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Tuesday, May 12, 2009
8:31 p.m.
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KGB Urban Hike #2 on Sunday ended up following this 17-mile route — just a bit longer than last week's walk, but still shorter than I would have liked. I remember from our West Virginia and North Park walks that I start to slow down by maybe a third somewhere between 20 and 25 miles, and I'd really like to get some of our warm-up walks into that range so I can see if it still happens or not and then work on avoiding it. Our first segment Sunday was a short walk to the South Side, where it was discovered that I may have been the only one who'd eaten breakfast that morning because everyone else was hungry for lunch after three miles. So we stopped at the Beehive (Carson and 14th Street) for a while before going up the hill on 18th Street. There we began a bit of a tour d'escalier, going up a couple of staircases into an area of the South Side Slopes where all the streets are named after saints and there's a lot of church-y architecture. Also, you know, amazing views of downtown. I have some pictures from up there where you can just see Wean and Hamerschlag poking through the landscape. There were a few places where the sidewalks themselves were just staircases with platforms, I guess because it would have been too steep to have them follow the contour of the road. We eventually ended up at Grandview Park (more views), discovering in the process that Warrington Avenue, just south, is still string with streetcar tracks and overhead wires. So on into Mount Washington, with more views and staircases, in that order. Greenleaf Street near the edge of Mount Washington looks like a regular road on Google Maps, but it turns out it's another one of those named staircases Pittsburgh seems to be rather full of. Up that, then down again all the way to the West End Circle, currently even more of an annoying mess than usual because it's now additionally under construction. (But I hear that when the construction's finished the madness of the area will be significantly reduced.) More staircases — the route I discovered last spring — up to the West End Overlook, which was another of our fairly major stops. The second half of the trip was spent on the North Side, between the West End Bridge and East Allegheny and up to what I think William and I now refer to as the "Central American Financial District." (This is in reality the Mexican War Streets, but "war" and "wall" are rather difficult to distinguish in faked British accents, and the two of us plus Chris and Pat were faking British accents for the better part of two hours, I'd say.) If you're ever up in the area, it's worth paying a visit to the West End Park, especially if you like those kind of classically designed urban green spaces that are (in this case) bisected by railroad tracks. We ended, finally, at Christos on Sixth Street downtown for a very good (if somewhat pricey) Greek dinner. Between that and our lunch stop, I spent a dollar in food for every mile we walked. It's interesting on these walks — or perhaps difficult, when you're planning them — to try to find the right mix of properties that keeps everyone happy. I refer here to distance and terrain preferences, number and nature of stops, etc. Everyone, of course, wants to see interesting things, but even that's rather subjective, since there's one axis of possibilities between business district and residential streets, and then another axis between hugely urban thoroughfares and tree-covered hiking trails. We managed to map out most of this space Sunday, which is good for variety and for everyone getting at least some of what they want, but I admit that I'm a little at a loss for what to suggest for next week's hike. I'm not really in it for the food, so personally I'd design something about 25 miles long with minimal stops, some room for on-the-fly street-level planning, and as many residential streets as I can string together with a few staircases, perhaps... but that sort of walk would get me shot by maybe all but maybe three of my fellow urban hikers. In the general case it may be better to map out at least coffee shops in advance, then play a bit of Connect the Dots. Or maybe to split into a distance-fueled group and a distributed-dining group. Or to do short stoppy walks and long pushing-forward walks on alternate weekends. If anyone's got any suggestions, leave them here: next week's plans are still kind of open. |
Thursday, May 7, 2009
10:53 p.m.
