Blasphemy!

There have been a bunch of rumours going around which I hope to clear up. Firstly, there have been those who dare proclaim that this journal is dead. That’s so obviously not true. I’ve just been “away” (for reasons I will enumerate later, though I must admit it’s been quite nice).

Then, some joker actually elevated said rumour to an all new high, that I am dead. Sorry evil one, not yet I am not.

With those out of the way, where do I begin? OK, this is either frickin’ hilarious or ironic depending on how you look at it. For some two years, I lived in a part of town where there are no interesting places to eat after 9 or so in the evening. Actually, there are no interesting places to eat even before that, but that’s a whole new story altogether. Anyway I could afford to if I wanted to. They just didn’t excite me enough for me to want to. Now, I’ve moved to a relatively fabulous locality, with a ton of interesting cuisine available even at the weirdest wee hours of the morning. Of course, the catch here is with the exceptional rent increase, I can’t afford any of it.

Frickin’ ironic.

Unrelated, I’ve been having the weirdest computing trouble, apart from the obvious lack of internet at home. Do you remember the “old” Apple switch ad campaign? In particular, do you remember Ellen Feiss’ story? Now I had a similar experience, except with far more disastrous consequences. I was sitting there, like, doing whatever it is I do, and all of a sudden my computer goes, like, berserk. It’s all *beep* *beep* *beep* and reboots to come up with what is essentially a useless blank screen. Not like I panic, but I am annoyed.

I reboot to GNU/Linux and continue on with life as if nothing happened. Until there is a need for my wireless ethernet card to work which is insanely flaky on it. Angered, I decide to reinstall some things to remember the #&@$**$! geniuses at HP have a sort of “disaster recovery disc set” that wipes out all your data before actually “fixing” anything. So I shell out some money and get a copy of Windows and attempt to “fix” my install. Now this is even more of a genius. Apparently it doesn’t like doing this sort of thing either and warns me that it will wipe out “My Documents” and other folders in the process. Crap. So I cancel setup, only to realize it’s now wiped out my MBR and it only boots to my non functional windows installation. F’in genius.

So, I almost didn’t have a computer, except for me figuring out grub weirdnesses and making a boot floppy so I can get back to my trusty GNU/Linux partition after all this excitement. Actually, said boot floppy had a ton of bad clusters which led to a lot more excitement, but I value your time and will stop.

Anyway, for rather interesting reasons I choose not to get into, most current activity has been diverted to delineate. If you’re one of those relatively long term frequenters of this site, there’s nothing really new to see, but otherwise you might want to take a peek. It might be interesting.

In related news, I’ve finally figured out my next major photography related purchase. A Canon EOS 20D body with a 17 – 85 mm, F4-5.6 EF-S IS lens. Now that lens is obviously just a start, and I think that camera has to last a while with a temporally expanding set of lenses, filters and other accessories since it’s now priced at just under 2 grand. *Shudder* But then again, it’s apparently capable of things like this [>3MB!].