Yes, I know the Jurassic Period wasn’t an Ice Age.

I don’t blog a lot. The thrill was never really there, I just had stuff on the inside I felt like externalizing, and it’s just not cathartic anymore. Maybe it is, I don’t know.

Yesterday I felt a little vindicated because my son turns out to have quite a brain on him and can read at a very advanced level. I do think this is because early on in his developement I spent time with him encouraging his understanding and recognition of letters, which kind of snowballed out of control. Anyone who knew Jabba at this time will tell you, he just started absorbing words and dropping them in to his brain like coins in a bank.

He is just amazing.

Well I’ve raked leaves, exorcised a bad oven/range, wrastled with a mangy computer, and staved off losing much data and hard work to my own horrible, horrible traps that I had laid for myself.

I had intended on doing much programming and blissful implementations of good ideas I have for my special brew of Q3 engine-ness.  I have only passed around some choice snippets  to some good people who know what they’re looking at, took some damn good pointers from more than a handful of people, but I’m still wary of releasing the entire thing to the public.

That said, with this weeks quagmire, I am thinking it is about time to start utilizing sourceforge.net.  I have seen first-hand the delightful problems that comes with keeping a work-in-progress repository open to anonymous access, with Tr3b, who is the programmer for the XreaL project (hosted on the forge), but his project adds a lot of eye-candy, which definitely reels in the … er … common folk.  Hell, I don’t like to tell people about the stuff I plan on doing, not for fear that they’ll steal my ideas, but more because I don’t feel like it needs discussion, and I like the freedom to change design and direction on a whim.  It’s how my brain works, so that’s how my projects work.  Don’t like it?  Too bad.
It’s almost the giving season, so you should know that I want tools, tools, and … uh … a set of weights.  Just 2 15 pound dumbbells would do fine, but if you want to give me a bar and a bench I’m up for it.

On a final note, I have finally gotten my Terratec EWS88MT to work with Ubuntu, my LOC (linux of choice).  In case you don’t own one of the elegant ICE1712 chip based sound cards and have tried to get it to work with Linux, you have no idea of the heartache and pain and frustration that goes with it.

After much exhausting downloading of sources and building by instruction (which were good instructions), I have built ALSA from source (that’s the sound driver), and have only found one mention of the downfall of the ICE1712 chip cards somewhere out there.  The Monitor-Out jack isn’t implemented in my particular card’s drivers, and as it turns out that’s the only thing that doesn’t work.  As fate would have it, I was able to record sounds before I could play them back (hahaha, oh so wrong), but I was able to fashion a linkage via Radio-Shack converters so that I can use regular desktop speakers (instead of having a Receiver dedicated to my PC) with my sound card.  The first time I fired up Depeche Mode’s Precious it blared out of my Family Room surround sound system (I had the volume cranked, to be sure that any sound made could be heard) I was joyous and excited.  I again tried the regular speaker jack and came to realize after examining the source it doesn’t appear that the Monitor-Out was ever implemented as a function of the Driver’s interface with the CS8404A-CS chip.  (I’ll be honest, most of it was beyond my understanding, jumping in to foreign code is like trying to read Sanskrit most of the time.  If the code is readily legible it’s because some generous and benevolent person deliberately put thought and heart in it.)  Looking at the card I can see a CS8414-CS chip as well but I think that has to do with linking up several of these cards at once.  Maybe.  I’m just glad it works in some sense.

So a couple of days ago I came home to find my PC stuck in OS-load limbo, just sitting there telling me XP is loading. It never came. Attempts to boot to safe mode were met with the BSOD, and the windows recovery console scan froze at 51%. Disk diagnostics weren’t conclusive, which wasn’t sitting well with me.

I had backed up a good deal of data and tried to install Ubuntu (Dapper Drake) and when it was trying to set up the partitions it came back negatory, ! I have hard drives to spare but none as cool as my 250 gig SATA drive. (Sukie and I have nearly identical specs).

So I says to myself, it’s time to try to just format the thing, if formatting fails, you have one messed up drive. It didn’t fail, and after that it has installed Ubuntu just fine. There certainly was a cause to my problems, but I don’t care so much now that I’ve scrubbed it from existence, and I’ve had no problems since.

I blame a few things:

1. I had never done any drive maintenance.

2. I kept my computer on ALL the time. I will probably still do this in the future.

My sound still doesn’t work though

(Update!) I got Ubuntu working with Beryl/Emerald (latest incarnation of Compiz) it’s some damn sugary sweet UI goodness. I thought I posted this yesterday but it just saved it. So here’s posting!