A Long December

A Long December takes it’s name from, of course, the Counting Crow’s song A Long December. I made it when I was at Stephen F. Austin. It’s disc 2 in the Best of Billy Collection, Volume 1.

  1. A Long December – Counting Crows
  2. Constitutional Peasants – from Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail
  3. Good – Better than Ezra
  4. Phaser & Slot Machine – Superdrag
  5. Lips Like Sugar – Echo and the Bunnymen
  6. Backwater – Meat Puppets
  7. King Solomon’s Wines – Monty Python
  8. Creep – Radiohead
  9. Spanish Inquisition – Monty Python
  10. The Book Lovers – Broadcast
  11. Sour Girl – Stone Temple Pilots
  12. How do You – Radiohead
  13. Cynicality – Superdrag
  14. Never you mind – Semisonic
  15. The Spam Song – Monty Python
  16. Singing in my Sleep – Semisonic
  17. The Real Folk Blues – The Seatbelts

Listing to this now … wow … maybe I was a little sad? I don’t think I’ve burned a copy of this one in a really long time.

Houston Aloha!

The title for this CD was inspired by the doomed Apple online service eWorld. When they shut it down, the refuges that found themself back on AOL made a forum called “Apple Aloha!”

  1. All The Young Dudes – cover by World Party
  2. Billy, Don’t be a Hero – Paper Lace
  3. High and Dry – Radiohead
  4. Fake Plastic Trees – Radiohead
  5. Excuse Me Mister – No Doubt
  6. Johnny Come Home – Fine Young Cannibals
  7. What Do You Want From Me? – Monico
  8. Shinobi vs Dragon Ninja – Lostprophets
  9. Road to Nowhere – Talking Heads
  10. The Lumberjack Song – Monty Python
  11. Monday – Wilco
  12. Santa Monica – Everclear
  13. Soak Up The Sun – Sheryl Crow
  14. Here – Luscious Jackson
  15. Millennium – Robbie Williams
  16. In The Meantime – Spacehog
  17. One Wish – Saturday Night Live / Steve Martin

This was the first mixed CD I made on my little Graphite iMac. Man … what was my deal with the Clueless Soundtrack? I think I created this right when I got back from Army Reserve Training and during my 2nd run at UHD. Part of Best of Billy Volume I.

Harvey Danger – Sad Sweetheart of the Rodeo

Harvey Danger is a pretty cool band. One of my favorite songs is Sad Sweetheart of the Rodeo. While some of their other music videos kinda leave you wanting, the one for Sad Sweetheart is pretty cool and kinda adds to the song.

When Tumblr first came onto the scene, I used the hashtags #sad #sweet and #heart not necessarily as part of a systematic taxonomy, but more as a way to express my feeling towards the post. Want to see everything that makes me #sad or that I thought was #sweet? Well, there you go! I did take work related stuff #rodeo, and when I rejoined Facebook (again) I kept using #rodeo for work stuff.

she takes another temp job
but in her secret heart she rides

Architecture in Helsinki

A while back I when through an “Aussie-ophile” period, listening to a lot of bands outta Australia. One of the bands that I picked up – and still really like to this day – was Architecture in Helsinki. Their songs are pretty good and the videos are always creative and usually add a lot to the song.

If you ever get a chance to see them play live, take it!

#OwnBooks

The Internet Archives is asking people to post the oldest books they own as part of their #OwnBooks campaign to show why it’s important that people are actually allowed to own the works they purchases, as opposed to just renting or leasing content.

This is not the oldest book that I own, but it is one that has been in my possession the longest.

Image of the book Our Universe
Cover of Our Universe

The National Geographic Picture Atlas of Our Universe was an awesome tour of the solar system and universe told in pictures. This edition, the original published in 1980, is now woefully out-of-date. It’s survived floods, hurricanes, and – perhaps the most destructive force of all – children.

Image of page 42 & 43 of Our Universe
Page 42 & 43 of Our Universe
Image of page 46 & 47 from Our Universe
Page 46 & 47 from Our Universe
Image of page 58 & 59 from Our Universe
Page 58 & 59 from Our Universe
Image of page 192 & 193 from Our Universe
Page 92 & 93 of Our Universe

The original owner of this book was the Houston Independent School District. Specifically, the library at Barrick Elementary. I’m not sure how many times I checked out this book – it was a lot. My favorite part was – and still is – the “What if …” there’s life on other planets, what might it look like. Deep down, I knew life on these other planets might not look like this, but when you’re a kid it’s fun to dream and imagine.

Image of a book spine repaired with packing tape
My dad repaired the binding with packing tape. Not the best conservation-wise, but it’s held for 30-something years.

I’m not sure how this book ever survived my childhood. At one point, my dad used box tape to fix the broken spine. Not the best practice, from an archival standpoint, but it’s held surprisingly well all these years.

I pretty much wore out this book to the point where it needed to be discarded and replaced. Our librarian, Ms. Bowman, decided to just give me the book. Thank you Ms. Bowman, wherever you are.

