It rained this week. It may have rained earlier, but this was the first meaningful rain of the season, not only because it had a bit of hail in it, but we got the first snow on the mountains this year on 11/16. This is always a big milestone for me, since while the harbingers of winter comes in fits and starts, snow on the mountains officially inaugurates the winter (re: the rainy) season for me. It might get warmer on occasion, but I’m not going to be running the AC for another 5 or 6 months.
There’s snow here I swear
This is also a great time of year, because we’re in that in-between period where we don’t have to run the AC but we don’t have to run the heat either. No HVAC = Big savings on the power bill. I’ll hold out on starting the heat for as long as possible. Hopefully I can make it to Christmas or after, but we’ll see. As soon as that unit starts, all I see are dollar bills shooting out of the place at a rate like they have at the bank.
I also hit upon a decorating idea for my garage. I hung flags in the hobby area that mean something to me — USAF flag, California state flag, and a Jolly Roger to add some color and visual interest on the walls. I liked it so much, I’m expanding the idea out to the rest of the garage. I’m going to decorate the bare walls with flags from everywhere we’ve lived so far. I just hope there’s enough space to fit everything. Most flags are either 3′ x 5′ or 12″ x 18″ so figuring out how to get everything to fit is going to be a bit of a challenge.
Ooh, the edge!
I also say the first green shoot of life from one of the onions I planted in my raised bed. I previously planted some radishes, but none of them turned out. I think I planted them too late and the heat likely killed them off, but I bought some onion bulbs that are season appropriate and I’m hoping for good things.
Come one little guy. Grow, grow grow!
Finally, in a bit of sad news, I went to Barnes & Noble recently because they had a 50% off sale on Criterion Collection movies and when I went in I found out why — they’re getting rid of their physical media. They’re keeping their CDs and LPs, but they’ve moved out nearly all of their Blu-Rays and DVDs and filled the area with board games, puzzles, and Funco Pops.
This means something
The funny thing is that I was all in at abandoning physical media and going full digital, but as the rights holders to many of these movies and TV shows have proclaimed their allegiance to onerous practices to increase shareholder value, I swang back hard to buying physical CDs and Blue-Rays again (and ripping them myself) just as brick-and-mortar stores chose to get out of the game.
I have no one but myself to blame, but it’s still sad to see the end of this era. I grew up with VHS tapes, then (very briefly) LaserDisc, DVD, and finally Blu-Ray in all its various varieties. That’s 40 years and it’s kind of sad to see an era ending. It’s not just the physical media itself, it’s the end of an era where you felt like you owned the thing you possessed and could do whatever you wanted with it. I could sell or give it to someone else. Or I could just keep it and it would always be there. Warner Brothers couldn’t break into my house and take my Batman tape away so I couldn’t watch it anymore.
But those days have slipped away into the remembered past and will soon be gone for good.
Week 45 has concluded and curiously, President 45 got re-elected, so Grover Cleveland no longer sits alone in the Non-Consecutive Club. It’s fitting, since Cleveland himself presided over an era of rampant graft, corruption, and a disgustingly wealthy elite who rapidly consolidated their power while exploiting everyone else as if they were disposable cogs in their machines. But they put their names on a couple of libraries, so it all balanced out. Welcome to the new Gilded Age, where we will spend the rest of our lives. Excelsior!
With that out of the way, winds and fires were the big news here this week. This is the time of year when the winds kick up something fierce, and combined with the dry vegetation, fires almost always follow. This time, the fickle finger of fate chose Ventura county to ignite massive wildfires, specifically around the Camarillo/Santa Paula area which I’m well familiar with. I’m going to be out there in a couple of weeks, but I’ve already made some calls and no one I know was impacted. As with a lot of these fires in Southern California, they begin in the hills. The hills are where the wealthy live. I don’t know too many wealthy people, so most folks I know mostly have to deal with air quality issues from the smoke and ash falling like snow over everything.
I had to deal with the winds out in Norco, home of the horse lords in the fabled land of Riverside; though unlike Rohan, the land and its people are bereft of any notion of quiet beauty and nobility. I was getting blasted by at least 50 mph gusts over there, which was a nice reminder of home when tropical storms and hurricanes came through. Unlike those events, I wasn’t pelted by rain but rather by sand and grit. I was still cleaning sand out of my nose a couple of days later and it took a few hours for the grit in my teeth to go away.
