I made the unfortunate mistake of crashing at my parents' house last night, because I had some things to do there and I figured it was better than driving back home down an icy road next to a river in the middle of a blizzard. Of course I didn't realize until I got set to leave that there was an accumulated foot and a half of snowfall and it was still snowing, and Mr. Plow seems to have abandoned me. Scrape my asphalt, indeed. So I found whatever scraps of freeze-dessicated leftovers there were in the fridge, and built a fire, because it looks like I'm here until spring. If I didn't have the ghostly bartender to talk to, I think I'd go nuts.
This did give me a chance to download and burn an Internet Freedom Disk, which is the somewhat pretentious nom de guerre some slashdot contributor came up with for linux live CDs, thinking as only a geek can that this would make them more appealing to the unwashed masses. My IFD... god, that acronym sounds like it should either explode or go up somebody's vagina, or possibly both if it's a Friday night in East Dubuque. Okay, putting that thought aside, my IFD was an Ubuntu distro that I downloaded from a UofM computer science department website. Actually speaking of names, I've got to hand it to the people who figured the best way to popularize their work was to give it a sexy name like Ubuntu... featuring the Gnome desktop environment. Not "gnome", but "guh-nome", just to be more up it's own ass.
Now that I've obsessed over the superficial, I have to say I was kind of surprised by how well it worked. Well, on the second try, anyways, since my goofy CD drive didn't seem to be reading the disc the first time and it took forever to load. It also occurs to me that I haven't quite gotten around to mentioning what the hell an Internet Freedom Disk is: it's a CD that can boot your computer straight into a linux OS (in this case Ubuntu) without installing anything on the hard drive, running entirely in RAM and disappearing again when you turn the computer off. The only thing I used it for other than poking around was to see if I could use the web, other than the lack of a wireless connection. I should have tried to print something as well, and cover all the emergency basics in case Windows blows up on me someday, but sadly I'm not that smart. I think it would be totally cool to get this working on a thumb drive so I could save some things to it, and basically have my own portable parasitic desktop that I could run by plugging it into other people's computers, but all the guides I can find to doing this say how ridiculously easy it is and then list seven homebrew utilities to reformat the file system and reverse the polarity of the neutron flow, so no dice.
This did sell me on the possibility of plugging a linux machine into my TV to play around with it a bit. I have no idea why this doesn't take off a bit more as a cheaper option, since getting some basic tasks going through firefox and openoffice was pretty easy without having seen any form of linux before. For environments where all that's needed is an appliance that can write a paper and open a web page, I would think this would be indistinguishable from the alternatives: a pirated copy of XP, an old copy of Windows 98 that MS isn't supporting anymore, and the like. About the only thing I can think of that I don't know if I could run on Ubuntu was the port of the original Legend of Zelda I like to play. Well, that and my favorite usenet program only runs on windows, which would at least temporarily interfere with my steady supply of free pr0n. Obviously a deal-breaker... fuck off, Tux!
Since I'm still snowed in, this will be the first of many half-finished blog posts I can catch up on in the next few hours until I hear a St. Bernard scratching at the door. But for the time being I'll be locked up in here with the creepy twins. Come blog with us... come blog with us, forever...
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