I wouldn’t be switching distributions all the time if I liked what I could work with.
But at the same time, I can’t help but be entirely nerdy.
I’ve dumped Gentoo and FreeBSD as impossible to install on a cheap Dell Vostro 1000. Or at least, impossible considering the liveCD wouldn’t recognize itself as root for Gentoo, and FreeBSD being way out of my league in terms of the way it handled… everything.
But I’m still using Linux. Sabayon, even though things are like, constantly breaking.
I have an incredibly high pain tolerance or something.
In other news, I’m done with my 3rd year in UCI. I wish I liked most of my classes, I would actually be enjoying college.
Winding Down
2008-05-30 15:10
I haven’t posted recently, I guess. Not that there’s been that much to do.
I’ve been futzing around with my system, as per usual. I’m rather promiscuous when it comes to distributions – I really don’t care what it is, as long as it’s stable and up to date. Ubuntu was one of those. Debian (I tried it for at least a week or so) was one of those.
Ubuntu was great. I loved it for 2 years, more or less. But there was somewhat of a downhill trend since Fiesty, when I totally loved Ubuntu. Gutsy was all right, but eh, then Hardy didn’t seem to change much of anything, not under the hood as far as I could tell. It came with more and more software, which is pretty cool to the average user, but when am I average with my computer?
Debian was pretty smooth. Installation hiccuped a few times, but it was mostly due to my ghetto ass CDRW. Wireless was a pain in the ass for every distribution I’ve tried so far.
That being said, my history with *nix so far:
- Desktop
- Red Hat (ugh)
- Xandros (ugh)
- Debian
- Ubuntu
- Laptop
- Ubuntu (2 years!)
- Fedora
- Debian
Next on my list is Gentoo. And if I don’t like Gentoo, I’ll be trying Freebsd. *nix for the win.
Why not any other distro? Honestly, I think they’re all the same. Running the same desktop, running essentially modified kernels (specific patches blah blah blah). I’m sticking with the Debian-like packaging, because Fedora and Red Hat were weird.
I hear wonderful things about Gentoo and Freebsd. Not exactly newbie friendly, but I’m willing to take the chance. They just seem different from the rest of the flavors out there.
Man, this was boring to write. I don’t think I’m that much of a *nix fan, it’s just an OS. But it’s free, and it’s fun to poke at things, hose systems and find out “So, that didn’t work”, make things look absurd and test my integrated graphics to its limits with eye candy I can’t ever achieve with Windows. Working with the command line to compile gives me the possibly false hope that one day I’ll be able to code little stuff.
But it’s just an OS. I crash nearly all the time, my system is just unstable because humans are coding, errors happen, my art and whatever I’m writing can get wiped out in an instant but I just start over like I should and try again, because I just want things to work.
I just want things to work. To work the way I want it to.
Professional, Hardy, Mighty
2008-05-10 17:14
One of these days I’m going to get a laptop that I customize. Not that this little laptop I have now is horrible, it certainly gets the job done while I make it look pretty in the process. But, wow, is it not upgradable at all (‘cept for RAM).
My system is schizophrenic to the max.
A US bought Dell preinstalled with Microsoft’s Vista, reformatted with Windows XP professional, partitioned to dual boot with Ubuntu 8.04, with (a random gift from my brother) Apple’s mighty mouse as the pointing device.
Here’s a screenshot:
Flow
2008-05-05 17:58
I am so tired right now, but I can’t help but think about this:
- What would be my life album?
What would be the top 10-20 songs you’d want to include in your “Ultimate Compilations” disc or whatever?
I actually didn’t have a hard time doing this, contrary to what I thought before. I decided somewhere along the way that I’d choose one song from each of my favorite bands. Now that I’ve actually done it, it was fairly simple to find the clear winner in every artist.
Of course, this sort of compilation changes from year to year with better exposure to more music.
But I think I’m old fashioned or something, the songs I’ve put up in my album are the songs I’ve ALWAYS liked. That stand the test of time, so to speak, even though they’ve only been around for a couple of years.
But “a couple of years” is a longer shelf-life than most songs, I guess. I just get infatuated with every song’s mood more than the message. Though the message usually makes or breaks the deal. But a very ambient song, a very in-the-background-until-the-chorus song, where it feels like the tide of the song rises with every stanza, until the peak breaks and washes over you until you’re drenched with it, until you’re a part of it.