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Ah, finals week. The time when destinies are shaken, fortunes are made or reversed by the outcome of a few sheets of paper, blood vessels burst with anxiety— Well, not for me this time around, but a good number of other people seem to be perturbed. Around the house this has taken the form of dirty dishes appearing at odd times and then languishing in the sink for days; also, people aren't around or awake when I've previously gotten accustomed to them being. (They're still quiet at night and not fighting me for the shower at 9 a.m., so this last part I'm OK with.) We're about to have a king-sized royal mess on our hands in the next few weeks, though. Somehow everyone decided that there is one and only one solution to all their storage, lodging, accommodation, and other hotel-like needs, and that place is here. On the bright side, I guess some of them are actually asking first. Still, though, I feel like there is a lot to coordinate that's falling on me: two people moving out, at least two's worth of stuff in storage, two moving in (and wanting to know about furniture), three (four? five? I'll be dashed if I can keep up) homeless and/or visiting for periods ranging from a few days up to a month, a new lease still being waited on from the landlord, ceiling repairs theoretically scheduled but without any progress made, a credit check that has to be re-submitted, and — to top it all off — people showing up unannounced to look the house over with a view to buying it. I'll state it here now for the record: I am going to be laughing myself sick come the first week in September, when I'm off in France living in the sublime and solitary knowledge that any mess I find around my living space will be my own, that I won't come home at 6 p.m. to find 10 lights on in an empty house (new record set here this week), and that if the drywall starts sagging because of an unidentified pipe leak on the floor above it'll be someone else's problem. I've been wondering lately — slightly relatedly — if I'm passing some important age threshold. The fact has been becoming increasingly apparent to me that I'm turning 26 in another two and a half months, and by that birthday in their own lives my parents had gotten married, bought a house, and had a kid (i.e. me) on the way already. All very prim and adult-like — which in certain contexts would sound frightfully boring, but in others sounds very steady and appealing. I was at the KGB Mafia Night dinner yesterday, meaning that we had infected Buca di Beppo's down at Station Square to the tune of about 30 people, and through the entire meal I just kept feeling this new sense of detachment. The room was about an order of magnitude too loud, I couldn't understand half of what "the kids" were saying (seriously, every other word these days is "nom," standing in for such conventional and equally monosyllabic words as "food," "eat," and "good"), so between those two factors I felt like I didn't really have any meaningful conversations. Maybe I'm just getting to the point where I want to stop pretending like I'm still 21 and settle down to a more adult life. I certainly detect that feeling around the house, where I do a fairly poor job of not coming across like an irate parent to my housemates, reminding them to do things like take their shoes off at the door and put their wet drink cups on coasters so they don't destroy my furniture. Part of me wants to solve the problem by convincing myself that it's not worth it to care so much about relative trivialities, but part of me says that it would be better to be off in a one-bedroom apartment somewhere that I can run to my exact idiosyncratic liking — or at least share with someone who shares my neuroses more so than the average undergrad. Well, in any case, I'll get a taste of that again when I'm in France for the fall. Aside from those kind of thoughts, I guess life has been going averagely. We had our final photo crit yesterday afternoon, which was wonderful. I was talking to Katilyn a bit before class, when a bunch of us were down in the darkroom for the last time to select and mount and generally get our prints together, and I mentioned that that sort of last-minute "we're all in this together up against the deadline" feeling is something I'm really going to miss about the class. It's the same feeling I always got from newspaper work, strongly enough there to make me seriously consider grad school and a career in journalism for a time. The actual critique was up in Maggie Mo... 227, I think it was. We went one at a time, and Martin had assembled a bunch of other photo professors to see and respond to our work as well. It was thus that I met Charlee Brodsky, who I liked on the spot as a very forthright and even-minded critiquer. She and Mark (the portrait professor) were both more straight about giving negative feedback when they felt like it. I think I helped my case, though, by my introduction. We were supposed to identify ourselves by name, year, and major, so I began "Hi, I'm Greg. I'm a fourth-year grad student in the Language Technologies Institute, which is part of the School of Computer Science, and this is my first photo class at CMU." The only mildly negative feedback I got was from Jen (who I'd seen around before and had thought was a student right up until Martin introduced her as a professor at the beginning of the crit), who thought that my interior space series didn't show a very solidified blending between very static architecture photographs and the more "weird" dynamic parts of them that were caused by people moving through my quarter-second exposures. Similar to what Martin had said about the people being somehow off in the photos when I'd first put up the original assignment, but I'm not 100 percent sure I know what to do about it. I find it both satisfying and amusing, now on the topic of photography, that I am easily marked by other people as an architecture photographer, since that's at least 50 percent of what I consider myself. (Most of the remainder is landscape, which I didn't really get into in this class because of assignment topics and non-cooperative weather.) Kaitlyn had said once before that, if she hadn't known my major, she would have guessed I was an archie (that's [arki]), and Charlee said that she really liked my architecture shots and gave me the name of a photographer I should look up in that line. Mark thought that it would be interesting to document the 24-hour life cycle of a building, instead of the hour or so I presented of it, and Martin suggested taking a 4x5 view camera out for architectural studies. I lose my darkroom and camera-rental access after another four days, though, so I don't know if the last one is going to happen anytime soon, but I do like the idea. I was asking Graham about the possibility of summer access over at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, but it seems like it's going to cost more money for me than I'd like to spend. Other more standard thoughts on work and daily life coming up in the next few days. Though I am certainly not feeling in a very strong writing mood as far as my thesis proto-proposal goes, I'm not opposed to more journal entries. |
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
9:55 a.m.
