Bozos on the beach pointing, “look at that fella”, saying “Let’s jump on him”. Staring, stupid. What sort of country is it where you can’t be buried in the sand without becoming an object of amusement for the slack-jawed locals?
The emerald isle, a tarnished jewel.
The past week has definitely been one of the busiest of my life, not counting holidays abroad of course. I’m exhausted and broke, so the world can wait until tomorrow…
I figured out my ethernet problem. Somehow my airport card got mapped (right word?) to eth0. I don’t know why, since I’ve never done anything with it… Anyway, now my airport is on eth0, and my ethernet card is eth1. I’ve deactivated eth0 though. Hopefully they won’t switch next time I reboot.
In other news, my girlfriend moved in with me last week, as did a friend of me and my sister, Nicola, and today, a friend of mine from Germany who I haven’t seen in ages is coming to stay too. And a friend of hers that I don’t know. Now if only I didn’t have to work this weekend… I’m off tonight, but she’s not arriving till ten, and we’d have to get her stuff to my house, settle in, change, blah blahblah…
Not gonna happen. Still, it should be a good weekend, with or without excessive consumption of alcohol.
Over the last few days I’ve been messing around with CD-RW’s and mp3′s. The mp3′s work fine, but when I tried to blank a CD-RW, my computer hung. I’m sure it’s not related, but now my network is busted. The eth0 interface seems to be set up properly on both machines, and the routing tables seem fine, but when I telnet in either direction I get a message saying:
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: No route to host
It’s somewhat annoying, especially as I don’t have time right now to figure it out.
My sister finished her leaving cert today, and went straight to Aldi to buy some strong, cheap lager. I can’t even remember how I felt when I finished my exams last year, but I remember the drinking afterwards 
If it was such a big deal though, why don’t I remember it? I remember the year ok, because it was great, and I remember the jitters I had the night before the first exam, I remember the sunshine, and I remember the calm I felt for the whole week, but about how it felt to be finished, not a thing. Maybe it’s just because I didn’t give a fuck. I’m pretty sure my sister felt the same way.
But even though I finished with a high mark, I have a sneaking suspicion that I really haven’t learnt a thing. With all the hype around the supposed stress, I think people tend to ignore the fact that we have an educational system that is little more than a factory for future workers (or more specifically, college students who will become workers). Is that the function of education in a responsible society?
Looks like I’ll have to recompile the kernel to get the modem to work. I’ve never done it before, and I’m not looking forward to it. I’m sure it’ll work out in the end though.
Since this is a linux.ie blog, I suppose I better highlight my experience of linux (and computers in general).
I don’t remember how I first became curious about the OS, but after I had, and had read a bit about it, I decided to install a basic system on my Mac SE/30, since I wasn’t using it for anything else. Since the machine doesn’t have a CDROM, I had to download all the files off the internet, which was a pain, but I got it to boot without any hassle and then couldn’t do anything with it, never having seen a Unix before, and seldom even a CLI!
Anyway, that got boring after a while, since downloading an entire distribution was unfeasible. So I got a Debian 2 cd set and installed it on my other two macs, an iMac and a 7300. I still wasn’t really able to do much, but I took it one thing at a time and I’m getting there… first was dialup, then the printer, the network… I can do most of the stuff I could do in MacOS, but I have more fun now
Since then I have bought an iBook and Debian 3. Everything is difficult with this computer. On my first boot all I got was a white screen, so I had to boot with the novideo option (later changed to video=ofonly), which meant I couldn’t use Xwindows. It was a good opportunity to get better accquainted with the console, but was frustrating at the same time. I had to install a new kernel to get it working, but I’m still not sure if I have hardware acceleration. Other fun things include trying to get the modem working. I’m connected using ip masquerading right now.
After playing with the template files for a while, I’ve decided to leave it the way it was until I learn more about html and css. It’s clear that this b2++ isn’t for your average blogger (i.e. me), but hey, I’m always up for a challenge…