The rest of the week was spend zipping about the Southland and enjoying the milder weather. In between all that, I made a brief video inspired by recent events and the Rings of Power series. I got a kick out of the idea of the elves in the besieged city of Eregion looking up and seeing this dude enjoying his cup of tea while orcs assault their walls and fires burned down their fair home. Celebrimbor is obviously under the spell of Sauron, so he’s unaware of the situation as he only sees a Matrix of Sauron’s making, but it was a great juxtaposition of someone enjoying the peace of tea as chaos erupts around them.
I spent the remainder of my week working on my gundam model and decorating my little hobby area. I’ve added some flags to festoon the bare wall and began test printing some small storage bins for parts. The one thing I really need to do is organize and store the myriad cords that I’ve hoarded over the years. I’ve got HDMI, mini HDMI to USB, mini USB, USB C, and so on and so forth that I need to bring some order to and put them in labeled bins that I can easily access if needed.
Mark it down — October 29th, 2024 was the first time I turned the heat on in my car. This is always a milestone for the year, since it usually means fall has officially arrived. It will continue to sputter in haphazardly for awhile, but hopefully temperatures aren’t going to get above 80 degrees too often from here on out. Unless it’s a bad El Nino year and then all bets are off.
At any rate, I had to turn on the heater that morning because it was cold. Cold being a relative term as I’ve been so fully acclimated to Southern California weather that my East Coast self snorts derisively at 50 degrees being cold. But I don’t care that I used to wear shorts in this weather, it’s cold to me now and I need a light jacket. So step off, young me. Go make decisions that I’ll have to eventually discuss in therapy.
In other autumn news, I decorated my patio for Halloween. Since I’ve downsized and everyone’s grown now, I keep it small and limited to my patio. I used to go all out for holidays, but I scaled back on that dramatically since all the fun is in putting the decorations up. I hate taking them down and since I can’t pawn it off on anyone else anymore, I help myself out by making everything quick to set-up and teardown.
This year, I got a Snoopy decoration. I’ve been a fan since I was a kid (one of my earliest pictures has me wearing a Joe Cool shirt) and now that I’m older, I find myself returning to the joys of my youth and Snoopy was definitely one of those. Peanuts and Halloween have been forever linked to me, because one the first Halloweens I remember going Trick-or-Treating was just after watching the Charlie Brown Halloween special on TV. I was walking around with a pillow case and a nice old lady dropped something in that felt heavy and I started crying because I thought she gave me a rock.
It was an apple.
Also, this was before parents started getting freaked out over nonsense like razor blades in fruit or poisoned popcorn balls or whatever. We used to get cool stuff. Now it’s trunk or treating. You don’t even run around your neighborhood or head over to where the middle class people live to get the good stuff. Just walk around to different car trunks.
I hope makes for happy memories for the kids, since that’s the most important thing. Thinking that your experiences are the examples par excellence is always a mistake and loses sight of the fact that kids have no frame of reference for what came before, so what they experience will eventually be their Good Ole Days that they’ll use as older adults to complain about whatever’s happening with the children of their time.
The wheel turns.
This particular decoration is Snoopy in his World War One guise, sitting atop his dog house to fight the Red Baron. It was a pain in the neck to put together since the metal framing didn’t really line up and the cloth covering is pretty thin and only glued to the wire frame, so it’s a lot more delicate than I thought it would be, but I got it together without completely tearing it apart and it looks pretty decent.
I also got some little hay bales and cheapo pumpkins with remote control tea lights to complete the ensemble. There is a fog machine, but my neighbors thought there was a fire and I had to turn it off before someone called the fire department. I came up with an idea to contain it, and I tried it out on Halloween night but it didn’t work. I couldn’t meter the flow, so I was rolling fat clouds right out the gate and annoying the entire area with my fog machine antics. I think I’ll have to make a micro controller to use as a timing device or maybe just use dry ice instead next year.
At any rate, the coolest thing about this little display is that it’s all controlled by remote, so I can just hit the “On” button and it’s all lit up.
Speaking of Halloween, I found my first ever Halloween picture. I must’ve been just a little over a year old and it shows my love for another long-running show, Star Trek. This is me sitting on the steps outside our trailer dressed as Mr. Spock. My sister will say I’m just waving at the camera, but I maintain that I’m trying to make the Vulcan Live Long and Prosper sign.
