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I’m trying to get my legs under me again, in a metaphorical sense. It seems as if my center — that sense of stability I experience when I am grounded — is shifting again. I feel off-balance too much of the time.

I saw the nearly-full moonrise tonight, a beautiful, huge, round eye looking down at me from just above the downtown Portland skyline. I walked home from work and went around the Back Bay. Every time I was given a choice in terms of which way to walk, I followed the moon. She always leads the way well.

I’ve started writing again. The idea that’s been brewing in my head for years now, a large writing project exploring the intersection of paganism with history, politics, metaphysics, and theology is starting to take shape. I’m using a really cool TiddlyWiki page as my nonlinear notebook, as a place to scribble down ideas, useful quotes from sources (think notecards), and do outlines, all from one central location accessible to me from anywhere online.

I think my rediscovery of balance is definitely going to have to include writing.

I say it again, as much as I want to like ubuntu — and I do like them/it for many reasons — PCLinuxOS is pretty hard to argue with. It Just Works(tm), it works elegantly, and there is a TON of software in their repositories.

So once again, we have a desktop machine that can play DVDs, play my music collection, with a bunch of cool 3D games for my daughter.

Geekery can be fun, if a bit expensive at times….

Well, I’m finally getting around to rebuilding the desktop computer. Only took six weeks…. :-/

I had really wanted to install Ubuntu Linux, mostly because they really seem to get what free software is all about. I want to like it, and indeed I use this distribution on my laptop.

But the new release, Dapper Drake, has a bug that prevents it from seeing all the partitions on my 2 hard drives. This, like, sucks. And stuff.

So I put in my LiveCD of PCLinuxOS that I had lying around, and sure enough it works flawlessly on this new hardware. I’m currently listening to headphones of Radiohead playing through amaroK through the LiveCD; this means that PCLinuxOS Just Works(tm). It sees the soundcards, the harddrives, and everything works fine out of the box.

So I’m presently downloading a version of PCLinuxOS that has the nVidia drivers already built-in for my nice videocard, it’s 61% done. Once it’s fully downloaded, I’ll verify the integrity of the disk, burn it, and run it on the desktop.

So hopefully soon this happy new machine will be running PCLinuxOS….

Well I seem to be snapping myself out of the funk I was in via brute force. For the most part I’ve been eating better and exercising more, which always helps.

In addition, my creativity has been increased; I now have acoustic guitar tracks recorded for 9 of the 11 songs going on the Freakwitch album, so things are moving forward there. We also have a gig coming up next weekend, which helps.

I’ve also been playing with a ccTiddly, which is like an online version of a TiddlyWiki that I can update from any computer… cool.

Not much else to report… life continues pretty much as normal, busy busy busy.

Oh, it looks like my sister and my niece will be visiting Maine for the first time about a month from now… very excited about that. Maine is awesome, and I can’t wait to show her around a bit.

Today on Boing Boing I saw this photo:

It’s a photo from Los Angeles, taken in the middle of the night in 1955. As you can see, the light is quite bright for the middle of the night. The cause? The US government was conducting nuclear test explosions in Nevada, probably at least 200 miles away. These photos, which are contained at the LA Public Library photo database, show clearly that the night sky was lit up to daylight levels.

Very interesting that this comes up in the wake of North Korea’s recent missile testing. The present US government is up in arms (ha) about this, when North Korea is just doing something that the US government did many times over, 50 years ago. And North Korea aren’t even exploding nuclear warheads on their own soil.

Funny what retrospect will do to you. Nowadays, anyone paying attention would be horrified if the US government were exploding nukes in Nevada. But at the time, it was seen as a necessary thing. It makes me wonder what the present US government is doing that will be seen in a similar way 50 years hence….

I put up some photos of my daughter’s new loft bed. Share and enjoy.

Over the past week, I discovered that carpentry definitely counts as geekery. I built a new loft bed for my daughter (thanks to the grandparents for buying most of the lumber). It’s a sweet design, if I do say so myself. I just thought, as a kid, what would I have wanted? So I imagined that, and built it. It’s a twin mattress on top, with a desk underneath on one end, and a big bookcase on the other end. There is also a ladder to get up top, and a smaller bookshelf at the back of the desk.

The corner posts are hemlock 4x4s, the bed slats and ladder are pine 2x4s, and the shelves are pine 1x8s (desk) and 1x10s (rear bookcase). The desktop is made of MDF, and there is a shelf below the desktop (also made of MDF, with pine 1×6 upright braces). I still have to cut and install the desktop surface, which is a sheet of masonite with a layer of white dry-erase board on one side. I had to get a 4×8 sheet of this, so I’ll also use it as the back of the bookcase, which will also provide a dry erase surface behind it (at the foot of the bed).

The loftbed part of it is cool (especially from a kid’s perspective… what is it about increased elevation whilst slumbering that is so exciting to a kid?!??), but the best part I think is the desk, with the increased bookshelf space being a close second. But the desk in particular, especially for a homeschooled kid. Space to spread out her work without having to move it by dinner is definitely welcome.