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Our long-walk adventures return! On Sunday a group of nine of us took this 16-mile walk — a big loop that's roughly campus, Shadyside-ish, Bloomfield, Allegheny Cemetery, Lawrenceville; across the river to Millvale, Etna, Sharpsburg, and almost-Aspinwall; then back across to Morningside, Highland Park, East Liberty, Shadyside, Point Breeze, and Regent Square. It makes a pretty good list, I think. The pacing was pretty good when we were walking, but the whole trip took us more than 10 hours because we made some very long stops at the Dozen Bake Shop in Lawrenceville, Ice Cream Station Zebra right across from the zoo on Butler Street, the Tazza d'Oro coffee house in Highland Park, and the infamous D's in Regent Square for dinner. Somehow it didn't rain, so there are pictures, but given how slow I've been to edit and upload things it may be a while before you actually see them, unless you track me down and sit me in front of my computer to show them to you. I think I like walking in a large-ish group. One problem with a West Virginia walk with five is that people tend to pair off — especially on narrow sidewalks — and then there's one person left over. It seems, though, that once you get above a certain number of people, the inclination to pair goes away and people end up forming clumps instead, and these clumps are a little more fluid. We started out pretty segregated into the six of "us" (Chris, William, gwillen, Ross, Zack, and me) and the three of "them" (freshmen, who introduced themselves as Alex, Nick, and Charlie). Ten miles in, though, we had mixed ourselves up decently well. Ross and I scared the born-in-1990 set with how old we were, they scared us with how young they were, and everyone seemed to respond positively to numerous checks of "Are you having fun?" Another walk is planned for next weekend — that is to say, I saild I would plan it — so if anyone's interested in seeing parts of Mount Washington, the West End, and the North Side (the Mexican War Streets, I hope) on Sunday, you should either let me know directly or watch the KGB b-board. There will also be the "big push" a bit later in the summer, which would be something like going for West Virginia, Ohio, or maybe somewhere south or east, so let me know if you're interested in that too. |
Saturday, May 2, 2009
5:47 p.m.
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Today is supposed to be a day wholly given over to photos — I'm behind in editing and posting galleries to my website, in coming up with and posting monthly galleries to Facebook, in printing color 11x17s for my wall, in updating my photo index of who and what appears on each day, and in printing some black-and-white 8x10s from film I shot on my own outside of class. So far I've devoted a lot less time to these activities than I need to, but there's some progress: if you're interested in the fall AUO concert from last November, my trip to Prague in January, or a short studio session I did with Ben in March, photos from those things are now posted. Computer problems related to Photoshop are delaying the KGB spring puzzle hunt gallery, but that's on its way too, theoretically. |
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
11:28 p.m.
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A writing mood doesn't necessarily imply a bad mood, and I know I'll get a bad mood if I spend this post talking about my latest adventures in Stupid Broken Computers Land, so I think I'd better concentrate on reading. Dani had a reading post a few days ago that made me want to jot down a list of the things I've been reading recently. When I think of it, going back several months now there's been a pretty consistent chain of new books. My ground state is to read and re-read the same few things from my shelf, but aside from filling in a gap or two with some quick O. Henry stories, I've been consuming an astonishing amount of new material — even if my list of books comes down to a sort of tale of two authors. In chronological order, since February, the books are:
I'm also kind of desulatorily at work on "Showplace of America," a research book by someone called Jan Cigliano on the history of Euclid Avenue in Cleveland. My mom had it out when I was home over Easter; she had gotten it from a co-worker who had two copies, and then my mom mentioned to me and let me borrow it because it's the sort of "old stuff" I would like. I find the writing rather uneven — possibly because it was originally a master's thesis or something and then fleshed out into a full book 14 years later &mdah; but the vintage pictures are unparalleled. Today Euclid Avenue, at least from about East 30th Street (where CSU ends) to 93rd (where the Cleveland Clinic starts), is a sort of crumbling and dilapidated ex-commercial thoroughfare, but from about 1850 to 1910 it was one of the most fashionable residential streets in the world. Knowing how it changed so dramatically could be kind of enlightening. |
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
10:48 p.m.
