Nth time's a charm

I FINALLY got a Linux distribution to run stably on my computer. I've had an on-again-off-again relationship with the OS dating back to high school when my friend Adam and I first played with, like, RedHat 3.0 or something. But every previous attempt has resulted in something fundamental being broken like internet connection, display drivers, botched installations, etc. So I guess Canonical has finally got it (mostly) right with the latest release of Kubuntu. Nothing critical has failed that it hasn't recovered rather well from. The remaining issues are minor nits, like the fact that the audio system is MUCH louder than windows (must be a driver thing), and the compositing window manager that I'm using disagrees with some aspects of KDE's behavior, but I don't think that's Canonical's problem, per se. All in all, I've been pretty pleased. The only remaining deficiencies are that it won't run Half-Life 2, and it won't run Live and Reason. It DOES run SNES and N64 emulators quite well, though, so at least I have those to entertain me. Infact, the N64 emulator seems to work BETTER than the windows version. If the WINE team ever figures out how to fully implement the windows API and DirectX 9, I'll probably be set, although I haven't tried MIDI yet.

On to more externally interesting things. I seem to have survived my finals, which were over Thursday morning. I now have 5 glorious weeks of intellectual freedom until I hunker down again for winter and spring quarters. 5 weeks to get my personality back. 5 weeks to start making music again. I'm hoping to make good use of the time (that isn't taken up by other activities). Hopefully my grades will be sufficient to buy this quarter's toy: and upgrade to the Live 7 Suite. It's only a third of what I have available, but the rest is going towards a nice set of studio reference monitors that calibrate themselves. *tingle*

My family is coming down here for Christmas. I'm excited about that. My brother's never seen my place, and it's been a few years since my family have seen him too. Should be a good time. I appreciate my family a lot more now that I'm not near them geographically. I've really come to realize just how important they are to me. Ironically, my parents are thinking about moving back to CA so they can be closer to family. It'll be a tough transition, though, because it's so fscking expensive to live here. The descision can't come without significant prayer, I imagine.

If anyone's still reading this, please leave a comment. I'll probably keep posting whether or not anyone does, but all the same, it's nice to know somebody notices.