It’s been a while since I last had something to say. I hate to neglect my blog, but I can just be so lazy.
I moved to Southeast Atlanta well over a month ago and got a job with Zingo as a designated driver. I drive a little motorscooter around all nigh, go to a drunk person’s car, fold the scooter up, put it in their trunk, drive them home in their car, get my scooter out and come back to Buckhead. It’s a pretty cool job and the pay isn’t bad.
I’m still making my residence in the living room and sleeping on the couch, which sucks. I need to get a mattress and move down to the basement. I want to start doing some freelance work, but I can’t stand to work without an organized space for it.
That’s it for now. I’ll try to keep writing if anything worth noting comes up.
I know it’s a little silly to write this tutorial now that the next release of Ubuntu is just days away, but I’ll write a tutorial for it as well. It makes a little sense, because this is my last chance to make a tutorial for Feisty Fawn, really, and I imagine some behind-the-times user may find use of it. This tutorial may work (in part) for laptops with similar hardware. Anyway, without further ado, this guide will…
fix your screen resolution
enable wireless networking
fix your sound and microphone (including making the speakers cut off when you plug headphones in!)
First thing you’ll notice when you boot up the live CD is that your screen’s resolution is messed up. Everything appears stretched horizontally. Don’t worry about that; we’ll fix it first thing after the installation. Same goes for your wireless which isn’t working. Having access to a wired connection will make things go much smoother until you can get your wireless card working, but if you don’t, it’s possible to use a thumb drive and another computer to get the files you need. So, go ahead and complete the installation and then we can begin. If you’ve already been working on your laptop (like I suspect you have), please note that you should probably try to revert any changes you’ve made as this guide will work best on a fresh install. I’ll try to keep in mind that you may have already messed with certain things and include directions to purge them first. Continue reading ‘Getting Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn to work on your Compaq Presario C500 laptop’
I wanted to let anyone interested know, in concourse E, and likely other areas, of Miami International Airport there is a WEP-secured wi-fi hotspot accessible from the lounge area just outside Dunkin’ Donuts. The name is “SBA” and the BSSID (hardware address) is 00:13:10:EA:48:8A. I happen to know that the key needed to access the network is 24:CD:28:84:DB.
It beats paying $10 for Boingo while you wait on your flight!
So my trip has come to an end and it’s time to find something else to do. I had a great time, although I don’t have the energy to retell the entire thing at present; I’ll get around to it soon. Special thanks to Katja and Augustas for hosting us in Cuenca and Juan Pablo and Agnese for hosting us in Guayaquil.
Now I have to come up with a plan for the present and near future. I’m in a little debt and have no income, so finding a way to pay off some bills is my present occupation, but other than that, I’m considering some travel within the States. If anyone has an interesting place to invite me to, I may just make the trip.
Also, six more days to wait for Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon! With the miserable failure of Vista becoming more apparent with every passing day, I suggest you take a moment to improve your computing experience with Linux. Gutsy has some really great configuration features making it a great opportunity to get past your GNUphobia.
I haven’t updated this blog nearly as much as I planned to. I’ve just been having so much fun that sitting down for a few hours a day to write is hard, even for my personal journals. However, I’m going to try to recap everything in some amount of detail on this sleepy afternoon that have nothing planned for.
We flew into Quito on the tenth, and the first thing that caught me was how colorful the place is. Everywhere you look, buildings are bright yellow or blue, there’s plenty of green space and murals aren’t hard to find either. On top of that, there’s plenty of graffiti stencil work. The people of Quito all add to the fresco–from the Inca women wearing bright traditional alpaca sweaters to the youth wearing more urban gear, everyone seem to prefer colorful clothing. Aside from clothing, the people themselves are vibrantly colorful. I was saying to Chastity one day that it’s neat how at home, all white people are white, black people are black, so on and so forth, but the people of this region have the entire spectrum and almost everyone is a different color. There are some people who appear completely white, people who look purely indigenous, the descendants of Africans who were brought here so many years ago and every combination in between, all mixed into one beautifully colorful people.
I’ve been here since monday, and it is absolutely one of my favorite places. The people are nice, the food is good, the views are great and everything is cheap. I’ll write more about this later, but I just wanted to make sure everyone checks out my pictures.