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So it seems that spring, though arriving rather late this year, finally made it here. Two weeks back was the Week of the Flowering Trees, then last week was the Beginnings of General Leaves, and from Friday we had four and a half days straight where outside decided that its temperature was suddenly going to be above 30 C. (I think we broke or tied a record over the weekend.) Today it got up to 27 before it rained in the afternoon, dropping the temperature by about 7 C in half an hour, and now for the next few days we'll be hovering in that more seasonal 18-to-20 range. Of course, I've been trying to take advantage of the sun and warmth to the maximum extent possible. Friday I ate my lunch outside by the KGB's Doherty table, where they were collecting stuff for the Useless Stuff Auction that night. On Saturday I walked to the grocery store and back, and then was considering going running when Eight proposed some frisbee on the Cut instead, which occurred a short time later with Jack and Ben also there. That night I also played tennis with Doug — played tennis (or any racquet sport) for the first time in about four years, which showed me just how awful at them I've gotten and made me wish the old CWRU crew was still around for our Friday 5 p.m. racquetball days. The running was saved for Sunday, through Schenley Park in the heat of the afternoon, which in retrospect was perhaps not the best idea since I came back feeling like I'd boiled my brains a bit. Yesterday was a more regular indoor work day and my only time outside was a nice lunch at the trucks with Sharon, but then today I went out and ran around the track for three miles — again in the afternoon, and again I came back feeling a little like I'd been boiled or grilled. There's a reason behind the sun madness, though, and it's interestingly enough my new anti-sunburn theory. See, what usually happens to me during the summer is that I live inside at a desk or in front of various computers, and then at some point in July or August I spent eight hours outside and fry myself. This is obviously sub-optimal, and I further don't like being the sort of pasty-white wimp who gets sunburnt in 10 minutes. So this year we are trying to build up resistance gradually. The rules state that, starting April 1, if there's a sunny day when the temperature is above 20 or so, then I have to spend at least half an hour outside. What I want to do is stay below the burn threshold, which should be easy to do when the sun's all weak in April and May, so that by the time the middle of summer comes up I can still stay outside for half an hour or more without really feeling any ill effects. Theoretically I should never get burned during the short half-hour blocks, have better resistance for longer periods, and as a bonus stop looking like an albino programmer who grew up under a rock. I explained this theory independently to Ben and Alan and got two different responses. Alan — who, I should point out, is cheating from the beginning since he never burns — thought that the answer to all sun-related problems for me should be generous and sustained application of sunscreen, resulting in overall the most minimized exposure possible. Ben, on the other hand, said that he thought the damage to skin from direct sun was actually a less harmful kind of damage than what happens to skin with sunscreen on it. (I am absolutely unable to confirm the biology from my own knowledge, but he said that direct sun causes missing nucleotides in DNA, which are easy to correct, while sunscreen results in the creation of dangerous free radicals.) My incredibly biased self sides with Ben, partially because I don't like sunscreen and always forget to put it on, and partially because people naturally rebel when given advice on a problem that the advice-giver doesn't have to deal with themself. (Argh, gender-neutral third-person singular pronouns, why don't you exist?) Anyway, if five days' worth of experimental data is any indication, I'm doing all right so far. I'll have to see if I have skin cancer in 40 years before knowing if Alan's wrong, though. Other thoughts on computers and reading coming in later posts... possibly even right now since I feel like I'm in a writing mood. |
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
2:50 p.m.
