/home/endperform   Rants, rambles and technobabble

I figured since I’m using Vista on my laptop, and I’m using my laptop a bit more recently, that I’d start a little series called “Life with Windows Vista”, and once in a while I’ll come up with something to talk about. I think this week I’m going to whip up an article on what I’ve done so far to make Vista a workable environment here on my laptop. Stay tuned for that.

So, I’m closing in on the end of my first week with Emacs. So far, things are going about as I expected them to be. I have started my own cheatsheet (which I may publish later), and I’ve installed Planner, which is a really great mode for organizing. It depends on a couple of other things, but once installed, it works well. I’m finding that it’s a nice tool as far as work goes when it comes to organization. I haven’t done much real coding in Emacs yet, simply because I’m still looking for a project to do. Coding at work has been slow because I haven’t had time to work on the internal web applications and there hasn’t been an opportunity for a cool bash script lately.

So, what do I have on my list of things to learn?

- Keybindings. This is going to take a while, but once I learn them then I’ll be in good shape

- .emacs. I’m sure there are some settings that some would see as essential. I’ll share mine in an upcoming post.

As far as projects go, I think I might start taking a look around at the open source projects out there and see if there’s something I can do to start getting involved. I think I’ll also work on setting up local source control on this machine to make managing things easier

So last weekend I decided that I wanted to play Forza 2 on the good ole 360. I pop the disc in and it starts, and I start going through the menus. Finally, it locks solid and I get the dreaded red ring of death. Now, this wasn’t the first time I had seen it. Bethany got it to red ring while playing Bioshock, but after some messing around it came back up. Unfortunately this time, it didn’t come back.

I called up XBox support, dreading the worst. Luckily for me, the guy on the other end was pretty decent. Within a few minutes, he determined that our 360 was eligible for the RRoD extended warranty and had a shipping box sent to us. 3 days later, the box arrived and I packaged the poor thing up and sent it on its way. I figured it would be at least 3 weeks until I heard anything, but as it turns out, they had the thing tested, fixed and sent out within 3 days of receipt. I’m happy to say that the 360 is on the way home. Whether or not it actually works is a whole other story

If any of you are following me on Twitter, you may have noticed a Tweet where I mentioned I installed Arch on the desktop. I figured I would go into my reasoning for going back to Arch. I left Arch initially because I got tired of messing around and tweaking things to get them working, but I also missed two big things when I switched to Ubuntu: up-to-date software and the install what you want way of things. I am keeping Ubuntu on my laptop, because now I’m moving back to the desktop for most of my computing at home. This leads me into what I have running as far as a desktop goes. Once again, I installed Fluxbox. It’s small, easy to configure and pretty flexible. I’ve been spending the past few days installing the software I need, and right now I’m working on transferring my music and such from the laptop back home to the desktop. All and all, I’m happy to be back on Arch, at least on the desktop. Ubuntu will work fine on the laptop, although I think I’ll probably end up installing Fluxbox on it as well.

As far as Twitter goes, I’ve been a little lax on my updates there. I’ve been rather busy at work, so that limits the amount of tweets I spit out during the week. On the weekends I’m usually pretty busy with family things, so again, lack of updates. One thing that’s beginning to annoy me with Twitter, though, is that there are a lot of ’spam’ users cropping up. I don’t add anyone that follows me. What I usually do is check out their Twitter page and see if they interest me at all. If it turns out they’re a spammy type of Twitter (spammy being ‘listen to x podcast! buy x!’), I’ll block them so I don’t see them on my follower list. I notice some of my Twitter friends are using another service (Plunk, I believe), so I might give that a shot at some point.

I know, I’ve been neglecting my blog of late, but that’s what happens when you get busy with other things. There isn’t a whole lot to report on, but I have been doing a little bit of geeking out. Last weekend I gave Bethany my XPS 600 desktop. Her old destop just wasn’t up to the tasks she was asking of it anymore, so I decided to set her up. I reformatted and put a fresh install of XP on it, transferred her old documents and now she’s happily plugging away. For the time being, I’ve got my laptop set up as a desktop, which is working out pretty well. But, for Father’s Day, I’ve got a new toy coming:

Dell Inspiron 530
Intel Core 2 Quad Processor Q6600 (8MB L2 cache,2.4GHz,1066FSB)
2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz- 2DIMMs
500GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM)
Radeon ATI HD 2600 XT 256MB
16X DVD+/-RW Drive

The only downside is the Radeon card, but I think I can manage as the Linux drivers from ATi/AMD are getting better with every release. The big thing I’m curious about is the quad core. I can’t wait to see how it performs under Linux. Part of me wants to install Gentoo just to see what it would do. Of course, people are going to ask why I went with Dell rather than building one of my own. It seems like it would cost just about the same to go either way. I’m not ashamed, so go ahead and dock me geek points :P