Monday, May 30, 2011

Transmission Received

Ever since she had killed the others he'd been on the run.

Shadows, shortcuts, cheats--he'd known some, and now he knew them all. The complex, seated as it was in the old Auburn mineshafts, was extensive. The mines had once been visible from space, and the Company had undertaken to "restore" the land. It had done so marvelously--and simultaneously built one of the largest government research stations in history.

Now he was inhabiting it's air ducts and service tunnels as a fugitive.

Occasionally she would find one of his hideouts, rat's nests he carved out where he thought she wouldn't notice. Then he'd close the compromised room off from his network and continue finding new sources of food, water, and a mockery of sanity. He left hints of his existence, though: that woman--six sigma tenacity!--needed to know her struggle against her was not in vain.

The radios were his favorite. Simple, set up strictly for Company propaganda distribution, yet with a little adjustment they could bring in the Outside.

One of these was his current focus. A wire here, some solder here, oh, such delicate work!

Then, a delicate shift of that inductor's core--


Transmission received.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

The Captain knew how hard subspace jumps were. The time frames and energy requirements forced the crew into cryosleep. The cold was hard on the hull, even as hardened against the rigors of deep space as it was. As the time of the jump wore on the Jackson-Emery Expansion Drive would slowly relax the field and the structure of the ship would begin to bear part of the load of supporting an extra dimension against the confines of the sub-dimensional vector space...

Place
motivation
meh
graser

wanted
pulled
drawn

missed
missing

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Ubuntu 11.04: Whaaaaat?

Stupid cousin.

Most of those reading won't find this useful. I do like feeding Google, though, so here goes...

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 from 10.10.

I am presently engaged in hating it.

Unity was a giant WTFreak era during my adoption, but a few minutes from a friend who 'gets' it helped loads. Now it's just three (big) complaints:
1: Meta-T used to be user-defined by me to open a new terminal. It now brings up the Trash Can. Seriously?!?!?! The Trash Can? Who hotkeys that, and THEN ignores the user-defined overrides?!
1.5: Why do I want a touch-capable interface with my touchpad and mouse? If my touchpad acts like a one-button mouse, how do I do anything? Hobbling along under Gnome is much more feasible.
2: Multiple Desktops. One X session over multiple displays has dead space that makes me nervous, so I use the ATI Catalyst configuration tool to set up multiple X sessions. My initial survey of all my options indicates that Unity has No Concept of this. I have no UI (aside from limited desktop-right-click-menu access) on my second monitor. Anyone with this issue may be interested in running "metacity --replace &" as a functional hack under Ubuntu Classic.
3: Widgets. I want a live CPU usage, temperature, and clockspeed display on my screen. No, pinning apps to the dock WILL NOT WORK. I tried. It doesn't do dynamic icons. Also, I already have my favorite Gnome apps. (Ubuntu 11.04 already killed my temp monitor app.)

Firefox 4.
Why did they rename "Organize Bookmarks" to "Show all bookmarks"??? Really?
New UI? Getting used to it. It is enough like the last one to struggle through it. (Stop Now! If I Wanted Chrome, I Would GET Chrome!!!)

I just spent an hour fighting with it. There is no clear winner. Am I frustrated? A little bit. I'm sure you can't tell.

Monday, May 2, 2011

So I decided to make a coat out of the sleeves of other coats.

It came out really well, actually. It's now my coat of arms.