Alpha Mind Blog

So it’s been upgrade weekend here at the Alpha House in North Berkeley.

My new PC arrived on Friday. It’s now Tuesday. Here’s what I’ve done in the interim:

1. Opened my spiffy new (refurbished, actually; yes, I’m cheap) Gateway laptop featuring Centrino Core 2 Duo inside. 2 cores, yay! 64 bits, yum!
2. Decided not to send the lousy thing back because most of its faults are probably Vista’s faults (Home Premium). Such as:
   1. I can’t get a single cardbus device to work.
   2. I can’t get a Mac-formatted external FireWire hard drive to be recognized.
   3. It chokes on a Windows hard drive wired to it through a USB2 hub.
3. Decided not to send the lousy thing back even though some of its faults are definitely its own (i.e. the Gateway laptop’s). Such as:
   1. Your eyes have to be below the center of the screen to get the best view. Which means that when it sits on a table, you have to have the screen leaning way back. It’s so near horizontal I’ve had to dust it 5 times in 4 days.
   2. It has spiffy function key functions of its very own which are somewhat hinted at by little ideograms on the keys, but if you can’t tell what those mean by looking at them, you’re out of luck: the Gateway documentation doesn’t mention the function keys or what they do. ‘nfact, a search in the docs for the word “function” comes up empty. So when you hit a key combo that turns off your wireless, you get to scream and shout and pull your hair out until you happen to hit the same combo again to toggle it back on. You get no help. None.
4. Decided not to install XP to the new machine. I was sorely tempted. Introducing new hardware to Vista… well, after a while you get to feeling about this activity the way you feel about telling a four-year-old his mother’s died. Pure dread. After a while I figured out the drill. Add hardware. Wait a long time. Get told the driver’s been successfully installed. Begin restart of machine. Fold 2 loads of laundry while Vista shuts down. Sit in a rocker and listen to a longish piece of classical music while Vista starts up. (When I plugged the external HD into the USB hub, I’m not sure Wagner’s Ring would have been long enough; I gave up after Dance of the Blessed Spirits and half of The Four Seasons and did a hard-shutdown.)So the main reason I didn’t install XP was that it would be a lot of work and I reckon I’d regret it within 3 months, when the Vista drivers have been debugged and anything new I buy will only work with Vista.
5. Decided I still can’t eliminate Microsoft Office from my life entirely. I massage a lot of data, diverse small datasets, not worth writing programs to do the routines, so I can’t live without ASAP Utilities, which means I can’t live without Excel. Not yet. So I installed Excel 2000 to the new PC.
6. But I did decide to leave MS Word behind. Forever, I hope. My last client made me use Word 2007, and a little bit of Excel 2007. It was like going to prison in Louisiana. To say Office 2007 sucks is like saying the Pacific Ocean is moist. Word 2007 prompted me to write a Twitter update that I’m really not proud of—I was soooooooo mad!!!! Worst! Software!! Ever!!!Ever!!!!

   Really, I can’t imagine how the Word 2007 team’s members sleep at night or look at themselves in a mirror. Vile. Repulsive. Truly abominable. Inexcusable. Disgusting.

7. Deleted all traces of Office 2007 from the machine. Installed OpenOffice.org, the whole suite, and started learning the Writer module.Did I mention I don’t like Word 2007?
8. Made my new laptop a dual-boot Vista-Ubuntu machine.
9. Found a reason to like Vista. Partitioning the hard drive to set up the dual-boot was incredibly easy, and required nothing more than the disk manager built into Vista. Last time I built a dual-boot I had to buy Partition Magic for the one-time use.
10. Installed Cinelerra and started using it. By which action I fulfilled a dream almost 3 years old.
11. Learned that Ubuntu rocks. Oh my goodness how sweet it is! Top 5 ways Ubuntu rocks:
    1. Package Management: They’ve almost got this right, finally. I got Cinelerra installed and running in less than 2 hours. And that’s Cinelerra—nobody told me Cinelerra was a game for kids. My guess is it’ll be the hardest install I’ll ever have to do in Ubuntu. In my previous tries at Linux I’ve given up on installing some packages after 10 infuriating hours.
    2. Did I mention introducing hardware to Vista was a pain? Ubuntu had no trouble with the hard drive routed through the USB hub, the one Vista completely choked on.With Ubuntu, either it can handle the hardware you give it or it can’t, and you know within a few seconds. And mostly, it can.

       Here’s Vista noticing a new thing plugged into a USB port:

       “Oh, I see you’ve plugged in something new…

       “…I’ll get on it right away…

       “… No problemo…

       “…Don’t you worry your little head about it. I can handle this… I seen just this kind of thing once, back in the day, in Bangalore during the war, where I got that Jezail bullet in the leg, I ever tell you about that?…

       “…You just might want to go get lunch. Better make it Chinese carry-out though, nothing too slow, because this really won’t take all that long…

       “…Yes sirree, my daddy used to work on these things, I seen one just like it, yes I did…

       [User returns from Chinese carry-out, eats while listening to William Tell Overture (12:53 if the conductor doesn't drag too much) goes outside to check for mail, returns to computer]

       “…Hey, where you been, I got this done a long time ago. Two three minutes ago, maybe longer. I told you I’d handle it.”

       After all of which, the hardware might work. Might.

       And with Ubuntu? Oh my goodness! I had a PS2 mouse, a PS2 keyboard, and that Windows hard drive all plugged into the USB hub when I introduced the USB hub to Ubuntu. My elbow accidentally bumped the PS2 mouse on the desk, and I saw the cursor move. I rubbed my eyes in disbelief. I moved the mouse on purpose. Cursor moved. I fired up Firefox and typed in a URL with the PS2 keyboard. It worked. I went looking for the external hard drive and there it was! This took no time at all.

       I plugged my HP PhotoSmart all-in-one into the hub. Ubuntu was ready to print to it immediately! Installing it to Vista had taken several minutes.

    3. A goodly selection of apps already installed. Like OpenOffice.org, which we should all learn to use now that hardware can help it go quicker than a snail’s pace. And, oh, did I mention I hate Office 2007?
    4. Ubuntu 7.10 for AMD64 on Core 2 Duo is fast! There just isn’t much waiting going on here. I may wind up spending most of my time in Linux instead of Vista. And 7.10 for 64 bits is surprisingly complete. (I.e. nearly every package you’re likely to want is available in a deb.)
    5. It allows you to feel like you could be a nerd if you wanted to, because after all, look at you! you’re successfully running Linux! which we all know is impossible unless your head is topped by a propeller or a turban.
12. Imported my current book project into OpenOffice Writer and got going on it after a few weeks’ hiatus.
13. Visited YouTube and almost cried over all the great 80s music videos that used to be there and are gone. (And several of the users who’d uploaded them suspended.)
14. Learned all the Vista keyboard shortcuts. Being a writer and a non-mouse-type guy, I like keyboard shortcuts. I suggest other writers check them out.
15. Fired up Windows Live Writer and started writing this post.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Life Itself. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Comments Feed . Both comments and pings are currently closed.