Columbia Mystegenics (OVA)

The Maintenance crew is supposed to come by today to put a seal over the whole shower area which probably means it will be a fiberglass encasement of some kind but I won't know until I see it. The first Wednesday of every month we have inspections, and if it weren't for this, I'd be in my unit cleaning right now. They'd better give me some grace on the stuff I couldn't get to in time. They did let me into this unit and gave me a key so at least I won't be out in the cold and wandering around. At least from here I can keep an eye on what's going on. They have a tendency to move things around, cause things to come up missing (a mistake, not necessarily theft), and they move major appliances around and have no problem keeping the fridge unplugged for extended periods even if food is in it, so with my being here I can bug them. The unit I'm in doesn't have a fridge which is a major bummer, because getting my cold food out of there was one of the things I wanted to do. I have to keep my eye out for them so I'll add more here later time and whatever else permitting.

EDIT: I found out that the repair is a piece of ply-board affixed to the cement wall by screws and then the same shower paneling as the other two sides glued over that. The silicon smell is intoxicating, and not in a good way. The bathtub had alot of fallout from the repair efforts so the last thing they did was fill it up with this industrial grade orange cleaner and stuffed a rag in the drain and I'm instructed to keep it in there overnight. I did get my stuff back in here so other than the shower being off limits, things are back to half-ass abbey-normal. They discovered the plunger in the sink faucet is broken- that thing that you pull from the top that moves the metal thing in the drain so you can control whether it drains or not, I use clogs for that anyway. They said they wanted to come back tomorrow, but that's inspection day and I really need to clean up the mess they made as well as my own so I can pass the inspection. I'm hoping they'll just forget about it for a while. I might as well take one more shower in the other unit if the landlord doesn't ask for it back, but if he does, I'll just be of the species smellus filthius for a while.

Another thing is when I was moving my stuff back, one of my neighbors was watching me like a hawk which kind of unnerved me and when I was bringing my monitor back in, it knocked against the door frame, but so far it's still working. I got plenty of exercise moving stuff back and forth in a hurried manner so I didn't go on my walk today. I might not tomorrow as the exercise I get will be cleaning as much as I can for inspections. Not as thorough as in previous months but I complained enough about it so they should understand.

My case worker told me about an apartment that might be open but again it is through some mental health program and there is no way in hell I'm going to talk to Dr. Mindbender once a week or take a bunch of man-made chemicals that were never meant to be in the human body just for the sake of holing up somewhere. I'd be as well off selling my ass on the street and getting AIDS as doing that, and no, I don't do that either.

Well, not surprisingly LILO developed a quirk where it would hang more and more when I tried to boot into Vista, so it bacame time to get rid of it and try my theory with Linux Mint 7. Gloria still uses the old version of GRUB so it acknowledges when a new kernel is installed so I installed that and Linux image 2.6.32.8 which was modularized into 3 .deb packages. I can't remember for the life of me where I got them so I couldn't remember what order to install them, but Murphy of Murphy's Law was out on a smoke break so I actually got it right. I booted into the new kernel and all was well with Mint.

All was not well with Vista however as it decided it wasn't going to let GRUB be the boss of it and it spontaneously rebooted the system whenever I tried to boot into it, so now I have a perfectly good Vista system in eternal suspension after I optimized it to near perfection. It's sort of like a person growing up in an unstable country where moving, having attempts on their lives, revolutions, and famines are the norm so they base their mood on that abnormal normalcy. Who the Hell is normal anymore anyway? The point is, that's the way I am with computers. I know just enough to be real dangerous and to screw things up to a fairly complete degree, so I try another experiment while having nothing much to lose unless I brick my PC altogether.

Having installed Mint and updated and installing the new kernel, there is still some ground to cover. That ground is upgrading to Mint 8 Helena using Apt and Synaptic. The method that is not the best of ideas if it's done on a mission critical system, but for me it is nothing more than a time waster in the name of a learning experience.

I am taking this screenshot now as I might not be able to do it later. As you can see, it is quite an involved and time-consuming process where so far I have downloaded 900 KiB of 1.1 MiB of packages and there is one failure so far. How it will deal with that remains to be seen. More later time and situations permitting.

This particular one started yesterday or thereabouts. Whenever I would go to my.opera.com and use the key to log in, no acknowledgement would occur and upon subsequent attempts I'd get an 'Address not Found' error. At first I could get in by switching to Firefox in Linux or Internet Explorer in Windows but then I was denied access using those too. After this error, I'd go to another part of the community like the Desktop Development team or a friends' blog and it was shown that I was logged in, but I cannot access my site directly. I wiped my triple threat system (Mint, XP, and 7) and installed Vista and installed Comodo internet security which has the option of using their DNS so I could rule out DNS poisoning and viruses, etc.