Finally, this year’s Trick-or-Treater Count: 2
And so ends another season of baseball. 162 games scheduled and 162 games played. Collectively, 2,430 games were played this season. I mentioned in a previous post that baseball was the game of my youth. I collected cards, memorized stats, went to games, and even played some myself. But in 1994, I fell out of love with the whole enterprise with the Strike and the cancellation of the World Series that year. My return to the game has been in fits and starts, but 2024 was the season when I really began to feel some of that old yearning for the game rekindling in my old heart. The excitement to see records made and broken, and following the rhythms of the season, from streaks and slumps, to blowouts and blowups.
I didn’t plan it or set out to say, “This is the year I get back into baseball.”
It just happened.
I went to my first ballgame when I was 7 years old. I watched the Cubs play the Braves at Wrigley Field. This was before the lights. The Braves won 7-5. I still have the program for the game where my Dad kept score. It’s not the fancy multi-page programs with full color photos on glossy stock that you may see these days. It’s just a simple bi-fold on heavy stock with the rosters of each team on one side and a scoring table on the other. The only color is on the cover, which is a stylized rendering of a man sliding into second base.
After that game, I decided my favorite player was Bill Buckner, a first baseman who got a hit that day. Don’t ask me for any reasoning behind that decision. The workings of my 7 year old brain are a mystery, even to me. Maybe I liked the direct, alliterative name. I’ve always been partial to those, so maybe it was that. Whatever the case, Bill Buckner was it. My baseball card from my T-Ball days bears witness to this fact.
Then 1986 happened. By this time, we’d moved again to the expansive confines of Norfolk, Virginia within Hampton Roads metroplex of Southeastern Virginia. They had a AAA team affiliated with the New York Mets at the time called the Tidewater Tides. They played at Met Park, whose dimensions were the same as those at Shea Stadium where the Mets played. This is where I became a Mets fan and my allegiance shifted to Dwight Gooden.
It was in the 1986 World Series where Mookie Wilson hit a ball right-up the first base line to the awaiting glove of Bill Buckner, who through the vagary of chance failed to put his glove down completely on the ground, allowing the ball to roll past him to give Mookie the hit. This started a chain reaction of events that ultimately led to the Mets winning the game and the World Series itself.
With my minor league team linked to these Mets, they had my allegiance for the rest of the 1980s. But then the Atlanta Braves came along in the ’90s to steal my attention.
I’d seen most of the Braves pitching staff and many of their players come up through the Richmond Braves, who were the cross-state rivals of the Tides that came through town all the time. I saw the most dominant pitchers of that age just humble the hometown team, but became a fan of them at the same time and rooted for the Braves up until ’94 and the Strike.
One of the effects of traveling around so much as a kid (and later as an adult), is a kind of rootlessness and the feeling that you don’t really belong anywhere. I was from nowhere and everywhere at the same time, leading to an eclectic mishmash of accents, idioms, and sports team affiliations. I consider myself from Norfolk, mostly because it’s where I lived the longest as a kid, and it’s where most of the important milestones of childhood and my teen years happened. But we didn’t have a major league team of any kind around us, and it was a Navy town, so everyone from around the country (and the world to an extent) all lived in the same place, denying it any real depth of cultural identity or team loyalties.
So most of the sports teams I followed were based more on key personal events than anything else. I liked the Cubs because that was my first baseball game. I liked the Mets because my hometown team was affiliated with them and they came through every year to play an exhibition game. I liked the Braves because I’d seen many of their players and I was impressed by their ability.
But I never had any strong feelings towards them. I was happy when they did well, but I had no real emotional investment in any of them. I held a much more ecumenical view of things, as my true heart belonged to the sport itself more than any individual team. I tended to be a fan of players, rather than the livery they were wearing at the time.
Now in the warm September of my years, I felt the old pull of my youth tugging at me again. Nostalgia for me is painful; a bittersweet longing for places I can never revisit and people I can never see again. I do my best to resist the siren song of sentimentality beckoning me to come and wallow in its inviting, shallow waters that feel like a warm embrace, but provide no comfort or relief, only a deepened sense of emptiness and loss.
