Random Thoughts

I know, all of you, my precious readers, must be thinking, “Whoa, Rick, slow down with the posting; my RSS aggregator can’t take all the new stuff!”

… Okay, so I haven’t been too gabby on here lately. Very sorry. And really, it isn’t ’cause I’m trying to distance myself from you; I’ve simply not had much to say!

So, what have I been up to lately? Here’s some random things, in no particular order, that you may continue reading at your own risk of boredom.

• Last week, I saw Transformers at IMAX. Today, Alicia brings home as a surprise the Transformers 2-disk set from Target — the set with the transforming case & prequel comic.

  I’m a Transformers fan. Don’t kid yourself; you know you are too.

• We’re three days away from our third Tuesday night Bible study in our home. We’ve been studying the Gospel According to Mark, and this coming Tuesday we’ll be picking up at Mark 1:21. I’m not at all a huge fan of speaking in front of people, nor have I ever considered myself much of a leader; but I’m loving leading this study. I’m incredibly thankful for the privilege. Oh, and we’re moving on to our next outline, so if you want, be sure to check out our first outline, on Mark 1:1-20.
• For anonymous reasons, please be in prayer for an anonymous couple and their anonymous yet adorable son.
• For just about as long as I’ve had my computer — less than a year, to be honest — it’s had one incredibly annoying problem: at seemingly random points, HTTP craps out. I could be sailing right along in Firefox, browsing at will, switch over to another program, switch back, and suddenly every page load results in a “Server Not Found” error. Opening Internet Explorer or Safari yields the same result. HTTPS still works; I can only assume something on port 80 is getting screwed up, but I’ve no idea how to diagnose the problem. Attempting to download Microsoft’s networking diagnostic tool requires verifying my Windows installation; verifying my installation results in HTTP crapping out. Go figure.

  I’ve decided to simply reformat my hard drive & start from scratch. This time, I’ve decided to take the plunge & install Ubuntu. I’ve hit a road block here already.

  See, my computer has an Intel Core 2 Duo processor which supposedly supports 64-bit processing. Having only Windows XP Pro, I’ve never taken advantage of that — I probably don’t need to, actually. But anyway, I downloaded the 64-bit version of Ubuntu, burned it to disk, and rebooted the comp. When the Ubuntu menu comes up which asks whether I want to run/install Ubuntu, verify the disk, and various other things, I can’t change anything — the keyboard is required to change the selection, but apparently mine isn’t recognized. Joy. After 20 or so seconds, though, the first option — the one I wanted anyway — is auto-selected, and Ubuntu starts opening from the disk. After a few moments, a few status messages are flashed, the last being something to the effect of “loading boot scripts” which it states as being “[ OK ].”

  Then, nothing. After quite a while, still nothing happened. ARG. Okay, so, that sucks, but maybe I misunderstand the whole 64-bit thing and I really just need the x86 version of Ubuntu. Well, it just finished burning to disk moments ago.

• After updating this blog and two others to the latest nightly version of K2, I’m going to be attempting a Ubuntu install. If all goes as planned, awesome. Though, I’ll likely be back tomorrow, browsing on Windows XP Pro as usual. Dang.