INightmare's ideas

The time to upgrade to newer distribution came and it was Mandriva 2009 Spring that caught my attention. Got a Mandriva One KDE iso and in less than 30 minutes I had a working Linux distribution.

First impression

Maybe the theme wasn't the nicest KDE theme I have seen, but it's possible to live with it and even more possible to live after change it.
Mandriva has modified KDE4 which maintains the classic KDE3 look. Standard menu and desktop layout are there by default, but it's possible to switch to widget mode and enable the new Kickoff menu.
It boots fast! And that is really important for me, I'm like most of you... Not a big fan of waiting.


Hardware support

My Atheros wireless worked out of the box, multimedia keys are there and most of the things you would expect, the only thing I needed to change was model for my soundcard, to make the jack sensing work. Also ALSA is routed to use pulseaudio by default so there seems to be no sound issues.

Opera flash problem

The only disappointment was, that Adobe Flash didn't work on Opera, but that was solved by removing 'nspluginwrapper' it seems Opera tried to use this one first and it somehow didn't want to cooperate.

Conclusion

Mandriva 2009 Spring is really worth considering if you're looking for a nice KDE based distribution (GNOME might be nice too, but I haven't tried that). It's fast to boot and use. Something I will use at least until OpenSuSE 11.2 comes out in November.

OK, I know, if you're an average guy like me you would think "How can shopping be fun?" and I understand you, but this case is an exception and let me tell you why. And for girls... This was shopping heaven, "why?" I will answer this as we go on.

The event
A big local shop here in Lithuania decided to do a wholesale on everything except food and drinks. A 40% discount on everything. TV sets, external hard drives, light-bulbs, jackets, you name it and it has 40% discount provided it's not food or a drink (well energetic drink Dynamite had 50% discount, was a good buy too). And the best part this all too place the night from Saturday to Sunday between 0:00 and 06:00. They called it the "Black night".

Our participation
And now the fun. We came about 10:15 PM and there's already people standing in line to get a shopping cart, this is pictured below.


And the whole shop was stuffed with buyers. The queue for home electronics was huge and getting something valuable at the time was already impossible. People would just get what they need and wait for 00:00 to come. Needless to say, it was hard to move in the shop and good hungry crowd really made the atmosphere hot and here an ice-cream cone proved to be a real helper.

But the food section was unusually free...


So, me and my friends gathered stuff we wanted (this included fighting the crowd and moving at 1 step per minute). And it was the time to pay for the goods, but queues, those were amazingly big and at ~00:05 when we decided to go it would have taken us at least an hour to get past, but then a friend helped out and we popped right into the place and took around 5 minutes of waiting. This involved upsetting some people, who were really jealous of our advancement through the queue.


The road to freedom
The exit, now this was a tricky part since all entrances where blocked by people who wanted to enter the shop, but where held back by guardsmen. But then a light of hope shines when one of guardsmen working inside told us to follow him and showed the way out to the freedom.

Unhappy people
As always, there were bunch of people complaining. Ones that thought it was stupid to do it at night, the others that had to exit on the other side than their cars were. And my point is that the people who complained about exit location, should've bin happy they could exit the shop as the entrance block took quite some time.


Morale
1) Well, I saved quite some money, so you could say that I got my new earphones almost for free as other things where ones I would really need at home. Though, I was dreaming about new earphones for quite some time.
2) It was a really fun event, to see what can people do to save some money. Was really worth it. Next time you have such wholesale in your place, be sure not to miss it. And come 8 hours early, so you can actually get some cool stuff.

So that's the story of Hyper Maxima "Akropolis" wholesale.

Have fun!

Wow, a realiable mail service seems to be down and quite for some time now. Google's blog doesn't have anything about it. Other services such as groups and search seem to be working just fine. Lets hope GMail problem is fixed soon.

And I wonder... Do emails still arrive? And maybe it's posible to get mail using POP. Too bad I haven't set it up.

One of the things that make product successful is good marketing. And Microsoft does it really well.

This is a story that I remembered from my childhood. It happened when I was in a second or maybe third grade.

At the time it was popular to keep pets... Electronic. The trend came from Japan I believe. And since most of my friends had one, so I wanted one too and happily the Christmas morning I found one under the Christmas Tree. It was a dog. Unlike most of my friends killing their pets every few weeks, I was persistent and loyal to my new e-friend. I would take it with me, feed, take for a ride and do everything I had to do, so it stays alive and is happy. I even instructed my mom how to take care of my friend in case I couldn't. I wanted to see what happens when I reach 99 as my logic was saying it is the limit. Well maybe I win the game or something. But there was one thing that always bothered me, instruction said "Do not take the dog for a ride after 20:00.", but it didn't say a word about what happens when you do. Curiosity was torturing me, every day more and more. And so one day, when my dog was of age 86 I did...

The moral of story is: sometimes it's better not to know. I was very said to find out what happens, very... So much effort was destroyed.

The second moral: care only about what helps you on reaching the first and main goal.

I cried...