But I’ve hit the time of my life where the long years of striving is ended. I did what I set out to do and I’ve accomplished everything I wanted. I’ve traveled and lived around the world, met Presidents and Kings, and participated in history. The family is grown and while my labors have far from ended, their only purpose is to provide for the necessities of life. Any sense of personal investment is gone and many of the things that I set aside have risen again in my mind, beckoning a return to the simple pleasures of my youth. Not out of any sense of nostalgia or vain attempts at recapturing moments that can never return, but to just do the things that made me happy.
Among these is baseball. Of all the loves of my youth, this is the one that caused the deepest hurt in my heart, but time, experience, and plenty of therapy have granted me a measure of equanimity and the ability to just let things go. I live in Southern California now, which interestingly is the first place I actually chose to live. Every other place I’ve lived in was a decision made by the government or through forced circumstance.
The great thing about the region is it has an embarrassment of sports teams. While I don’t think I’ll ever feel like I’ll really belong, I’ve definitely insinuated myself here and its dovetailed with my renewed interest in baseball. We’ve got the Angels and Dodgers here, and while I’ve been to a few Angels games and I don’t have anything bad to say about them, I threw my lot in with the Dodgers.
I take that back, there’s one thing that really bugs me about the Angels — they’re in Anaheim. In Orange County. Yet they call themselves the “Los Angeles Angels” (of Anaheim?). I can’t abide such blatant falsehoods and I wonder just who on earth this bit of chicanery is meant for. Everyone who lives here knows they’re not in LA or LA County, so the name can only be for people who don’t live here and why would they care either way? They ought to just go back to being the California Angels. Everyone was happy with that back then. They made movies about them and everything. Now they’re just kinda there and known more for wasting a generational talent and getting me free medium fries from McDonald’s when they win a game.
But the Dodgers? To a kid growing up on the East Coast, they were synonymous with LA and California. Fernando. Tommy Lasorda. Vin Scully. There was always a romantic notion of California born of TV and movies, and the Dodgers got wrapped up in all of that as well. And while the real world is obviously far from that concocted illusion, it had completely captured my imagination as a kid and it’s hold is so strong that I can never shake it.
I don’t think it’s just me, either. I think a lot of people here live in two Californias — the one we deal with every day and the romantic ideal of our imagination. Every time you get beat down by the traffic or the receipt at the grocery store, all it really takes is that one perfect sunset and the California of the mind re-asserts itself again for a while longer. There is magic here; fleeting, near insubstantial, and elusive. But every once in awhile you have it in your grasp for just a moment and gifted a glimpse of Paradise before it flits away.
At any rate, when I moved out here, everyone was a Dodger fan unless they lived in Orange County (which I don’t), so I figured why not. They’re a team with a storied history with an equally historic ballpark, and if I was to be a true southern Californian, I was gonna be a Dodger fan.
I didn’t jump in whole hog, but mostly in fits and starts. I thought it was odd the Houston Astros seemed to have the Dodger batters dialed in and then it came out that they were cheating, which not only offended whatever sense of justice was left in me, it revealed something else to me — I was mad on behalf of a baseball team. I was in it.
I still didn’t really get into the weeds until the pandemic season of 2020, when I was stuck at home and didn’t have much to do except hang out with my family and listen to baseball games on the radio. Most of the games were being played during the day, so I ended up listening to almost every game that season while assembling puzzles, cooking, or re-arranging the house. With the shortened season and day games, I was able to really dial into the rhythms of the players and begin to understand the game management philosophy of Dave Roberts, the Dodgers manager.
By the time the post-season came around, I knew these players. I had a feel for how their at-bats would go in various situations (the types of pitches they bit on, what they tended to do when down in the count, etc) and also a good picture for when Roberts would yank a pitcher and why. It was the first time I’d watched a World Series in maybe 25 years where I was completely dialed in and invested in at least one of the teams.
And then they won. And I was finally, completely, a Dodger fan. I bought a hat and got a T-shirt.
Over the following years, I attended games, bought merch and got excited when they signed Ohtani in the off season. After that, I followed this team more closely than previous years, and after attending probably the greatest baseball game I’ve ever seen in person, I knew this team was something special.
They even had a Mookie.
