worst. taco night. ever.

May 04, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Magilla and I went to Del Taco tonight for Taco Tuesday. 6 tacos for $2.14 (counting tax), and as usual I paid with dimes, nickles, and a few pennies. Tonight, though, two different groups in front of us were buying tacos for a whole house. I don't know how many the first group had, but the second one was a guy getting 300 tacos. That'll definitely slow things down, and it did. Ridiculously. So slow.

On the plus side, I am now watching Coupling -- the British one, obviously. Season 1, Episode 6, The Cupboard of Patrick's Love. Funniest sitcom ever.

Fedora: First Impressions

May 04, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Last night I got everything installed, played for a minute, and then ran off to do other things, so today is really my first full experience. First impressions, though, are pretty mixed. Note that I am using FC2 Test 3, so I expect a bit of abnormality related to that.

The first-time bootup interface, which scrolls the system messages in a nice GUI, was very cool. But then for subsequent boots it disappeared. What's up with that? I liked it.

In FC2 Test3 all the system-config-whatever tools are broken unless run as root. That's annoying. I'm running up2date right now and it better fix that.

acpid is installed by default, but not really set up to do anything other than call shutdown on power button press. Lid events would have been pretty clutch.

As it is lid events are troubling. I shut the lid and it turned off my screen, but then it didn't turn it back on when the lid was reopened. It seemed to do the same thing later when it was left sitting long enough to cut off the screen.

Like I said, I'm running up2date right now and am also compiling my own kernel so that I can have suspend to disk and such. We'll see how that does.

starting fresh

May 03, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I'm waiting right now for Fedora to install on my laptop. It had been a Redhat 9 box since I got it last fall, but a number of nagging annoyances prompted my move. Instead of upgrading I decided to install fresh and avoid building up the cruft I usually tend to accumulate in a Linux installation. I'm curious to see how a number of the things that have been most annoying to me of late work out:

• Random hangs, particularly related to hot-swap type behaviour with PCMCIA and USB. The PCMCIA part seems to have gotten better now that I destroyed my old wireless card, but yesterday I got pretty ticked when I pulled my USB bluetooth adaptor out and it hung the machine solid.

• Suspend to disk. When I upgraded my memory to 512MB it got bigger than my swap and I was no longer able to suspend to disk (since on linux you write the mem image to swap). I upped the size of the swap this time, so I'm curious to see if things have gotten better between the early 2.6 kernels and now (2.6.5?).

It used to be that I was all about the challenge of getting things to successfully work. I remember spending hours figuring out dependencies, compiling stuff, etc. Now, though, I get angry at things with dependencies. I'd much rather just use something that's already installed on the box.

What are apps that I'll install on top of a new installation?

• wlan-ng drivers
• kismet
• firefox
• enlightenment
• Eterm
• lyx
• Gimp 2

That's really about it.

The Palace

May 03, 2004 by Eric Richardson

So at the new digs today I checked and it is the Palace Theatre, as I had guessed when I looked at the picture I took out my window. Some of the old Broadway (the street in LA, not the place in New York) neon was relit earlier this spring. Cinema Treasures posted some good pictures showing the front sides of the Los Angeles and the Palace.

it's the little things

May 03, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Went down to the new apartment today to drop the first small load of stuff off and see if the power was turned on, etc. Each time I'm there it's the little things that strike me about how much I'm never going to miss City Park, the apartment building I've called home for two years now.

First off, it's ridiculously hot right now. In City Park, the hallways reflect that. They're open to the outdoors, so while they do get a little shade, that's it. Premiere Towers, though, has the air on in the hallways.

The City Park elevators are some of the slowest, sketchiest elevators you could imagine. There are two of them, but often one's out of order. Premiere Towers has three or four elevators, with dark wood panelling and framed black and white pictures. Their elevators are about twice as fast getting to the 4th floor.

I checked my mailbox there today and it was full of ads and credit card offers for the last tenent. I'm sure that'll keep up for a while. There was also a lady sitting in the lobby who started talking to Kathy and not making sense, and I don't think she stopped once we got on the elevator. You have to use a key to get in there, though, so she's either pretty sneaky or a crazy lady with means.