Alexandra Erin

Witness the death of a Microsoft apologist.

I finally started using Firefox a while back when it turned out that, in my case at least, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was fundamentally incompatible with Microsoft’s Windows Vista, as it grabbed and held onto an ever-increasing chunk of system memory and made it clear it was never gonna give it up and never gonna let it down.

And now, I’ve finally installed Ubuntu on my laptop, my laptop which is apparently physically fine and in perfect working order except for the fact that its default operating system has apparently been slowly degrading from the moment I got it. Apparently Windows Vista is only an improvement over Windows 98 in how quickly it self-destructs.

Let me back up. First, I owe you all an apology for yesterday, for not producing anything worth reading and for breaking my word about keeping you apprised of what’s going on. I’m afraid that after I missed an important FedEx shipment that came early in the day because I was in my bedroom on the desktop instead of the living room, getting my laptop working became a bit of a white whale for me. I didn’t really mean to spend the whole day on it, but I kept trying things and thinking “Okay, this is the problem. This is going to be the one that fixes it.”

In the end, after having tried every fix I could find and everything I could think of, I was just about convinced that it had to be a horrible debilitating physical problem that couldn’t be fixed with anything short of replacing components. Between Friday and yesterday, it went form locking up every time I used Firefox to locking up three to five minutes after booting to locking up on the login screen, and while I did quite a lot of fiddling and disabling services and registry cleaning and uninstalling programs and such on Friday, I didn’t do anything between then and now except try to get in occasionally, long enough to get my important files uploaded to my webspace.

What kind of operating system goes from kind of messed up to completely messed up when you don’t even do anything to it? Something had to be busted, right?

But something bugged me. If I booted in Safe Mode, it worked fine (except, you know, Safe Mode). I couldn’t figure out how that would work if the computer was actually broken. So I took a chance and downloaded the Ubuntu installer. And it works fine. I mean, it’s just a partition right now, but I don’t think Ubuntu looks at the computer’s hardware and goes, “Okay, I’m just going to put together a partition from the parts that aren’t broken.”, right?

The only absolutely essential things in the Vista partition are in my email. Later on when I’m in a mood to mess with it I’m going to open it up and see if there’s some kind of mass export thing in Windows Mail. The slightly less essential thing is my MUD project, which I backed up several times over the course of working on but all of them in the same place. The only other thing I’d want off it is my music folder, most of which exists on other devices. Once I have those things, I’m going to see about installing some flavor of Linux over the whole thing. Kind of like paving a parking lot and putting up paradise.

I’m not sure how many people this will reach in the relevant fandom who don’t know about it already, but I have to do my part to spread the word…

I think I mentioned the other day that Ms. S.J. Tucker had been hospitalized with abdominal snowmen problems… I’m not going to try to sum up the whole chain of events here, though, because that should probably all be coming from one source. I’ll let Mr. Kevin Wiley, s00j’s common-law assistant, explain it in his own words here, or here for those who aren’t down with Facebook.

Of course, this isn’t just an opportunity to help an independent musician who’s hit a bit of misfortune. To help raise money, they are offering albums at a discounted price and at this livejournal community, various fans are offering incentives to those who are willing to donate. I may yet have more to contribute myself, apart from publicity.

I’d originally (when first making holiday plans, back before Everything Happened) counted on taking today off from writing since historically I know fewer people would be on the internet looking for new content anyway, and my sleep schedule would be pretty much not after a night spent at the family homestead and the possibility of staying up all night chatting with my siblings like used to do.

That was exactly what happened, and so I ended up sleeping in today, and now I’m finding that in addition to my laptop problems, my desktop is slow as molasses and riddled with viruses/spyware. So, I’m going to be making use of the free AV program you folks pointed me to and giving both my computers an overhaul/tune-up in terms of things like unnecessary running programs and malicious adware and such. I may yet have to reinstall the OS on my lappy before it’s in working order.

So, today’s a technical day. I’m going to get a good night’s sleep the next few nights and be up bright and early Monday to start the week off right. Expect Tales of MU to go up between 10:00 and 11:00 a.m. Monday morning, with more stuff to follow. I’m also going to be making some site changes in the next week, but only after the writing for the day has been done. Expect a little more remodeling along the lines of the new style/theme on my blog page, and info on new pay structures and incentives.

There will be a bonus/side story between now and Monday, and an announcement during the week about a new schedule/arrangement for them, as well.

I hope everybody enjoyed their holidays as much as I enjoyed mine.

Okay, the lappy’s booting up this morning, but I’m seeing the same problems (a slow down leading to a lock up) every time I open Firefox, even when it’s a new session and there are no pages to display. Fun. Guess I’ll reinstall. I’ll do that later, though. I’ve already pissed away most of an hour isolating this.

Familiarity with the popular music of the 1980s required for appreciation of the punchline, but is not required for appreciation of the artistry…

Straight No Chaser - 12 Days of Christmas

I need to start doing a search for $ and € before posting anything I’ve typed up on this laptop. Laptop-sized keyboards already tend to be a little cramped, so I don’t know why the designers felt the need to put one-touch currency symbols right around the arrow keys. It’s like they thought that nobody but international financiers would possibly buy a laptop from Wal-Mart.

Reader and sculptor Holly Bowers has made herself a refrigerator magnet of the MU crest:

Is that not cool? It put a smile on my face.

…I will have free “WW2D?” bracelets. I only ordered 50, but I doubt that will be a problem… this is sort of a test run for something I might use as a giveaway at cons and other appearances, so I didn’t place a huge order.

The bracelets are the standard mass produced rubbery silicone things with the message stamped (”debossed”) in the side. They say “WW2D?” on one side and have the Tales of MU URL on the other.

I’ve never once failed to regret “going political” in a blog post, but making the same mistakes over and over again is a great way to get in character before I start writing for the day.

CNN’s Julian Zelizer writes:

There’s a great irony in the fact that President Bush’s administration, which has worked harder than almost any other in recent memory to expand presidential power, ends with Americans thinking so poorly about the institution.

That’s ironic in the same way it’s ironic that day follows night and that it rains after clouds roll in. What Mr. Zelizer is describing is more like cause and effect than it is like irony. History should not look kindly on our “unitary executive“, our man who would have been king, the man who introduced tyranny to the great republic at the dawn of the 21st century.

Please note that in labeling the president a tyrant, I’m not making hysterical allegations of baby killing or comparing him to any particular historical despot. A tyrant in the classical sense is somebody who seizes power unlawfully. A tyrant in the modern sense is somebody who rules absolutely. Bush ran his administration under the assumption that the president was empowered to determine whether portions of a newly passed law were constitutional and that he could amend the law with a signing statement to “fix” such problems. These powers are supposed to rest with the judiciary and the legislature.

He reserved ultimate power for himself, and he did so in flagrant defiance of the highest law of the land. Thus, tyranny. That he wields so little power at the end of his presidency reflects on what a poor tyrant he was, and how ill-considered his power grabbing ways were.

Even if this were not reason enough for the despite that so many of us feel, the results of such tyrannical action will almost never be conducive to the governing one holding the favor of the governed over the long term. Checks and balances exist for a reason. The ship of state is too large, too complicated, and carries far too precious a cargo to be trusted to the care of one person alone… especially when the one very important job we appointed that person to do—mind the tiller—is the one thing he refuses to do.

“Stay the course! If we change directions now, we’ll look weak!”

If you want a picture of the future, Mr. President, imagine a shoe flung at your face, forever. That is your legacy. That’s the image the American people are going to take away from your presidency.

Sic semper tyrannis.

So, I decided not to plug that comic I mentioned the other day, after all.