And so the season ended and the Dodgers once again won their Division, heading into the post-season amidst a mix of hope and hesitation — they’ve been one of the best teams in baseball for the last ten years, but they were never quite able to get over that hump and win the whole fucking thing outside the pandemic season, which a lot of people dismiss.
After getting into a 0-2 hole against the Padres, there was a feeling of here we go again. The Padres have been the Nemesis these last few years, bouncing the Dodgers out in the first series of the post-season, but then something new happened.
The Dodgers bats woke up. Freddie Freeman, playing on a bum ankle and gutting his way through the post-season, became Mr. October and delivered clutch hits again and again, including the sweetest grand slam I’ve ever seen in Game 1 of the World Series. The Dodgers rolled the Yankees 4 games to 1 and finally won in a full season, fulfilling all the expectations of the last decade and cementing Dave Roberts as one of the most exceptional managers of our times.
Amid the exultation and celebration, the season is now ended and we are bereft until Opening Day next Spring. The days will be shorter, football will assume its preeminence in the calendar, and the world will continue to turn about its axis.
I’m extremely happy I returned to baseball and fortunate to follow one of the best teams in recent memory, who delivered real magic this year and enriched my life in many ways this season, providing a soundtrack to my summer and delivering fantastic experiences for me and my family. I would’ve been poorer for having missed it.
First Part is Here: Dual Scoot Boogie Part One
With Linux Mint selected as the distro, now came the interesting part – the logistics of getting it done. The first and most obvious thing was that I needed to upgrade my C: drive, which was a 500GB M.2 SSD installed on my motherboard.
This PC began life as a quick and dirty streaming PC that I built from the most economical (and available) parts during the pandemic, so it only had what it needed to stream to Twitch from my gaming PC. I stopped streaming when the pandemic subsided and then decided to make my streaming PC the main desktop, so I cannibalized the power supply and graphics card from the other computer. It now sits alone in the dark; once a proud gaming champion, now just a shell bereft of purpose, save for potential spare parts.
I’ve been upgrading memory, HDD storage, and other components over the last couple of years, but the painfully small SSD remained the original sin that needed to be purged. Problem was, it served as my boot drive and the one I wanted to install Linux on as well.
So I needed a new SSD and figure out a way to clone it with the least possible disruption. The SSD was easy enough — I went with a 2TB M.2 replacement, but the actual process of cloning it had me scratching my head for a minute or two. What I settled on was plugging the new SSD into a USB adapter, ensuring Windows recognized it as a drive, and using a cloning program to quickly clone the old SSD stick to this one.
Since it had literally been 15 years since I did anything like this, I searched to see what the current recommended software and processes were, but there didn’t seem to be a consensus around the software, so I just used the first one I could find with a free tier — Macrium Reflect.
The actual process itself was quick and painless. I cloned the drive, turned off the PC, removed the old SSD stick (after removing the GeForce card blocking access to it), installed the new one, and booted up the PC.
It was like nothing had changed. It worked perfectly. The old SSD was wiped and permanently entombed within the confines of the USB adapter to serve as a 500GB USB drive.
Now came the fun part: installing Linux Mint from the bootable USB drive I created. The process was relatively straightforward. I found a guide online and followed it to create the necessary partitions (root, swap, and home) and then let the installer do its thing. The PC rebooted and I was met with a screen offering the choice to boot into Linux Mint or Windows.
I chose the former. I was in.
The stock Linux Mint desktop is familiar to anyone who’s used Windows, using the same design elements for everything. It came with Firefox as part of the package, along with a firewall that I immediately turned on. It was ready to use out of the box. I made some modifications to the look and feel (I installed the KDE Plasma desktop instead of the stock Mint offering), but the more important thing is figuring out which programs worked natively and how would it affect my normal workflow for various tasks.
The first thing that jumped out at me was how different things are from the 2000s. Obviously, progress in hardware and software are a thing, but until now it never really hit me just how differently I use a computer. The last time I seriously worked with Linux (not counting Raspberry Pi or things like Android), I went online — I wasn’t always connected.
Going online was something that you consciously did. I had dial-up until 2004 because of where I lived and how little money I had. Most of my computer usage was devoted for tasks that were mostly local to the machine and offline — gaming, writing, etc. So all of the software was specific, or at least written to, the OS that I would be using (Windows). And using Linux with janky substitutions just wasn’t very satisfying.
