Just a quick progress report. Yesterday I had the pleasure of peeling of the scabs, which is easily the best part about the whole scarification process, it is such a satisfactory feeling.

Before I headed to sleep last night I had prepared to do an install of Kubuntu on my system, and deleting Windows XP once I had everything set up and working. When I woke up today (or tonight rather, as it was 1:30am) I put in the Kubuntu DVD I had burned the other day before and proceeded to boot from it. A minute or two later I was booted into Kubuntu because of the live CD, and started on the installation part seeing as everything seemed to be in working order. 30 minutes later everything was installed and I restarted the machine and booted into Kubuntu again, this time “for real” so to speak. I knew I had a few hours ahead of me setting everything up, but what awaited me was pure agony.

The first issue I ran into was getting dual monitors working. And people wonder why Linux isn’t more popular… Having to manually edit the X.Org config file to get dual monitors working is not something you should have to do, but there I was. Random googling solved the issue, after maybe 30 minutes or so of work my second monitor came to life. Next up, installing Opera, my favorite browser of choice. Uh oh, what’s that dpkg? Did you say “package architecture (i386) does not match system (amd64)”? Really? Oh great. Yea, granted perhaps I should have taken the step to do some proper investigation before I downloaded Kubuntu, but seeing as I have a AMD 64-bit CPU, I found it obvious to download the amd64 labeled iso. But unlike Windows, running 32-bit applications on a 64-bit kernel is not possible. Well, not without 5 hours of work in config files and/or installing stuff with debootstrap-chroot-whatever-the-fuck.

Well Firefox was installed in the mean time, maybe there was some hope about finding a Opera solution later on I thought. So next up, partitioning my NTFS drives and moving stuff around so they’re all formatted as ext3. Guess what? KDE’s partition manager sucks ass and is the most unintuitive application ever. I did an apt-cache search for another partition manager, but alas, all that was available was a command line thing. Not something I was in the mood to work with, I don’t want to see a line that countains any of the words mount, dev/sdx or fstab ever again. Please get away from me. I just want to move my files from my NTFS drive over to my ext3 partition and then format the NTFS drive to ext3 when I’m done moving stuff over. Why make this simple task so incredibly hard?

Later I discovered that the joy of getting the dual monitor setup working was to be short lived. It does not work very well. You know what operating system handles dual monitors perfectly? Windows XP. It’s pretty much flawless. Watching a video in VLC on the secondary monitor and going into full screen mode should do just that right? No Sir. It goes on the main monitor, and in the wrong resolution at that. KDE’s task bar is of course on top of the video all the time, not to mention the titlebar of the video window as well. Full screen? More like 90% screen.

And you know what’s really quite intolerable? Having to manually edit the X.Org config file to get extra mouse buttons working. Then KDE started behaving even more weird, maybe because of TwinView, I don’t know. Popups from programs, including errors, would show down right on the second monitor, way out of the screen’s viewing area, making them both impossible to read and close. Applications kept starting up hugging the upper right border of my main monitor and I started getting pissed off. I rebooted and got back into Windows XP again, and I felt so insanely relieved.

I really want to migrate completely to linux and use it every day. I want to get rid of Windows. But it’s just not possible. Sure, all these bugs and annoying behaviours I ran into could probably have been solved with several hours of google searches and asking annoying questions in help channels on IRC. I don’t want to do that. I want an operating system where all my mouse buttons work, among other things.

On Tuesday I finally got my second replacement PSU, and this time the cables were in fact intact. I actually put the whole thing off for a few days, I was deathly afraid of it not working when I tried it, so I curled up into a ball and sat in bed with the trusty laptop that I’ve now practically inherited from my mom instead. I really got quite used to it at some point. I’ve never been a fan of laptops, but I am now. I will definitely buy one later into the future when I can afford it, it was delightful to have something portable around.

Today I finally ventured into the real world, I opened up the package with the PSU and got to it. Lo and behold, 5 minutes later when I pressed the power button my computer actually powered up. God, what a wonderful feeling. I’m glad to know that it indeed was the PSU that was the problem as I (almost) first suspected. Had it not worked this time I think I might have started crying or something. I do consider myself quite competent when it comes to both hardware and software related issues, so when there’s something I can’t figure out I get awfully frustrated.

I then almost panicked when after configuring the BIOS the computer froze up right after getting past the BIOS boot screen with the text “Verifying DMI pool data (update success)”. I tried restarting a few times, which only led to the same text, only this time without the “(updated success)” part. Googling the text revelead a lot of forum posts with the same issues, but the amount of various fixes just didn’t help me any. I read a lot of the possible causes, and I was frightened when I read that a dead hard drive might be the cause of it. I’ve got 4×250gb SATA drives, completely full to the rim with data — losing that would have made me want to kill myself. To my extreme delight, changing the boot order of the drives fixed the issue. When the first two reorderings proved unsuccessful it was looking grim, but luckily the third time was the charm and the lovely Windows boot logo appeared.

