Stealing a line from Mark Twain, “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Yeah. It’s been months since I’ve updated this stale little hobby of mine, so I guess I should spend some time typing an update. I have no excuses, except the same old bullshit that always keeps me from it; long commutes, work, sleep, and far too many doctor appointments. It’s my own personal Groundhog Day.
Hopefully, I’ll be able to do more frequent updates thanks to two – yes, two – new laptop computers I just got. I recently did some web page design for a tiny Seattle company, including an online store, and with the proceeds I opted to get a new laptop. My old laptop had seen better days. The hinges were so loose the 15″ display wouldn’t stay open; it would crash on my hands or flat backwards. The some keys on the keyboard wouldn’t type a character, and the battery was as useless as a limp dick in a whorehouse. So, a new lappy was long overdue.
Dude, I got a Dell… a Studio XPS 16, with an Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 2.53 GHz CPU, 500 GB hard drive, 4 GB of RAM, ATI Radeon Mobility 512 MB video, 15.6″ hi-def LCD wide-screen display with two megapixel webcam, dual layer slot-load DVD burner, 802.11n wifi, a backlit keyboard… oh, and something called Windows 7 Home Premium. It’s one sweet, kick-ass machine, even with that Microsoft virus on it.
One of the add-ons Dell tries to up-sell people with – along with faggoty-looking colors, carrying cases, services agreements, lo-jack services, and antivirus software – was a netbook. With the purchase of the Studio XPS 16, I was able to get the Mini 10v netbook for only $80 more. Eighty dollars? Who the hell wouldn’t buy a mini laptop for $80? I’m actually typing this blog update on it right now! It has an Intel Atom N270 CPU, 1 GB of RAM, a 160 GB hard drive, a 10.1″ LCD display, and Ubuntu netbook Linux 8.10 installed!
Of course, there was no way I was going to leave the factory-installed operating system on either machine. The netbook now dual boots between Mac OS X 10.6.2 (also known as “Snow Leopard“) and Ubuntu Linux 9.10 (codenamed “Karmic Koala“). It was a challenge to install a new OS on the netbook since there’s no optical drive. Everything had to be done with flash drives. I used three different USB flash drives to install both operating systems, with a bit of help from mydellmini.com for the Mac side of things.
For the big laptop, I trashed the Dell recovery partitions, and set it up to dual boot between Ubuntu 9.10 and – against my better judgement – Windows 7 (for those times I need a Windows machine, like hacking my phone). Dual booting with Windows was about as much fun as masturbating with steel wool and iodine. Windows is like an only-child with ADD, it doesn’t play well with others. Linux is like the stoned child of a hippie, and doesn’t give a shit. But I got it done, and it’s pretty fucking cool.
This is a short update, but I’ll make a resolution to update more frequently in 2010. I gave up making resolutions many many years ago because I could never go long without breaking them. Don’t wager on me keeping this one, either. It’s impossible to teach an old dog new tricks.