But so many things are native to the internet now and designed to be largely OS-agnostic. It doesn’t really matter what OS I have for the majority of programs I would use. Discord, Spotify, Steam, Audacity, MakeMKV, Handbrake, Proton Mail — all available on Linux with the same look and feel (and sometimes better operation or features). I’ve got Firefox to access web apps, but Librewolf is also available, as well as browsers only available on Linux if I want to go down those rabbit holes.
I’ve been using LibreOffice, which has an Office feel from before the Ribbon was introduced and Microsoft started junking it up in earnest. It definitely works smoother & faster here on Linux than it does on Windows, and it’s a perfectly acceptable replacement for what I’d need it for. Also note: I don’t use Google Docs or any of that. I limit my use of Google products as much as practicable.
I’ve found that I can easily use Linux Mint for 90% of everything I did in Windows with little to no issue. In many ways, it’s a better experience than contemporary Windows. I don’t know if it’s a good analogy, but the thought in my head is that this it would be like if Windows XP/Windows 7 had been continued to be polished and refined with useful features, but you could still jump into a DOS command line to bypass the GUI if you needed to.
It’s a genuinely pleasant experience.
The only drawbacks I’ve encountered are on the video & photo editing side of things. Da Vinci Resolve seems to offer a Linux solution, but it’s for a specific distro and there’s a lot from reading the documentation to get it to work on my machine that immediately sets off my potential jank alarms. For photo editing, my Windows programs don’t have Linux equivalents and as much as I like Gimp, it’s not what I need for what I want to do.
I could use WINE, but I’m not sure how much I want to potentially dick around with using GPU-intensive programs through an emulator, so I think I’ll keep ducking back into Windows for those tasks until I find a suitable replacements.
Other than that, I want to emphasize that I’ve been using Linux Mint exclusively for the last 2-3 weeks and gone through all my task workflows without any issues or hiccups. With few exceptions, it’s a great replacement for Windows and it’s become my primary interface.
It turns out that 2024 is the year of Linux on my desktop.
When Microsoft first announced their upcoming Recall feature, I was like yeah, nah. My immediate gut reaction was that this was a security nightmare, and it didn’t help that it came wrapped with the AI nonsense that shareholders are pushing to get greater returns from a moribund industry. Microsoft quickly paused the rollout to make it more appealing, but there was no question that they were going to release some version of this thing along with their bullshit AI, so I began thinking it was time to look at alternatives.
Granted, Microsoft and every other member of the tech oligopoly has collected information for at least the last 30 years, but there’s something about what’s happening now that crossed my own personal Rubicon. Maybe it’s the obnoxiousness inherent with the AI push. But it’s more than that, I think. It’s the culmination of turning everything into a subscription, putting ads everywhere, and increasing the cost of services without providing much in return. Topping off this shit sundae with an inherent security risk in a world where leaks are so common that I’ve probably banked a lifetime of credit monitoring, while the companies responsible for them face zero accountability, is a bridge too far.
I suppose the biggest difference is that it’s in my face now. All this stuff used to be in the background where I could barely see or even be aware of it. But now they’re rubbing my nose in it, asking whaddya gonna do about it while rifling through my wallet.
And I’m like, Okay Linux, where you at?
I did briefly consider buying a new Macbook. I had one awhile ago and I generally like the Apple ecosystem, but spending that kind of money for what’s essentially the same experience as 10 years ago isn’t all that appealing at this point.
It was Linux. It was always going to be Linux.
I haven’t messed with Linux in the desktop space in years. Back in the 2000s, I dicked around with Red Hat and Debian, and even rolled my own distro at one point. But the main problem was that it was janky and felt like it wasn’t quite ready for prime time. It was great if you wanted complete control over your operating system, but at a certain point you have to stop dicking around and start doing things, and that’s where it fell apart. It always felt like I was fighting the limitations of the available software and eventually, after hours of figuring out how to do something that was effortless in Windows for the umpteenth time, I threw in the towel.
But I’ve heard good things about where Linux is at these days and I looked at various distros to configure a dual-boot set-up. It also helps that contemporary Windows is pretty janky itself, so I guessed that it’d be an equivalent experience.
