I am officially cursed with electronics. My laptop has passed away and I am missing a couple months worth of photos because the last time I backed up my computer was in March. Farewell, Drew Jr. Luckily I got off my resume and movies. The pictures are important but I have a lot of them on my Flickr, so I guess that’s good. Sigh. It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have bent (bended?) the truth because now my computer and I are suffering. I’m on my sister’s computer now and she’s not here in the daytime so no worries. I’ve been keeping busy anyway. Sunday I went to Heren’s grad dinner, Monday went to Old Town and Panera Bread with Wendorz and then we went to do decor child labor for Susan’s mum. haha. Today I met Dar at Boba Express by biking and then we biked to his house to Partyville and then play Diddy Kong when his dad kicked us out of the TV room (crazy new TV they have) to watch the Lakers game. Biking home was pretty tough because it’s all uphill but perhaps I will have awesome legs by the end of summer then.
So I’ve been using Ubuntu off and on for about a month. Off, because it wouldn’t start up anymore if I didn’t defrag on Windows beforehand, because Ubuntu wasn’t given enough space to grow and my hard drive was kind of getting full. I was excited at first because I felt like I was being freed from the monopoly that is Microsoft, but Ubuntu sometimes causes me much stress. I’m not the type to stress out a lot, but Ubuntu’s done it. I don’t know if it’s just me, but my Firefox on Ubuntu is a mofo. When I right-click because I want to open a link in a new tab or window, sometimes a Save Link As window pops up or a Del.icio.us favoriting window pops up or my computer just laughs at me. Many a time have I merely hovered over a link without clicking anything and I have been directed to that particular page. When I try to write a post as I just did earlier, my text decides to repeat itself over and over again randomly so my post seems more repetitive than usual and not intentionally. Oftentimes, in the middle of my typing (this happens in Pidgin, too), out of nowhere a link will be pasted in the middle of my text. This embarrassed me a little when I sent an email to one of my professors and did not realize that Ubuntu had pasted the link to my del.icio.us in the middle of my text. It’s really odd because I don’t know what the pattern of it is, because I try to re-type what I have typed to see what it is that triggers a pasting of a link that I did not copy and it never works. Yesterday, Ubuntu was frustrating me because I couldn’t get my DVD to work in VLC player, even though everyone says that it will play DVDs. I was hoping I could install less stuff if VLC could play it, but I ended up having to install packages of codecs and junk and several other media players and finally Kaffiene pissed me off the least so I’m keeping it. On top of all this, my adapter to charge my laptop is being a son of a B and works but half the time it’s plugged in. And my cooling pad sucks major butt, working possibly only 1/100 of the time it’s plugged in. I feel like technology’s been against me lately.
As cool as Ubuntu is for the tech savvy, I have pretty basic needs and if my programs continue to be botched, I may not make the switch over to it after all. 
And another thing, I can’t watch ABC shows on Ubuntu without having to install some extra shizz! This I do not blame Ubuntu for. I think this is just the network being a d-bag.
The nerd within wants to tell you that she loves Ubuntu and all the free-ness it entails. For those who don’t know what it is (I only heard about it recently from my tech savvy sis), Ubuntu is an operating system based on Linux. The only problems I have had are setting up my wireless network adapter, a super slow startup, and a misleading “hibernation.” After quite a while of trying to install the drivers for my wireless, it worked and I felt all good about myself because I had to type commands in Terminal, though I’m not quite geeky enough to understand what I’m typing when doing so. Unfortunately, I must’ve commanded it to work only temporarily or I was typing such ridiculous commands that Ubuntu just felt sorry enough for me to let me online for a little bit to make me feel better, because it has decided not to work anymore. What a tease. I don’t want to work on it at the moment, because I have to write my Chinese paper, and also, I don’t really feel like sitting super close to our router due to my ethernet cable’s debilitating shortness.
As for my slow startup, it was just because I hadn’t defragged my hard drive after installing Ubuntu. It was seriously taking up to like 30 minutes and I was reconsidering using Ubuntu because of that. But after I defragged today, it ran really fast and I was filled with joy joy joy.
Regarding the false hibernation, I don’t know if it’s because I had to choose not to partition the full 8 gigs for it to run on so they decided to skip out on a few things out of spite, or if they’re still working out some kinks, or something else, but when I tried to put my computer in hibernation mode, it did not quite work that way. The first time I tried, it just put my computer to sleep and then the sign on window came up. The second time I did it, it went blank and didn’t do anything else, and my screen did not even turn off. Hopefully that can be fixed, because I don’t like not being able to hibernate.
I am not claiming nerd street cred by trying to transition over to an alternative operating system; I just really like Ubuntu so far and wanted to write about it, because a lot of the programs on there seem to be better versions of things you’d find on Windows. I haven’t played with a lot of things on there yet, but I got pretty excited when I installed CheckGmail, because I already love Gmail Notifier and CheckGmail is even better, in that it shows a few of your most recent new emails when you hover over the icon in the system tray, for one thing. I am also very satisfied that Ubuntu comes with FreeCell. Eggsellent. And it’s really nice that there’s a pretty big community out there and it’s easy to find help when I need it, as well as the many cool programs. I wouldn’t recommend it to the computer illiterates out there (like my dad, who called me last week freaking out because his screen flipped upside down, maybe more on that later because it was pretty funny), but I would to those who are ready to try something new and want to stick it to the man!
Anyway, there’s a paper that needs to be written with my name on it. Auf Wiedersehen.