Tomorrow will be exactly one year since I departed for London with Derek. This entire year has felt so short for me. Ever since being deported and arriving home, I’ve just been planning to get back out. My entire year of work and everything else is about to culminate in a one month trip to Ecuador, starting on the 10th.
I’m completely excited about leaving. I was worried about not having enough money, but Guaka has assured me that a budget of $20 per day will be quite enough. As happy as I am to finally be getting out again, it makes me think about what I’m doing with my life in general. I keep thinking that what “I do” will eventually figure itself out and I’ll find my niche, but I don’t feel like that’s happening. Rather, I’m falling into a routine of escaping, feeling that it’s what I’m meant to be doing and that it will go on forever, but then hitting a dead end and being forced back into a factory or workshop or wherever I can scrounge for a job.
This time I’ve decided that I never want to go back to manual labor. I abhor working 8-10 hour shifts doing some repetitive task that is completely irrelevant to me. I will be coming back to sizable chunk of credit card debt that I’ll have to take care of. I don’t have a job planned out, but I’ll likely work for a few weeks in a local South American restaurant that I’ve been putting in a few extra hours at on top of my night shift job, but after I get my debt taken care of, I don’t know what I’ll do.
I feel like I need to do something to force myself into finding a way to make a living. I’m going to try not to plan another trip right away so that I don’t have to subject myself to more wage slavery, and instead give myself some time to just be creative and see where it takes me. I think that if I stay out of work long enough, I’ll eventually have to come across some way to live. As long as I don’t have any big plans in the near future, I can live on almost nothing.
I’m hoping that all my years of Internet obsession will be some help. I have a laptop for the first time in my life so I can at least continue working despite my living conditions. The question I am try’ing to find an answer for is “what should I be working on?” I want to find a way to make a living through the internet, because that’s about all I’ve ever been good at, but I haven’t found my opportunity yet. Maybe some freelance work will eventually get me paid instead of making me lose money by paying for the domain and continuing to host it. Any tips appreciated.
I’ve wanted to get a laptop for quite a while. I’m usually a fan of the desktop because of it’s modability and everything, but I’ve become more and more transient over the years and I really need to be able to work while on the go if I’m ever going to find a way to make my travels financially self-sustaining.
Anyhow, my friend Phil is desperate for an iPhone and he presented a deal I couldn’t pass up. A Compaq Presario c500 with 2GB of RAM (as opposed to the stock 512MB) for $375. I happen to have a few hundred dollars to play with, so I decided to go ahead and get it.
Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn has gone on it without a hitch so far. This blog points out everything that needs to be done to get it working. Pretty much, all there is to it is getting the WLAN working using ndiswrapper (this how to is for a Dell, but works because it’s the same WLAN chipset) and getting the widescreen resolution fixed. You’ll notice when you first boot up, that everything seems stretched. All it takes to fix it is…
The ugly politics behind the Olympics often go unnoticed by the average viewer. When we sit down in front of the TV, we never see the housing projects being demolished, the homeless being run out of town or the children working 15 hours a day in sweatshop factories to produce merchandise for the events.
With the 2008 games in Beijing, China just around the corner, I think it’s important to take a look at some of the real spirit of the Olympics–the exploitation, human rights violations and limitations of freedom for the poor. Continue reading ‘The ugly spirit of the Olympics’
A lot of the elite out there would like you to think think that in order to create impressive, modern graphics, you must use some professional, proprietary graphics suite like Illustrator or Photoshop. This is simply not true.
In the Linux environment, GIMP and Inkscape are very popular graphic manipulators, and there are Windows ports for both of them. Inkscape is an open source 2D vector graphics editor that uses the SVG format. When used correctly, you can create graphics every bit as appealing as those made with Illustrator.
This is a how-to for creating a very basic web 2.0-style reflective logo using Inkscape. It doesn’t have any of the other snazz that you see in a lot similar graphics, but I’ll create a more advanced tutorial on that later. It’s important to get to know how to do the basics first. Continue reading ‘Creating reflective web 2.0 logos with Inkscape’
