Michael Bevilacqua (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} time3) wrote,@ 2008-01-08 22:34:00 |
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| Entry tags: | geek, movies |
Recovery, Blade Runner, Linux on my Laptop, and Last.fm for Linux
Originally published at Bevilacqua.us. You can comment here or there.
I’m healing well. I felt strong enough to head to Physical Therapy at the YMCA the other day without my cane. I also arrived an hour too early and had to kill some time. I was planning on picking up my blood thinner medication refill on the way back from the “Y” so I just went over to Target and picked up it and a Starbucks Cafe Mocha and played with my iPhone for a half hour.
Today however, I am extremely weak and sore. My body is not happy with me for some reason. This, combined with other mental and emotional problems happening in the house are starting to wear on me a bit. This has been, and well… is one of the most challenging situations I’ve put myself through in a long time. Recovery is going well though. And I can’t ask for much more than that. A little at a time. I have to stay focused on that.
In my spare time while not doing work related duties from home I’ve been watching more of the Blade Runner Ultimate DVD collection. So far, my favorite portion is DVD 5, which contains an ultra rare version of the Blade Runner Work Print version of the film. But, what makes it are the extras. And wow. The Work Print has a commentary over the entire version by Paul M. Sammon, author of Future Noir: The making of Blade Runner. He reviews the Work Print much like professionals review Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, and rightfully so as this movie is the Citizen Kane of SciFi as far as I’m concerned. He covers this version in such great detail it is this reason alone why you should consider purchasing the set.
The other feature on this 5th disc is the Making of the Final Cut, which points out the tremendous amount of work performed to correct the many filming and continuity problems with the different releases. It’s very impressive how they used CG to enhance and get the scenes working better. And don’t worry, none of that George Lucas Jabba the Hut extra CG crap… the only reason I still own a VCR, so when I do want to watch Star Wars I have to break out my original Trilogy VHS set so I don’t get upset that he had to go and ruin a favorite few movies and end up turning it off…
Hate:(
Love:)
I’ve also been working on finding a way to get Linux back onto my laptop without having it interfere with my WinXP install. Obviously using a dual boot setup would work fine only, with the OEM install, installing into a single partition was not an option. The installer would repartition the entire disk no matter what I would do. Fortunately, Elizabeth turned me on to Ubuntu’s NTFS resize function. Granted, no matter what I do, no Debian nor Ubuntu release will ever run on this machine without a lot of work around on my part. So I simply downloaded the text based installer of Ubuntu, burnt it to disk, backed up my WinXP install, defragged (a few or more times), and resized my NTFS partition. I can happily say that Ubuntu’s gparted implementation successfully resized the 100G partition to 50/50. I was then able to install Gentoo 64-bit, or try to. I tried a few times to get AMD64 working, but ran into many strange build errors. I ended up sticking with 32-bit x86 optimized to the K8 processor spec. I’m happy to say I have a working Linux Laptop again.
Elizabeth also introduced me to Last.fm’s Linux based player, which is available in Portage and for Debian based distributions using apt:
* media-sound/lastfmplayer
Latest version available: 1.4.1.57486
Latest version installed: 1.4.1.57486
Size of files: 7,129 kB
Homepage: http://www.last.fm/help/player
Description: The player allows you to listen to last.fm radio streams
License: GPL-2
Very fun stuff. I know I’ll be spending some time in Last.fm’s player in the next few weeks.