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Given how much I've been mistreating my stomach over the past week, it's not really surprising that it's come down to this: I spent the entirety of yesterday in bed with food poisoning. The Case of the Upset Stomach really begins about a week ago, when I went with Alan, Ben, and Lilli to "the meat place," which is what everyone calls the Green Forest Cafe in Penn Hills. The nickname is obvious in its derivation: the way things work there is that you pay the restaurant people $34 and then they serve you various grilled pieces of meat at about five-minute intervals until you tell them to stop. I am absolutely afraid to calculate out the number of pounds of dead animal the four of us consumed in about two hours — for me, it was enough that I still felt full when I woke up the next day, and even at lunch I only had a vegetable meal from Sree's. And even after that I still felt like I was trucking around a bunch of extra weight in the midsection all week, a feeling made only worse by the fact that Carnival kind of disrupted my usual schedule of running and weight lifting. And then we come to Sunday, and the usual free Qdoba at the Tartan office. The way this works is through an ad exchange: Qdoba brings us free dinner every Sunday at 5 p.m., and in return we run their ad often enough to make up the cost in food to them. Of course, the problem in this respect is that my copy shift starts at 7 p.m., at which point the food's been sitting out in those little Sterno-heated trays for two hours, but I generally eat a bunch of it anyway because it saves me the trouble of buying or figuring out dinner. And, since most people have had their fill by 7 or 8 or 9 p.m., I usually go back for more as my shift goes along. That turned out to be a big, big "oops" this week. I felt disgustingly full when I went to bed at 12:30 that night, and then I woke up feeling even worse around 5:30 in the morning, which is when the "fun" began. I'm not sure how much conscious credit I can take for this, but I was laying there thinking "You know, I'd probably feel a lot better if I could just throw all this crap up," and, well, I got my wish a few minutes later. And again at 7:00. And again at 8:15. And again at 9:30. I was getting pretty nervous as 10:45 came up — I've never vomited on schedule before, and I'm not sure now if it's a good thing or a bad thing to be expecting it — but it turned out the series was at an end after four episodes. After that I just got to lay in bed all day, feeling like a horrible mass of broken parts shoddily strung together — parts I had to check and re-arrange every five minutes to make sure something wasn't crushing, getting caught under, or cutting off circulation from something else. I kept thinking about those old wooden marionettes all collapsed in a heap. Somehow the day went past. Total food intake for the day was a handful or two of Cheerios, a can of peach halves (that took me most of the afternoon to eat!), and maybe half a can of chicken noodle soup. The weird part was that the food poisoning symptoms mostly subsided to something more or less flu-like where my feverish aching self was barely strong enough to get out of bed. Seriously, I think I got half of my day's activity just in going downstairs and making the soup... and even then I almost fell asleep at the kitchen table while eating it. I spent the entire day minus about 20 minutes in bed, asleep for at least half of that and turning over restlessly for the other half. I went to "bed" for the night around 8:30 p.m., woke up briefly this morning around 3, and then got up on roughly a normal schedule at 9:00. Today the side effects seem to be limited to being kind of unsteady on my feet and being unable to focus — both literally and figuratively. For some reason my eyes have gotten noticeably worse since I last looked at anything but my bedroom wall or ceiling. Also a certain latent confusion over today being Tuesday rather than Monday and me now being a day behind with work and photography. Just a heads-up in case you see me looking dazed or otherwise out of things in the next few days. |
Sunday, April 12, 2009
7:54 p.m.
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I think I am going to have to start listing Easter as among my least-favorite holidays. Not because of its underlying reasons for existing, of course, or even its implemenation, but just because of what I find myself doing on the date. One of my undergrad years, for example, I didn't go home to see my family and basically skipped the holiday entirely because I was working on some big class project. I was going to say it was databases, but I think I took that in the fall, so it was probably networks. If so, nothing I did in that class was a stunning success anyway, which means in retrospect I should have gone home and enjoyed myself. The No. 2 spot on the worst Easters list also comes from my undergrad days; we had all gone to my aunt and uncle's to celebrate Easter on the Saturday that year, and then the next morning I came down to breakfast and found a tick in my hand when I went to drink a cup of orange juice. That Easter I spent with my nervous mom in the emergency room of Bedford Hospital for what turned out to be a harmless dog tick. I think this year, though, now claims the top spot. Again, we celebrated the holiday Saturday, so I had a great day at home with my parents and siblings. And then I came back here and spent today split between failing to sort out more computer annoyance and playing second fiddle to a bunch of half-built wooden boxes. Around 5:30 I took a walk by myself to the grocery store, only to find it was closed. I reserved the photography studio for tonight after half-price, so I'll be finishing this triple threat of a day by taking pictures of someone who doesn't want to have his picture taken, a situation I forced out of some selfish desire to take those pictures despite the subject's reluctance. I have a feeling that Annie Leibovitz, the photographer we saw a documentary about in class Wednesday, wouldn't approve, and for about 24 hours after seeing the movie I couldn't wait to take pictures. Well, on the positive side, the copy at The Tartan's going remarkably well tonight... |
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
8:25 p.m.
