Once again DH comes through with an idiosyncratically perfect romantic gift for Valentine’s Day:

Seriously — it is!   Over Christmas break the techno-idiots in our IT department at school managed to totally mung up my computer, meaning it took most of two days to fix it back to where it needed to be.  This will go on the wall right beside my monitor, yes indeed!

Not only are my tunes working, but I spent a couple of hours tonight and got my new Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet working.  Now THAT was a non-trivial task.  All the necessary steps of downloading modules, building them, getting files into the right directories, editing system files to recognize the hardware, and so on were documented out there on the Web, but there was no one place where it was spelled out completely and step by step.  So I put all the pieces together with much trial and error and a bit of gnashing of teeth, but in the end worked out the puzzle and got it working.

Next comes the REAL challenge — learning to use it, along with The Gimp!!

I haven’t had sound working on my computer since this fall’s rebuild.  It took me a while for the problem to get annoying enough to deal with, but it finally did.  Actually, it was as much the fact that DH is getting fed up with Windows and AOL and how things just don’t play nice on his computer, so earlier this week he commented that he was starting to consider having me install Ubuntu Linux on HIS computer.  DH, the non-technogeek!!!

Well, he would absolutely be miserable without sound on his computer for all the sound clips and videos he finds in his ‘Net surfing, so I knew I’d better get it figured out.  Of course, as I started digging into the problem, I found out that our motherboards both have the absolute worst sound hardware to get working under Linux.  Lovely…NOT.  But I dug and dug and fiddled and fiddled and installed and uninstalled until I should have been getting SOMETHING…and then I pulled out my motherboard documentation and started reading.

Ha, I should do as I say, not as I do, myself — RTFM FIRST!   Come to find out my motherboard does NOT like unpowered speakers, and of course both sets I’d been trying (the ones embedded in my monitor and the stand-alone ones) were unpowered.  So I plugged in the spare pair of powered speakers we had lying around and after another fiddle or two, VOILA!  SOUND!  WOOT!!!

This morning I decided I’d try some music.  I tried out the default Rhythmbox Music Player first, but it kept spontaneously closing as I was using Firefox.  Luckily I had another option available, because I’d installed Amarok upon its recommendation  in one of my many RSS feeds.  I opened it up, told it where my tunes were on my hard drive, let it build its database, and for the past hour or so have been contentedly listening to Acoustic Alchemy and Gretchen Wilson.

(Now there’s an odd combination for you, true.)

HHJJ!!!!

I don’t know if I work better under pressure, but I certainly get more done under pressure.  With the holidays looming on the horizon, the bead show this weekend, family and friends coming next week for Thanksgiving dinner, and the end of the semester around the corner, I have a lot on my agenda.

In the past couple of days I have done much of the planning for the show as well as getting stuff together for it.  The bed risers and new lighting are in my studio waiting to be packed into the car Friday night.  I have put a large dent in the grading backlog, particularly for my introductory class, and the pile is back down to a somewhat manageable size now (at least until next week’s test). I keep seeing and taking care of little bits here and there around the house in preparation for a bigger cleaning early next week.  Today at work, I defragmented the hard drive on my work computer and installed Ubuntu Linux to make it a dual-boot system (completely against our IT rules, of course, but with absolutely no issues) so that I can be happier with my computer use there.

I feel like there’s still an insane amount to do right away but it doesn’t feel quite so overwhelming now that I am getting a few things dealt with.  Deep breath, let it out slowly, decide on the next thing to tackle!

I usually don’t post these, even if I do them. These are an exception, though. Mr. Frosty claims I’m not a nerd or a geek, but the tests seem to show otherwise!