beginning again

kde has been compiling since last night, er … this morning about 2am and it’s still sputtering away. thought it would be nifty to put this old machine to use and get some of the deep hack fiddling sensations going at the same time. this is a pIII 500Mhz thing that has been a caseless stand for the pIV 2.5Ghz for a very long time. trying to find the hardware specs to help with the gentoo install was fascinating as i came across reviews of the thing from 1999 that began “on the high performance end …” it’s so easy to forget that a pIII-500 was “hot” not so long ago. well, it’s running gentoo and gnome really great today in 2003 … but for the eternity to compile anything at least. once i get the basics all in and backed up that won’t make much difference as new fiddly bits will just be in the admin desktop … kinda like it is now … even with the kde and evolution running i was able to get this mt install setup finished and do all the other stuff. in any case, if the pain reached an unbearable level the kvm switch is right there and civIII-conquests is already up … and of course the tibook is my left hand … well, the mouse is on the right so what can you do. hm. quite a ramble. oh well.

Gentoo “is” in the same way that Elma Cogan is.

I thought it would be such fun to install a hands on distro … and as 9.2 mandrake iso's seemed to be a major pain to dl … i went for gentoo … it WAS fun when i started on thursday morning, but it's now saturday afternoon and the install is still not completely finished. i entirely agree now with the articles i read about how gentoo is *extremely much* more source based than others. everything but the initial bootstrap is individually being compiled (hopefully with the correct processor optimizations) … it's like cooking dinner starting with the surveying the land, getting the agent, escrow, locating appropriate lumber, building the kitchen, designing electrical, refrigeration, heating .. and then putting it together before getting around to shopping for more edible components … to be slightly fair i did go to sleep at some point which was apparently just the time it was waiting for to finish with one thing and wait for me to type 'y' followed by the enter key. oh well. Anyway. Bless Brent Ashley for affording me a slight smile in relation to some apparent presidential assistance in his latest java bugging efforts… is is undefined

Switch Hitters

Hallilujah! Shawn Rose says "…most people that tell me a PC is better than a Mac have never owned one. Come to think of it, everyone I know with a Mac thinks it's better than a PC and most have both. That says something." When it comes down to it, it's the only 'real' statement that can be made. It seems quite bizarre to me that this is the first time I've heard it put this way … and that this way is so damn obvious and true. I suppose it's just yet another case of missing what's right out in the open.