I got the wood last week, and took it out to Starcat and Quester’s home and got all the pieces cut that day (there were 58 separate pieces, mostly for the bed slat assembly and the ladder). But when I assembled them, I realized that something didn’t quite translate from my 2-D sketch on graph paper to 3-d reality. The bed was too wide overall, though the slats were too wide by 2″ less than the rest of the too-wideness. So I had to shorten it, which meant disassembling the frame and cutting all the shelves and the desktop a bit narrower, and trimming a bit off the slats fo good measure. Did that yesterday, and assembled all the pieces using drywall screws.

Once that was done and everything seemed to go together, I went through and, one by one, removed the drywall screws and drilled a 3/8″ hole for a bolt.

The unit is modular, and is designed to be held together by 5″ and 7″ bolts. I started off with carriage bolts, but found that they were ineffective because they kept turning in the wood as I tried to tighten them. So I ran out again and got normal bolts, so I’d have something to grab onto as I tightened the nuts. So now I have about 40 carriage bolts that I need to return, as they cost something on the order of $1 each.

Starcat was wonderfully patient and flexible tonight. We had a walking date scheduled, which we ended up spending in my daughter’s bedroom. The room got completely rearranged top to bottom, a task that was basically 8 hours of work for all of us. Whew. I’ll have photos of the new loftbed up soon. So thanks to everyone for helping (everyone tonight, plus Quester for his assistance during assembly and cutting, not to mention driving the truck out to our place today, plus Starcat’s aunt for the use of her truck).

In other news, Freakwitch gets to play as a 5 piece tomorrow, and then as a 5-piece-minus-a-drummer on Friday. So that’s good. Next week is the great acoustic guitar recording session….

I switched departments at work. I used to take road-service calls for AAA, but now I am a dispatcher. The job is more complicated, but it isn’t a bad thing at all. It makes the time go faster. So now, instead of talking to grumpy, stressed-out motorists, I talk to tow truck drivers who are grumpy because they have to deal with stressed-out motorists.

I’ve been moving through a bunch of energy these past couple weeks, part of which have been manifesting as specific ailments in my body. I won’t go into detail as everything is fine, but I’ve spent much of the past fortnight both in a bit of pain, and also afraid that something more serious was wrong with me. Turned out to be OK, though I was certainly moving slowly and gingerly. As a result, I haven’t exercised much in almost 2 weeks. Back to it. I feel awake again, as the ailments are all but gone.

Now that the loftbed is done, my next project is to rebuild the home computer. The studio machine seems to be functioning well, so now it’s time for some computergeek luuuvv at home as well.

Plus I need to play my guitar every day for a while….

I just placed the order for the new computer. I ended up with the Gigabyte GA-K8U-939 Socket 939 ULi M1689 ATX AMD Motherboard, an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Venice 2000MHz HT 512KB L2 Cache Socket 939 Processor, and 2 Gigabytes of Corsair XMS RAM. So this machine should be really amazing for the studio computer.

But at least is cool is the fact that I’ll bring the current studio motherboard setup home, so I’ll now have easily the most powerful computer I’ve ever had at home. We’ll be able to watch DVDs at home again! Plus the increased capabilities of this machine will mean my daughter can play better computer games…. this too is cool.

Lots of money to spend, but I think it will be worth it! 2 computer upgrades for the price of one….

The new Google Earth beta has been released… and there is a Linux version! Wicked cool…. playing with it now….

We’ve recently realized that we need to get a new motherboard for our home computer. The one we have was graciously donated by a friend who had upgraded, but this machine just isn’t doing what we need it to do. We can’t even watch DVDs on it; every time we want to watch a DVD we need to use my laptop, and that’s getting kinda old.

In addition, the studio computer is still chugging along. It’s a nice motherboard, but it’s just not well-suited to serious audio production work. I’ve managed to make it workable, but it’s not ideal.

So we’ve decided to kill 2 birds with one stone. I’m going to upgrade the motherboard in the studio computer, and then use that motherboard in the home machine, where it will be MORE than adequate (read: by far the most kickass home computer we’ve ever had).

So now, in order to upgrade, I have to do some serious research on motherboards for a DAW. A friend of mine works for AMD, and also runs Sonar (the same program I use), so I asked him. He recommended that I use Asus motherboards, and to avoid VIA chipsets, so my challenge is to find a model that does not use VIA chipsets, and has the features I need (ie, an AGP slot for the video card I use, onboard USB 2 and Firewire, etc).

The first contender is the Asus K8N. This board, along with a AMD Athlon 64 3400+ 1600MHz HT Socket 754 Processor and 1 GB of Corsair memory would run just under $300. This is a first step; I imagine there will be further updates to this post as I continue investigating.

Also, I’m being somewhat active on both the Sonar forum and on the Tape Op (TOMB) forum. I’m mostly documenting these here for my convenience.

Geek out….

UPDATE: People in audiogeekland are raving about the Gigabyte GA-K8U-939 board as well. Another option.