There are getting to be a lot of bugs in the backyard. Twice already I've come in from yard work, sat down with a book, and had a bug crawl off of me. It reminds me of when I'd go out into the fields at Davis, where the general rule of thumb is if you stayed out there for more than an hour, the first thing you do after you get home is shower. With lots of scrubbing and soap. Though in defense of field botany you seldom get things worse than mites or a spider or two.
An ant just crawled off. Huh.
So yes, occasionally I guess you get ants as well.
Ubuntu trial's failed for no clear reasons that I could detect. A check with hash values told me that the iso file has downloaded correctly, but for some reason I can't check the CD itself after it's been burned. I can get around crc error by resetting the boot sequence and the logic block 0 error seem to bypass itself, but once Ubuntu hits the local boot sequence it starts cycling and the computer is effectively dead. I've requested a Ubuntu CD, on the hunch that there's something wrong with the CD despite of my careful rechecking with the directions. The helpful banner at the website informed me that the CD should be arriving in 4 to 6 weeks. Meanwhile dad gave me a Linspire CD and I've been playing with that instead. (Loads up like a charm, the network setup, internet and LAN, as well as user settings, are all set up within an hour - and you get a direct console - that's like the command prompt in Windows except better - built in, which is way cool.) From how well THAT particular OS's been running I think I can safely say that the problem with booting Ubuntu's not because of the hard drive.
Such a shame. And I had such high hopes for it too - I've looked up the content before downloading and Ubuntu came with most of my favorite open source programs (Audacity, anyone?).
Speaking of computers (and geeking out over them), mom's decided that I should know something about how memory works, so I've been assigned a bit of short reading. It is, in retrospect, a lot like a short lecture in biophysics, if I were to consider the computer as something that is alive. There's the prerequisite knowledge of circuits that needs to be applied to a frightening amount of models and acronyms. I despise acronyms, and the computer industry is just as bad as any other field of science I've ever encountered (there's DRAM, SRAM, and then you get SDRAM...). There must be a rule somewhere, way back when they were inventing each field, that informed people that no one would ever take them seriously unless they have a plethora of acronyms for every single worthwhile object/ idea that they encounter. Still, I should be fair. At least as far as nicknames are concerned, they're still heaps more regular than what English, as a language, came up with.
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