Incidentally, the song that does this the most to me, currently, is called Saltwater, by Chicane.
There’s another type that surprises even me sometimes. I love the band Lamb. I LOVE the band Lamb. “Gorecki”, “Cotton Wool”, “Trans Fatty Acid”, “Sweet”, etc. Their music is incredibly… unique and mildly chaotic sounding, but it all ties back to a very sweet voice, sweet lyrics, and this soul flavor you can’t find elsewhere.
A new emerging trend in my taste for music is… hip hop. No, not like what’s on the radio. Hip-hop, trip-hop, inspired by either – the beats, man, the beats. You wouldn’t believe the crazy beats I’ve heard so far. One of the best songs I’ve ever heard was a remix of Rihanna’s “Umbrella”, and it’s one of the phattest beats. This isn’t surprising if you know I’ve been listening to Massive Attack for some time now, and I think they’re one of the greatest bands like, ever. Listen to “Teardrop” and tell me that’s not epic.
Anyway. I am by no means a music critic. I just totally think pop radio is killing good music, and so I’m making a Lani compilation, for me, maybe for you if it wasn’t for the fact I might get busted for hosting music that’s not mine. Oops -_-
Voices
2008-04-28 18:37
It’s probably a good sign when I’m playing the same song over and over (and over and over) again.
I do this with songs/bands I’m instantly obsessive about. This is rare.
One such group is called the Shanghai Restoration Project. I’ve been clicking on their Myspace, Download.com, and especially Last.fm for their songs. I was even tempted to buy it (STILL am), and being the extreme cheapskate I am, that’s a huge compliment.
Babylon of the Orient is probably the best known, and for good reasons. Better than myspace!
I’m just amazed someone could pull off the mix well. And if you didn’t know what the mix is by now, it’s Shanghai Jazzy electronica.
It works.
Really, really well.
edit shoot, I just realized that the page I linked to doesn’t actually work :(
edit 2 Works now. Yay last.fm!
This again
2008-04-22 08:07
…
I’ve all ready got it, but HEY NEW UPGRADE YAY.
Comment [1]
Family
2008-04-17 21:12
There’s always something funny about older brothers. Or any kind of sibling.
(08:29:03 AM) Lani: I’m going to school :)
(08:29:12 AM) Sibling: ok, did you eat breakfast
(08:29:17 AM) Lani: no.
(08:29:32 AM) Sibling: i ate the last mcmuffin
I don’t know why, but that cracks me up.
Habituation
2008-04-04 09:46
This will be another analysis on something very strange in my life that will show you the state of my psyche.
It was another casual conversation with Jay. He asked something along the lines of “Would you like to play City of Heroes with my friend and I?” I replied “I’ll try it if you want me to, but I don’t think it’ll be fun for me.”
That should have been it, right? Instead, I managed to write out some few pages of why I didn’t want to play (from past experiences and observations, etc) in defense of myself. I’ll point out a few key words: in defense of myself.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, because what happened really, really upset me for no real reason (it left me shaking and crying just a little bit – I know, crying at something like this is pushing the limits of reason), and it was on my mind for quite some time. I didn’t want my boyfriend to think I cared less or something, since this is something he’d like to do and I essentially said no. It feels awkward, like some really weird indirect rejection of him, his interests, etc.
It took me an hour or so to flesh out WHY it felt that way, and I have an answer, or maybe half an answer.
It’s because I felt that my parents didn’t want me to be me. You know, normal parents probably ask “Oh, what happened to X that made you do Y?” My parents ask “Why can’t you be smarter/better/nicer/more subservient/ someone else ?” It’s really damaging for anyone to think that the person they are isn’t worthy enough, obviously. And I never want to make someone else feel that way, so any kind of rejection to a relevant interest (in this case, Jay and gaming – you know boys) I never actually want to do, but I end up giving reasons (and plenty of it) in case I accidentally let slip out that I actually don’t care for MMORPG1.
It’s a weird response.
1 Since Jay felt that me implying “I hate ALL games” isn’t actually true, I’m editing this to make it more obvious that MMORPGs are annoying. They ARE o_o