Brasero Can’t Burn CDs/DVDs

I still like burning CD. What can I say, I’m an olds 😐

The last few times that I’ve had to install Debian from scratch, and now with Fedora as well, it seems it’s a bit of a rigmarole to get Rhythmbox and Brasero to burn disc. It usually takes about an hour, but eventually I’ll run into this bug report with the following workaround:

sudo chmod +s $(which wodim)

This sets the setuid bit for /urs/bin/wodim.

Thanks Sergey Zolotarev for the workaround. Maybe one day your bug will get fixed.

Fedora, NVIDIA, and Parkitect

It seems like a lot of people have had trouble with Parkitect running in Linux on NVIDIA cards, myself included. For me, even with nearly empty parks I would have tearing of images when using WASD to move about the map and things in motion, like park patrons or attractions, would do a weird stutter, almost like they were vibrating. I was going to try and record some video of this happening, but for some reason I can’t recreate the problem with OBS Studio Recording. Weird.

A lot of people have tried a lot of things that worked for them, but none of that worked for me. Strangely, the thing that did work for me was turning off V-Sync and running in Windowed mode. I’m not exactly sure why this works, but it does. The stuttering and weird tearing is gone! You should be able to run in Vulkan or OpenGL. I haven’t really tested, but I think the graphics may look a little better in OpenGL, but that may be my imagination.

So if you’re having problems with Parkitect in Fedora or another Linux box with an NVIDIA card, try running it in Windowed mode with V-Sync off.

Goodbye Despair^h^h^h^h^h^h^hDebian

After some hemming and hawing, I finally decided to try a different Linux distribution on my main computer. I’ve been using Ubuntu for sometime on it, and while there’s nothing particularly wrong with the distro, there’s nothing particularly right about it either. It’s great for new users, and I have it on two other computers and will probably keep it on them, but it’s not particularly suited for gaming.

Destination Debian

I thought I’d give Debian a shot. In hidensight, this was probably a bad idea: Ubuntu is based on Debian, so a lot of the issues that I had with Ubuntu would probably be there in Debian as well, and I was not dissapointed. Strangely, the most difficult thing that I usually have trouble with – installing the Nvidia drivers – wasn’t that hard. I had a much harder time figuring out what wifi driver I needed. But once done, it was all working.

Steam and Punishment, libc.so.6 and Coconuts

The biggest problem I’ve ever had with Ubuntu was getting Steam installed on it. But I guess I didn’t realize how much of an upstream problem it was. I got Debian set up, Evolution email all set up, Dropbox syncing, and then decided to try and get Steam setup. And as usual, I had trouble getting libc.so.6 installed – a part of a larger library that Steam needs to run. I’m not sure how I got it installed in Ubuntu, but I did. In my struggles to get it installed in Debian, I got a weird message from apt asking me to retype the phrase that “I acknowledge that what I’m about to do could damage the system.” And sure enough, it did! The system would boot into the terminal login, but after logining in it would log you right back out. Oh well.

Trapped by the Fedora Scent

I had wanted to try Fedora before I installed Debian, but I had trouble creating the boot USB. Because I didn’t read direction. But this round I did and it worked. It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything with Red Hat / Fedora. Like: a really long time. The last time I ran Red Hat was back in the 90’s off of a CD I got out of a magazine from Walden’s books . Well, it’s all come a long way since then.

After getting the live CD going, I thought I would try installing Steam to it just to see if I could … and it did! I had to look up how to do it in Fedora – I’m not to familiar with their package manager(s?) – but plopping down the code into the terminal downloaded and installed Steam no problem. And then Steam started up with out any problem.

So I went on and installed Fedora on my laptop. I had a little trouble with the boot manager and Dell Bios, but that was about it. After that it seems to start fine.

I was kinda impressed that – on the live cd I had setup the wifi connection so Steam and it’s dependencies  could download, and they carried over to the install. For the most part, all the drivers seemed to be working. I still had to download the Nvida driver, but it wasn’t near as painful as it had been under Ubuntu.

Do Ultimate CIMs Dream of Clockwork?

Now the big test: how would Steam and Cities Skylines run in Fedora? I installed Steam like I had on the live cd, and it worked fine except for the Steam icon not being displayed in the System Tray. But that was and easy fix. Cities Skylines is probably the game that draws the most resources, so I installed it and opened up one of the scenarios. And it worked pretty well! Still not as good as in Windows, but a lot better than it ever did under Ubuntu. Also: the Paradox loader screen never quite worked right on Ubuntu. As of laste, it would come up as a black square with no text or icons in it. You could move your pointer around and click the buttons if you knew were they were at and get the came to load, but still a pain. But in Fedora, it opened right up and everything worked.

Smile at Fedora in the Name of Ubuntu

After this experience, I probably wouldn’t recommend Debian unless you have some special reason for it. I would still recommend Ubuntu for plain-jane computers: those with just one basic gpu and that you just surf or email on. I have two other computers and I’ll probably continue using Ubuntu on them for the foreseeable future. But if you have a gaming laptop that has a  fancy discrete gpu, or you’ve had a lot of trouble getting Steam to install under Ubuntu or Debian, maybe give Fedora a try?