I quickly discovered that there are major differences in the distros that’ve developed over the last 20 years. After doing some Facebook Mom research, everything seems to have split into three major distro families: Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch, with each using different software repositories, display managers, and varying levels of centralized control over the OS.
I was left thinking, Can I at least just do apt-get and still be good?
I settled on Linux Mint, which is by all accounts a stable and respected distro that people seem to like. One of my major requirements was that I didn’t want something that I was gonna have to dick around with. I’m not in my 20s anymore. I’m very aware of time and how I want to spend it, and my computer is a tool for accomplishing things, rather than an experimental machine. Mint looked like the one that would allow me to get up and running with the minimum amount of fuss, while still allowing me the ability to customize things if I felt like it.
In the next part, I’ll cover the process of configuring the PC to dual boot and my thoughts on using Linux Mint as a desktop alternative to Windows.
I was in Hawai’i last week and it was an interesting time as always. I typically fly Hawaiian airlines out there and that in itself is a study in contrasts. I think they’re probably the last airline that feeds you something substantial during the flight at no extra cost, which is nice. How long that lasts since they’ve been bought out by Alaska is anyone’s guess. They’re usually a good airline to fly, but I don’t know if it’s my luck or what, but I’ve yet to fly Hawaiian without some kind of weirdness stepping in for a moment to say Aloha!
On the outbound flight, everything was smooth until landing and everyone was happy that we arrived about 20 minutes early. We taxied to the gate area and then stopped.
And we waited.
And we waited some more.
The Captain finally announced to the cabin that they were having trouble getting the Jetway to mate up to the aircraft so we could egress, which I have to admit is a new one on me. Usually with Hawaiian, I’ve had to wait in the penalty box until a gate opened up, or stop short of a gate only to be directed to another one, or finally get ready to turn to the parking spot but have to wait on ground crew to show up so the plane could proceed.
But it was Jetway issues. I appreciated the novelty.
At any rate, folks were standing in the aisle, thinking they were getting off the plane at any moment. But as minutes turned into a quarter hour, the Captain announced over the PA that they still couldn’t get the Jetway to cooperate and they were sending for a technician.
At this point, I’m thinking why not do it the old fashioned way with a ladder truck, but the 21st century seemingly has no memory of those legends from the long-ago 1900s, so we waited some more, happy that we used the lavatory before landing.
Even more so when the Captain announced that the Jetways were the responsibility of the State and we had to wait for a State technician.
The wonders of bureaucracy will never cease to consternate, as the groans of multiple passengers could attest, especially as one of the flight attendants announced that the lavs were being serviced and couldn’t be used.
As the the sky turned above, the issue was ultimately addressed and we were able to get off the plane and head to baggage claim, where we assumed our bags had been lazily cruising in circles awaiting our arrival.
But no. Even with the lengthy delay, the ritual of waiting for the bags was not to be denied. Even as we’ve shed all vestiges of the past in the mad dash to make it everything worse for the financial benefit of a few, it appears some forms must always be obeyed.
King Kamehameha StatueIolani PalaceFood Trucks Line a Street
The rest of the trip was great. We stayed in Waikiki, because I’m touristy like that. Honolulu always reminds me of Vegas — the touristy area that the locals probably avoid like the plague, and then the rest of it that resembles North Vegas. But one of the nice things about Hawai’i is that not only is every island different, every island itself has distinct contrasts.
Oahu has a city side with Honolulu, but take the Pali Highway through the mountains and you’ll soon be greeted by a country atmosphere of small towns, gorgeous beaches, and natural beauty unspoilt by high-rises and congestion. Then keep going North from there and be treated to awe-inspiring views that’ll leave your jaw on the floor.
Irish Countryside or Maui?Waves Breaking in WaikikiCat Cafe
But we didn’t have time for that this time, so Waikiki Beach and Pearl Harbor it was. I’ve always like Waikiki Beach, and the weather as always was perfect the entire time. Our hotel room had a nice view of Diamond Head and it was right on the beach, so it was nothing to go and spend some time at the beach and forget what it was we wanted to do that day.
Waikiki Looking to HonoluluDiamond Head from WaikikiDiamond Head From Our Hotel
One of the things we finally did was visit the Pearl Harbor historic sites, specifically the USS Arizona Memorial and the USS Missouri battleship. They have the Missouri moored just a little bit away from the Arizona memorial, so you can stand where the war started for the USA and see where it ended four years later.
