Remember Shadows?

Man I remember way back in the day... Windows 2000, marveling at the mouse pointer. It had a shadow! It was the most amazing thing. Items near it were still visible but they were cloaked in a little, smooth gradient shadow. The mouse pointer was hovering above the other items on the desktop.

Remember being amazed at the little details? New OS versions would come out and the biggest question was what would it look like? The glossy plastic of Vista (It looked an awful lot like Beryl on Linux prior to Vista's release *ahem*).

I still notice and enjoy the little things. The cool flat Doh's UI. Sadly my love minimalism robs me of most of the fun. I typically turn off any panels or shortcut bars, launchers etc. Plain color backgrounds and nothing but basic window decorations. So when I install new distros efc I miss out on any new flashy GUI elements.

But it still feels so good running a freshly built machine!

So Much Doom

It has been a surprisingly long time since I've had to rebuild my computers. Well, nevermind, it wasn't that long ago. BUT the last time was by choice and not because I broke the OS etc. I was making the switch to LinuxMint. And I still love it.

But the other night it happened. I ran the updates tool, I hadn't updated my system etc in a while. Then the next time I logged in - NOTHIMG. Frozen, black screen. I had to do a hard shutdown to get it to do anything. Well I broke something so maybe it was time to install the next version of Mint.

Fluxbox worked, but not Plasma for some reason. So...
 

Two days later I finally finessed nix into clearing out my thumbdrive and getting a disktable that was proper for booting. But in the course of my struggles I truly did break something. You know how people are like:
 

"Be careful when you use dd. Set the of= correctly."

Yeah. There goes my SSD (primary drive). But I didn't realize it right away, you see the current Ubuntu, that Mint is built on won't even run from a thumb or CD if the drive designated as 0 is messed up (Some people's bios has a floppy drive entry they had to disable). But it took me a while to realize this was why my live CD/USB boot was freezing. I ripped a bunch of DVDs and re-dd'd my USB a couple dozen times with diff Mint versions etc. Thankfully I inadvertently hit F11 and dropped into the actual nix boot messages. That's how I found the 'no filesystem on 0' error messages. Prior to that it just appeared Mint was hung then eventually said 'no drive containing file system found'.

What is interesting is Mint built on earlier versions of Ubuntu had no problem with my messed up SSD. So I ran an old version of Mint and worked more with gparted and various terminal commands. I finally got the SSD put back into a state that the BIOS liked.

I installed the latest Mint... Buuut... I couldn't log in. Plasma was still giving me grief, and this time I couldn't get in to install Fluxbox.

Finally I installed the previous Mint version and am back in business.

What a nightmare.

Back to Back to Basics

I'm pretty sure this is not normal. Every time I start a new book on programming or programming languages, unless it's an advanced book, it starts with the very basics. Everything is data. What are variables. What are operands. Etc.

I never skip past this portion of the books. I'm familiar with the basics, I use them every single day. Never the less, I love to read about them. For some reason I find this review to be the most exciting part of the books. I love how computers work. I love seeing examples of binary applications. I love how flipping bits on and off can result in amazing feats of computation. I am a mathematics outsider marveling at the magic of mathematics.

Every time I read a different author's take on the basics I learn new things, or at least learn to see and think about them slightly differently than I did.
I guess in this sense it is poetry.