Romii

I’ve discovered that I’m more productive while sick and bedridden than when I’m completely healthy and bouncing around. At least, outside of work. Funny how that works. I suppose the incentive is to keep myself busy enough not to think about how sick I am, and therefore increased productivity during times of sickness.

That being said, I’ve spent most of yesterday and this morning reinstalling Windows XP and Ubuntu 10.04 on my desktop computer. Why, you may ask? Because for some reason, my DVD player was unplugged.

This was discovered Monday night when a friend was over with Brendan and I, and the general consensus was to watch Spinal Tap (still haven’t watched it, mind you). When Spinal Tap wouldn’t play in the Playstation 2, I decided to test it out on my desktop. DVD player wasn’t ejecting. Brendan took a look inside the computer and saw that the DVD player was not plugged in, therefore no power. Probably was unplugged when Brendan unplugged a lot of things to put in my new graphics card a couple months back. In any case, after we plugged that in, a new problem presented itself: none of the OS’s were loading! Problems ensued – it would either not load to the grub list, or not get past the first startup screen listing the components within the computer, or the BIOS wouldn’t start up.

Eventually we found an Ubuntu 9.04 live CD and used that to boot into the computer and manually (as in using the terminal) moving files from my XP/Ubuntu partitions. Then we reinstalled Ubuntu 9.04 over that partition, and all was well. Except Windows XP was not working still.

Tuesday…I didn’t even bother touching my computer. My head hurt too much, my throat was making me want to claw out organs, and I was in general feeling very restless by the end of the night. Wednesday comes around, and I’m stuck at home, still reeling from pain. Being sick is not pleasant, even if I do get a day off from work.

So using my time wisely after I slept away half the day, I decided to reinstall Windows XP Professional (with Service Pack 2) on the XP partition. Installed. No network. What? No network? Why is it not reading the internet? Frustrations ensued. Tried to reinstall again, XP wouldn’t load properly. And again, finally worked but again with the no network. Eventually my brother responded to my frantic pleas on AIM and helped me through it (forgot about manually installing drivers). Had to find the drivers that I saved from my last dumb-what-happened-install of XP that my brothers sent me. After all of that was said and done, I reinstalled some of my more-commonly-used programs (VLC Player, Adobe Photoshop CS4, MediaMonkey, Firefox, Google Chrome, etc).

Then I decided to take a look at my Ubuntu side. Now 9.04 is a nice install, but I wanted to try out 10.04 and see if it fared any better on my desktop than it did on my laptop (had to downgrade with a fresh install of 9.10 because of some weird graphical errors). So I did that, and it was great. Now I updated, installed restricted graphics drivers, and everything is nice and dandy…right? You would think that, until I tried to install the Ubuntu Studio packages through the repository. While everything seemingly works, the boot/usplash screens are all weird and messed up. Tried to fix the usplash problems, but ended up creating more problems with my graphics card. Eventually I accidentally (I think?) deleted usplash and had no startup!

So here I am, reinstalling Ubuntu 10.04 again. I’m going to give Studio a try one more time and see if I can get around that nasty shutdown/usplash screen and get the default back at least.

And yes, I’ve been up for quite a while. Tried sleeping earlier but ended up tossing and turning too much to stay asleep. Yay sickness-induced insomnia!

Oh, did I also mention Brendan was sick over the weekend too? It was pretty bad.