Arizona Memorial Looking to MissouriThe Wall of Honored DeadMissouri & Arizona Memorial From Ferry
I’ll have posts for each of these places, but for all the chilling relaxation of a tropical isle, it’s nice to be back home. I decorated for Halloween this weekend and also installed a pegboard in the garage above my hobby desk, so I had a busy weekend right before what will almost certainly be a busy week of catch-up at work.
It seems repetitious to complain about the heat yet again, but here we are in autumn and the temps have been in the upper ’90s. Is it climate change? I don’t know. Most likely. What I do know is that as someone who grew up on the east coast, I genuinely miss autumn. It was my favorite of the seasons. The cold, crisp air in the mornings. The subtle change from shorts to pants and then from short sleeves to long sleeves, and eventually the donning of jackets late in the season. We don’t get that here in my corner of Southern California. It’s either warm (or too hot nowadays) and dry or rainy. And the heat lasts longer than it used to, even from 10 years ago.
Whatever the case, it doesn’t feel right to have Halloween decorations out when it’s 99 degrees outside.
These kind of temps are often referred to as earthquake weather around here, and the ground so far hasn’t disappointed in this regard. It’s been awhile since we’ve had this much rumbling around the Southland, including a series of quakes in the Inland Empire where the earth is typically quiet. Of all the natural phenomena I’ve experienced, earthquakes still freak me out because you can’t see them coming.
We experienced them on a weekly basis when we lived in Japan, but I still never got used to them. You can see hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, and floods coming, but when the ground starts shifting back and forth out of nowhere and you have no idea how long it’s going to last or whether it’s going to get worse, you get an immediate and conclusive reminder of how small and powerless you really are in this world.
With the purchase of a folding chair with padding, the little hobby area in the garage is complete and ready for use. I moved all of my model-making and paint equipment down there, and after about three trips carrying boxes, I discovered I still have about a dozen models left to build. My previous excuse was that I needed to make my own little area to paint & assemble them instead of using the kitchen table or my computer desk, but I’ve successfully removed that excuse, so I guess I’ll need to come up with another one.
The second season of Rings of Power concluded this past week and it was a vast improvement over the first season. I wasn’t even going to watch it, but I saw some buzz online from the types of people I respect and decided to give it a shot. I’m glad I did.
There’s still issues with it, especially concerning Hobbits and the Stranger, but I got the sense that even the producers wanted that whole thread tied off, so thankfully it wasn’t given much focus and mostly served as a means of revealing the Stranger to be the character everyone thought he would be.
The Numenor storyline was mostly just table-setting, so the emotional and narrative heart of the season took place in Eregion between Sauron and Celebrimbor and the knock-on effects their efforts had on others, most notably the nearby Dwarves in Khazad-Dum. It was genuinely satisfying, especially the portrayal of Sauron as master manipulator, deceiver, and gaslighter.
Plus, whoever was working visual effects was absolutely feasting this season. Just absolute high-fantasy art and set-pieces all over the place.
The creation of the hobby area and subsequent clearing out of a bunch of models and miscellany allowed me to access my old stereo system once again. I have an old JVC CD player that I can use as well to play all the CDs I’ve been buying over the last few weeks as well. Cleaning: It Makes Things Better!
I also got some little hay bales and cheapo pumpkins with remote control tea lights to complete the ensemble. There is a fog machine, but my neighbors thought there was a fire and I had to turn it off before someone called the fire department. I came up with an idea to contain it, and I tried it out on Halloween night but it didn’t work. I couldn’t meter the flow, so I was rolling fat clouds right out the gate and annoying the entire area with my fog machine antics. I think I’ll have to make a micro controller to use as a timing device or maybe just use dry ice instead next year.
At any rate, the coolest thing about this little display is that it’s all controlled by remote, so I can just hit the “On” button and it’s all lit up.
Speaking of Halloween, I found my first ever Halloween picture. I must’ve been just a little over a year old and it shows my love for another long-running show, Star Trek. This is me sitting on the steps outside our trailer dressed as Mr. Spock. My sister will say I’m just waving at the camera, but I maintain that I’m trying to make the Vulcan Live Long and Prosper sign.
Finally, this year’s Trick-or-Treater Count: 2
