Categories
ranting

esl

G████ [codejunkie.org] and I went out last night to the Eighteenth Street Lounge for a few drinks. He had never been there and when I stopped out front to open the door he asked ‘is this it?’ and ‘dude, where’s the sign.’ I think that the following, which comes from the Washington Post [www.washingtonpost.com] should explain it to anyone else who has never been:

“On the wall outside the front door is the smallest of bronze plaques indicating that, yes, this is the Eighteenth Street Lounge. If you don’t know the club is there, maybe you don’t need to know. And if you do, you’re probably familiar with the world of modern dance music and techno, where the names Thievery Corporation and ESL Music carry lots of weight. If you don’t recognize those names, you might find it hard to understand this: Since the Eighteenth Street Lounge opened in April 1995, people have traveled from around the globe—Iceland, Malaysia, India, Zimbabwe—to cross its threshold, musical tourists who couldn’t care less about the monuments and the Smithsonian.”

Sound like over kill? It’s not. The Lounge is filled on the weekends with people from everywhere. It really is part of another world. Sometimes getting into that world is not so easy:

“On any given night there’s a crush of people on the sidewalk waiting to get in, hoping to withstand the scrutiny at the door (no khakis, no ball caps, no attitude), pay the cover ($10, $15, $20 or free, depending on many things, including the time of night, the number of people in your party and the doorman’s mood) and be let into the club.”

Which is actually not really true. Very rarely are there more than a few people talking in small groups on Tuesdays or Thursdays. The best time is early on Tuesday or Thursday evening, around 6, in the summer when the windows are open. Take a group of friends and just relax. And If your like jazz, brazilian jazz, downtempo or lounge music check out The Lounge and ESL Music’s website [www.eslmusic.com].

Categories
ranting

stairs to nirvana

When my computer boots I am presented with two options: Nirvana or The Ninth Circle. In the warped mind of the geek inside me Nirvana is Linux—where I am in control of my experience… The Ninth Circle is Windows, it’s not there because I enjoy it but a little sin is necessary. The reality is that installing Linux and setting it up the way I want it has become a tour of Hell, with out Vigil to guide me. But, least we forget Siddhartha nearly died on his journey to enlightenment. And really the path is the goal.

Categories
ranting

back in business

After much toil and stuggle (and more than a few choice Dutch [www.m-w.com] and Saxon [www.m-w.com] words.) I have a working computer! It’ll take me months to get all the programs and settings back to the way I want it, and of course I will never get all the stuff I lost back, but I guess if “a little revolution now and then is a good thing,” then wiping the slate clean and starting over can’t be too bad.

I still have a few problems with the system. Mainly the inability to set up my network connection automatically at startup. The real issue is that in order to start the network connection I have to run adsl-setup everytime I start the computer before I run adsl-setup. I’ll have to do some research into why that is, but for a while at least I can deal with doing that each boot.

As for Gentoo, I am fairly happy. My system setup has little bloat—in fact it has so little bloat that I will send the next few months downloading and installing (via gentoo’s emerge system) programs I am used to having by default. My Xwindows system is very nice. Took a little while to get the XF86config file setup correctly, but it looks very, very nice now.

One little thing that I can be happy about is I sent my emacs and mozilla settings to work when I set up my devel box there. So tomorrow I will email them to myself and install them. I will make life so much easier not having to set up all the anoying little options for emacs and remembering the urls for all the websites I visit on a regular basis.

Anyway, back to playing with all this stuff.

Categories
ranting

dude! thats wrong!

This [reuters.com] is so all kinds of bad, and just plain wrong. Reguardless of being vegitarian or not, feeding live chickens into wood chippers is wrong.

Categories
ranting

baby steps

After much toil and “a little help from my friends” (thanks S██████) I can once again boot my computer. In fact I can, load my network driver (still haven’t figured out how I did it much less make it do it automatically,) I have also configured and loaded X so I can see pictures! And while I am typing this in a text only web-browser I will soon have mozilla downloaded and installed! Now a lot more baby steps and I will be able to actually use my computer…