No riding today, see what my boring life holds

Bah!

took my son to the drome in the morning, sat there doing fuck all for three hours although I did go out for a coffee and then got back and chatted to an old bloke who had come down from middlesborough for the weekend. Nice bloke. We talked about cycling and that for a while, and then he took his kecks off to get ready for his SQT. JEBUS! His legs were skinny, shaved, very dark brown and literally strewn with veins and knots of muscle and stuff. He’d suggested during our conversation that he’d spent so much time taking his kids around the country to riding events (one was there with him, a 40 year old 6 foot one bloke), that he’d not got chance to ride as much as he wanted to. His words were ‘I’ve not got many miles in my legs this year’, and then we watched him power round the track like it was all downhill while he whistled away like he hadn’t a care in the world. Proper character.

Also, this lady turned up for the SQT. Highly classy, rather sexy and had a habit of marching around the D talking to people she knew on a very direct fashion (including the old chap I was talking to). She was rather exciting to me. Lots of hair all over the place. Splendid.

Came home, had some dinner and then intended to go out for a ride but lawks! The computer broke. So I spend a few hours fixing it (new power supply) and by the time it was sorted it was too late to go out without lights so I canned the idea.

In other news I’ve got 537 in flight control on my ipod. Not bad eh?

I also spent a fair bit of time afterwards playing Borderlands. It’s a great game, get it.

Well that was nice…

I get home after working a full day and driving over 150 miles and find that the home computer has been bust since a certain someone turned it off before it had shut down properly. So within seconds of me arriving at home I’m prexsented with the following.

1. Fix the computer
2. Make sure all the important documents are restored
3. Make sure office, all the solitaire games, google architect?, all bookmarks and everything else work fine.

O….K…. Not happening, the main hard drive is screwed. Looks like some nasty physical contact has occurred.EDven booting to live linux and attempting a format results inmany errors. That disk is goosed. Luckily, I have a 160G disk lying around (plus the 1 Terrabyte data disk in the computer), so after lots of very low level messing around with teh screwed disk I have everythging I need to start again.

Windows 7 here we come. It installs in about 30minutes and is up and working on the internet in 10 more. WOW! It’s great. So fast and easy and quick and clear. Love it!

Still sorting things out but it’s on here and working very well now.

New Computer – Acer Aspire 1

After a HUGE amount of shopping around, I finally chose a notebook for myself. The decision was accelerated by the amount of time I’m spending in hotel rooms at the moment with not much to do so I pumped up my options, did some final checks and went for this. An AcerAspire One from Acer Direct .

This one is a refurbished unit Grade A2 (which means it’s effectively brand new with some damage to the box – The box is a bit tatty, nothing more – the laptop itself looks pristine.). It has a 16G SSD hard drive and 1Gig of RAM. I went for the small SSD drive because I realised I’d not need a huge amount of space for what I’m going to do with it (web/writing/email/photo editing/videos/music). Yes, music, photo’s and videos take up a lot of space but they’re very transient. Load them up, do stuff with them, remove them (with music being the possible exception).  Videos I’ll just watch once or twice and then delete, photos will be there only prior to sticking on the internet or back to my home PC terrabyte drive so space isn’t a big issue. Plus I have three USB drives. One 16G that I’ll use for videos (I typically accumulate videos on my home desktop and then move them onto this USB for watching), an 8G one that I use for general file transfer and a 4G encrypted stick that I use for very special things. I also have a 16G ipod which I wish could share it’s files when it’s connected but sadly not.

The other issue with the disk was that while SSD is much faster than a spinning platter and far more fault tolerant, it’s not nearly as quick as I wanted it to be. The online comunity suggests the way forwards is to replace the original SSD with a compact flash card and adaptor. Which I may do for a laugh.

Anyway. I can live with the space issue, (and there are many options available for internal expansion) . Battery life was a bit disappointing, 2.5 hours with the wireless enabled. I’m hoping this improves over time, it might need to go through a few discharge/recharge cycles before it reaches optimum performance.

The software was completely pants. The device came with Linpus Linux installed which I hated fromthe very start. Clearly desigend to allow idiots to use it it was far too restrictive for my geek fingers so I almost immediately downloaded an Ubuntu notebook remix image and dropped that on. Ten times better! It needed a bit of tweaking when it came to codecs for the video player but apart fromthat it worked fine. Sound, video, wireless, all the things that linux is typically slated for, all worked great!

It is brilliant! Battery life aside it’s very easy to carry around and while the keyboard is quite small for my engineer rapid fingers, I soon got used to keeping it tight. Well recommended.  140 quid from the link above. Get one.

SUSE – errm, yes, actually NO

Got my new laptop so I partition it and I’m just about to get Ubuntu which works well for me, when I think maybe I should try a new one. Always avoided SUSE since the last time I tried it they messed around with vim to make it hard to use and made cutting and pasting with the mouse as hard as possible (should be: select – right click pastes, everyone knows that).

SUSE comes out top in all the linux reviews so I download the DVD and install it. It all looks very nice and professional, installs with minimal effort, all very good.

Starts up for the first time, the Grub loader screen appears, SUSE is default, we’ll change that later but for the time being, off you go. My laptop dies. Oh, try again, dies again. Panic a bit and select windows next time, that’s fine. Had to do work then so waited till like now before I got chance to look at it again.

Try again, this time select SUSE safe option, that boots up OK. Login, again, all looks quite slick but then the real rot makes itself apparent. They’ve tried to make it cute. It’s like a fucking MAC. They have these little icons that hop up and down next to the mouse cursor, yeah, fun for two seconds. I’m sure you can turn them off but doing that would mean having to use something far more sinister and mind controlling… the menu system. Nothing is where you expect it to be, nothing is easy to find. There’s messages and alerts popping up all over the place, wireless goes up and down, up and down.

In terror I flick through the menus trying to find a terminal window, THERE! loads of terminal icons. I open it up (it’s like going into a starbucks, JUST GIVE ME A FUCKING COFFEE!!!), I choose one of the 17 options and hope it opens something I can use. YAY! I take a quick look at the logs, wireless is pissing about so I turn it off. Things calm down a bit but finding how to do ’stuff’ is just horrible. I appreciate it’s just KDE and that it’s all configurable but I, (and I’m sure many others), do not want to have to do it.

I try to configure Grub to set windows as the default. Seems simple enough, YAST, change settings. Although YAST will no longer start. I check the logs again, no errors, just nothing. I mess about for an hour or so, make no progress with wireless (i’m a seasoned wireless-on-linux user and have been through the ball ache many times before so accept it’s not entirely SUSE’s fault)

Back to Ubuntu tomorrow. If I were a normal windows user, this would have stopped my Linux experiement in it’s tracks right there and then.

And they still don’t set up select-paste-with-right-mouse by default, what’s that about?