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Six out of seven people who answered the short "Ubuntu 8.10 (y/n)?" query in my Facebook status message today recommended that course of action, so that's what I went with. At least my computer finally works properly — I'm looking at the world in the correct aspect ratio — and maybe an added benefit is that improvements to Flash for 64-bit Linux will probably hit Ubuntu releases sooner than they will Debian. Now I just have to do something with the keyboard, which is currently irking me to no end because they keys are all flat, laptop-style, and the block of six containing Page Up and so on is rotated from what I'm used to. I do a lot of copy/paste with Shift-Insert, and so far my miss rate for getting Shift-Home instead is probably about 70 percent. I also have to look down every time to figure out what's happened to Home when I do want it. In an ideal world, I would magically come across a PS/2-to-USB converter in the Wean blue bins or something and just plug in my old PS/2 keyboard, but in the meantime I'm kind of loathe to pay the $10 or $15 minimum that the Internet seems to want for such a thing. Also... who gave it permission to snow? Especially on and off all day like it was somehow February again? I suppose it's better than "Arctic Circle Fest" my senior year at Case, when my parents got a foot of snow on April 23. (It seems I've been misremembering this date as April 25, but my journal post proves otherwise, which is a good reason to keep this thing around.) Still, though. I'm all ready for sun and biking and being able to go outside without a jacket, and now I have to dig my winter coat out of the closet again. |
Monday, April 6, 2009
11:29 p.m.
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Even with the new computer running Linux, I am not free of annoyance and pain in that department. This may be a long story. My plan for Saturday afternoon was to sit down and get Castle off of Vista and onto something a little more palatable. So I got my materials together and started mucking around with Debian "netinst" CDs and partition editing and so on and so forth, and that was all right if a little mystifying. For some reason, I only get to create one more partition on my hard drive, and anything remaining after that is marked "unusable," apparently regardless of its size (at least given the various test values I tried to create). This is why i'm currently running a Debian system with no swap partition, which I suppose is all right for now given that I've got 6 GB of RAM. But that was just the beginning, because the system booted up with my shiny new 1600x900-pixel monitor displaying a little error message saying my "input timings" were off and that I should set them to some supported value as per my monitor booklet. Otherwise the best I could get was a text console on tty2 and such. I had mucked with this sort of thing before when I got my old widescreen monitor, but that was two Thanksgivings back, and now I had to re-derive everything with only an 80x25 text console. (I had foolishly left my laptop in my office over Friday night, so I didn't have another working computer within range.) Luckily there's a manual entry for xorg.conf, and after enough pleading and prodding I got a little bit of information out of #cslounge. For the monitor "booklet," though, which was actually a CD of HTML files, I had to look at it in text-only Lynx. At any rate, at the end of this Saturday night madness, I had seen that my monitor was reporting its resolution capabilities properly to the computer, and so constructed the correct ModeLine by hand for 1600x900 resolution and added it to xorg.conf. Not, you know, that it did a dang bit of good in actually getting the resolution to work, but it should have. Which brought me into Sunday,with a screen stretched to 1600x900 that was meant to be 1280x1024 or whatever that size is. Not widescreen, at any rate. There was a suggestion from #cslounge that it might be a video driver problem, since Debian stable is using an older version of the X.Org video driver than, say, Ubuntu is. So I burned an Ubuntu 8.4 live CD and tried to boot that, except it wouldn't boot and dropped me to some stripped-down "BusyBox" shell instead. So I burned another one. That one So. Live CD testing with Ubuntu 8.4 (which I'm less opposed to than 8.10) revealed that it uses the exact same video driver as the Debian I've already got, so that didn't get me anywhere with the resolution problem. So then I downloaded a live CD of Ubuntu 8.10 and sent that down to Pyxy to set up on the USB stick. A bit later, I found out that that, at least, works, so one option is to completely wipe Debian and go with Ubuntu instead. I'm not sure I actually want my box to be a Ubuntu box, but at this point I'm getting pretty desperate for anything that works and that I can start turning into my computer instead of some transient install that I'm still trying to get set up. The other option, of course, would be to keep Debian and just update the video driver myself — much newer versions exist than what's in Debian sta(b)le. On the one hand, there's the Debian experimental package, which looks newer, but being experimental there's no guarantee that it would actually work. On the other hand, the X.Org driver itself is released as source, which is newer still, but the instructions for building it look a little meagre and I don't entirely trust myself to correctly interpret and follow them without some additional step-by-step guidance. So, to put it metaphorically, I'm not sure which of these two hands is the right one. Ah, yes. To make me feel even more cursed, frustrated, defeated, etc., Skype on my laptop (where I'm typing this after two days of stretched screens, so everything looks weirdly narrow) has mysteriously quit twice in the time it's taken to write this out. I stinkin' give up. If anyone's got any advice, post it here and I'll check it tomorrow from work or something, but I don't think I'm going to come anywhere near my desktop until at least the evening. It's driving me nuts, that thing, a massive pile of top-of-the-line computing equipment (that I so badly needed and wanted) that I can't even configure right. |
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