The problem continues however. I write posts about these things to alert others as to what is going on even if it is affecting only me because it might affect them later or somebody might tell me if the problem already affected them. Plus it is a possible security issue or it might just be a server bug.If no one reported bugs, this community would never have gotten off the ground.

Anyway, the problem continues. I did file two reports, once as a browser bug, and once when I discovered it wasn't. I'm sure they're happy with that. Oh well, honest mistake.

EDIT: This problem was resolved fairly quickly. I have nothing to say other than thank you to those who solved it in a timely manner.

Linux Mint is fast becoming my favorite operating system. The developers have focused on functionality, convenience, and having Mint stay out of the way when it's not needed. I still like Windows because I'm familiar with it, but the fact it's proprietary puts complications in it that protects their interests but at the sacrifice of convenience and functionality. I have much more stable and fast wireless with it too so that's a major selling point.


Linux is not bug free and I've taken my leave of it several times when it failed to do what I required of it. That happened with the very install I'm blogging from right now. I installed Mint 8 Helena in normal mode and when I'd try to use it, it would freeze up solid except for the mouse pointer. That at least let me know it wasn't a hardware problem, it was a hardware driver problem. I re-installed in compatibility mode, which means that a generic one-size-fits-all video driver is used that sacrifices fine grain functionality so that problem hardware can at least run Mint or Ubuntu or what have you.

I did not have to install in compatibility mode to solve the problem but it was easier to do it that way since random freezes wouldn't be a problem. I tried quite a few things like hand editing the xorg.conf file and various other things I found in the Mint Forum but most of that only made it worse. I couldn't even boot into the desktop for a while. Then I ran the new elive unstable cd and it generated a good xorg.conf file but I couldn't get it to copy to the appropriate place in Mint, so I had to store it on my thumb drive and then boot the Mint 8 cd which then let me copy it into /etc/X11. I rebooted and it froze after a few hours, but I rebooted and now it's been almost 48 hours without a freeze. I also installed the latest kernel that's available from the repositories but I can't get GRUB 2 to point to it, but as long as the system works, that's all I need.


EDIT: Just as I was about to post this, my internet was starting to drop out, so I launched my Gens emulator to wait it out and the desktop froze. I don't attribute this freeze as related to the ones previously mentioned here though.

EDIT 2: IT always happens this way. I proclaim something then when it's too late to reverse it before others notice it, I'm made a liar. Right after I posted that the problem was solved, the freezes came right back with a vengeance. I booted into the recovery mode desktop so all my settings are in limbo, so while I like Mint and will continue to work on it, I have some uploading to do, so I'm glad I have XP on another partition. I have 7 on a third partition but when it's dual booted, it never gets online for some messed up reason.

We are held accountable for the things of truth we are convinced of.

God is truth. His word is truth. No shadow of turning.

All things that are not of truth or light are of lies and darkness (confusion).

There is nothing in scriptures that state that the people of God are to commemorate the birth of Jesus with a holy day. His resurrection is to be commemorated on the Holy day of Passover.

Christmas is pagan in origin commemorating the first day that the days in this hemisphere get measurably longer. It is a high sabbath for witches, satanists, etc. Light has no fellowship with darkness.

The term Holy Day was replaced with holiday to accommodate the pagans and to give their feast days credibility in the eyes of many.

Every Christian Denomination (division) has its roots in the Roman Catholic church and the pagan traditions absorbed into Catholicism was inherited by the Protestants (who each protested about a few things about Catholicism but by and large kept everything else).

Moves of God did happen in churches that observed Christmas, Easter, etc in the past. God winked at our ignorance but them after revealing and restoring the truth in its totality, there is no more room for his winking at our ignorance about anything. Jump high or stay home- is a saying used in a card game that fits here.

The feast days of the Bible have been replaced by the Roman Catholic church with pagan celebrations that mark times that Christians were not told to observe. The feast days are not Jewish holidays although they in some manner observe them. They are for the people of God who happened to be the Jews when they were implemented.

Satan thinks to change the times and the seasons so people will be in darkness of when, where and how God is doing things so they perish not knowing the truth.

Whatever is popular with the majority of people (the many) are not respected by God who always deals with just a few.

I prefer not to write about religious matters and matters of faith because of the firestorms it can cause, but people insist on shoving their beliefs up my ass sideways, so I figure I get a say too. I'm not trying to change anyone's minds about what they should believe. What everyone believes is in itself predetermined and in this late day and age, people pretty much believe now what their beliefs will be at the end of this world system- only more so.

EDIT: My case worker read this and asked me if I was Jewish. No I'm not. I'm about as far away from Jewish as can be.