I’ve spent the last couple of hours migrating back to my own computer, which so far has involved downloading about 10.000 mails (99%) of it being spam), and transferring the files I’ve racked up on the laptop over to my own computer. While poking around the computer when I was installing the PSU and SATA cables, my eyes veered to the back of my graphics card, and I noticed that it has two outputs, one VGA and one DVI connection. And here I’ve been for almost two years, with my CRT screen connected and my LCD screen collecting dust right next to it when my secondary computer passed away. I never thought to check if my GFX card had two connections before, god what an idiot I am. So now I’ve got a dual monitor setup, which is just awesome. It’s also made me realize just how awful CRT screen really are. God the difference between my main monitor and the LCD screen is frightening. When I can afford it I will definitely replace my CRT for a second LCD screen.

The last few hours I’ve scoured my Windows setup to see if there’s anything I need to worry about, as I am just about to replace my Windows installation with a Linux distro. Completely cold turkey so to speak. My mind is leaning towards downloading Kubuntu, but we’ll see.

Ever since I did my first one back in July (link) I’ve been wanting to do more. After careful consideration (read: my laziness ceased) I finally came up with an idea or two about what I could do for my next one. The one that particularly stuck in my mind after a while was this really basic idea about doing a couple of angled lines positioned in a row. So on Tuesday I decided to perform another self scarification, this time on my inner right ankle.

A week or two ago I ordered a few scalpels to aid in my (the then not thought of) procedure, as I had previously used a box cutter for my first scarification. It worked pretty well considering, but it wasn’t exactly the most optimal tool to use. After receiving them it didn’t take long before I got the urge to use them, and so I did.

I started off by trying to find something to clean my skin with. With the lack of any disinfectives, I resorted to the ghetto solution of a miniature bottle of Absolut vodka. I wasn’t really sure whether or not regular vodka would be of any use at all, I know it’s not exactly rubbing alcohol or anything like that, but it was what I had. A wikipedia search reveals alcohol has disinfective properties starting at 18% and peaking at 70%, so I figured it couldn’t hurt either way (feel free to correct me if this is absolutely useless). Not that I really think there was much point to it to begin with, although the scalpels are sterile it all boils down to the lowest common denominator, and I’m pretty sure there were some contact with other unclean surfaces or objects during the procedure anyway. Oh well, that’s the charm with do-it-yourself things isn’t it?

After I rubbed my the skin on my ankle clean (if you want to call it that), I took my trusty marker out and tried to draw up a few lines on my ankle with the help of a ruler to get them straight. After being somewhat satisfied with the alignment, I unsheated the scalpel and proceeded to do the cutting. I was quickly reminded of how wonderful adrenaline rushes are, as cliché as it may sound, you truly feel alive in those moments. The blood rushed to the surface of my skin, making it hard to judge the length and debth of the cuts, but I think I prevailed through it all with a nice result. The cuts aren’t quite equal, but it was never really in any way intended to be perfect, so I’m happy with the outcome.

Of course I had to take pictures, so here they are, in chronological order, with the last picture being taken 2 days after the initial cutting.

ZeroxCOS welcome to the collective. We are the blog. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your life as it has been is over. From this time forward, you will service us.

As you might know, I watch a lot of movies — or movi…ez as Ramzi of thebroken fame would say (while you’re at the revision3 site, you should watch my favorite show to geek out to as well: diggnation).

Ugh, where was I? Movies, right. For my birthday last month I got this book from my cousin and uncle, 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die by Steven Jay Schneider. It’s a wonderful and thick hardcover book filled with a list of great movies, all in chronological order and with lots of details about each and every one. I wanted to find an easy way to check how many of these movies I had seen, so after searching on google for a bit I ran into this site where you can easily check your progress on various “best of” lists, like let’s say the infamous IMDb Top 250 for instance. I’ve previously used twofifty.org for this task, but the site is a bit bland and not updated very much anymore it seems. So when I found listsofbests.com (yea, not the greatest name), I quickly changed to that instead since you not only can check the Top 250, but it has a whole bunch of various lists, like the one I originally searched for, plus you can create your own as well. Granted, the site seems to be very buggy at the moment, going down pretty much all the time, but it gets the job done, and easily at that.

I have some gripes about it however. First off, everything links to an Amazon product detail page instead of a movie’s IMDb details (if you’re a frequent IMDb user you know how annoying it is not being able to check a movie’s details quickly). Obviously, they want to make money by Amazon referrals, but geez, a second accessible link to IMDb wouldn’t hurt. Then there’s the various issues with its perhaps ambitious, but poorly done AJAX scripting. It’s buggy as hell. You can only check off one movie at a time, and if you try for more the site will implode on itself so to speak, and the other movies you tried to check off will just stall and nothing happens, so you won’t be able to check off those movies again before you reload the page.

Pros and cons aside, it finally gave me a chance to make a list I’ve always wanted to do, but which I’ve failed at repeatedly — namely a list of my favorite movies, and in a somewhat ranked order at that. Please don’t take it too seriously, but for the first page or two it’s a pretty accurate list. Once I ended up adding the 200th movie or something, ranking every single one meticulously and precisely didn’t seem like the most important thing in the world, but again, they’re not random that’s for sure. So without further ado, my favorite movies, in ranking order (to some degree anyway).

As for those 1001 movies, I have currently seen 37% of them. Let’s hope I won’t die in the near future so I can finish the rest.