Shades of Nothingness

Incense rises up
Conduit of our prayer ---
Vernal mercy, please

Forgive me.

Congratulations President-Elect Obama, I am glad for your victory.
Congratulations Senator McCain, I applaud your grace in defeat.

Photographs of the Lovely Lady:
That Faraway Look
Her Hair is Beautiful Red
She Wears a Snood

Originally published at Shades of Nothingness. You can comment here or there.

I have done a small amount of photography since school started. See below

A bee/wasp at my bus stop

Work on the front yard easement

A rose on our new-ish bush

As always, the full list is available at photographs section of my website. Enjoy!

Originally published at Shades of Nothingness. You can comment here or there.

I have programmed.  That is all.

Originally published at Shades of Nothingness. You can comment here or there.

So, I have attended the Welcome Convocation at the real school (read: not the community college who can’t spell).  It was less-than-interesting, but it was the mark of finally being ready to start programming classes—though this coming semester I’m going to feel more like a math major than a CS major.

In other news, it’s my lovely’s birthday today, and I will come bearing gifts of frankincense and myrrh…okay not really frankincense and myrrh, but I will be bearing gifts!  I will also be bearing cake.  May today be happy and wonderful for you, Anita!

Laters,

Originally published at Shades of Nothingness. You can comment here or there.

I have set up a WordPress-LJ crossposter!  Now duplicating effort for no good reason!  Ah well.

Originally published at Shades of Nothingness. You can comment here or there.

After a (quite) brief experiment with Fedora, I have installed Ubuntu upon laptop mine.  The install went trickily…which was quite unexpected, having had experience with installing debian several times.  The default install CD refused to progress beyond the main menu (the install, memory test, et al).  I tried several suggestions: ’safe graphics mode’, ‘vesa=force’, ‘vga=791′.  None of them moved beyond that menu screen.  The next suggestion was to try the alternate installer CD.  This would have worked, had the burn not corrupted half the files on the CD.  It booted up and began the install, partitioned the drives, and the blew up when three of the first five packages were corrupted.  Rather than risk a full install of unknown reliability, I decided to do an install with another CD.  Having had bad luck with all the other install media, I tried the net install image; this was the charm.  The install proceeded smoothly, downloading the whole kit and kaboodle from the Ubuntu mirrors, and presenting me with a familiar installer—while it may seem a bit retro, it is quite functional.  After about an hour and a half (about 20 minutes of it sitting at a progress bar stuck at 6% and “Please wait…”.  I realize that it had to download the entire desktop environment, but some sort of progress indicator—even just an indication of which package was being downloaded—would have been nice.  After all of this, I finally had a nice desktop—composited even, Fedora and debian both refused to composite it—with a nice and familiar package manager.  It might not have been worth the trouble, given how I could have installed debian, but it’s done.  Next up, measuring power consumption with compiz-fusion, metacity, and openbox under GNOME (and pulling for openbox, but the testing will tell).

Originally published at Shades of Nothingness. You can comment here or there.