You Can't Make Mistakes.

Again, for those of you who actually read this, of which there are five, I apologize for my recent month-long hiatus. I have been a bit busy, though not gainfully, necessarily.

Recently my dear friend, John Tobey, and I decided to start a design firm. We will be conducting business primarily on the internet as we will be in wildly disparate locations very soon. Tobey does graphic design and sound engineering and is a prodigy when it comes to both of them. His work is superb. I do graphic design and web design, though I will make no claims as to my own proficiency specifically, I think that I do a decent job of them. You can find our online faces at johnmedia.net. I think that we will at least have a very good time working for ourselves, and possibly even make some money at it.

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My laptop ate itself—mostly my doing—a few weeks ago. I had attempted to do a clean install of the OS and my optical drive failed in the process, successfully murdering my laptop, leaving it with an unformatted disk and only a BIOS. I managed to get a Linux kernel and a bootloader on with a network boot and had little success after that. Then my dad found a new optical drive for me and I was able to reload the Windows install that was on it. After that I partitioned up the disk and placed an Ubuntu Linux install on a second partition, which I am actually using right now.

It is brilliant. It runs better than the windows—it is less resource intensive—and it has effectively allowed me to use Ubuntu—which I have grown to really enjoy using on my desktop—anywhere I want. It is like turning my five-years-old Sony notebook into a totally different machine. I suggest trying it, but it is not without obstacles an pitfalls. Installing Linux—especially in a dual-boot environment—is not the easiest thing in the world. However, after a little reading, I think that anyone would be able to do it.

If you are interested in learning about Ubuntu, I would suggest visiting their website: www.ubuntu.com. There was a recent article about Ubuntu in The Economist Magazine which is worth reading. This article is what got me interested in Ubuntu in the first place. I had been playing around with Fedora Core, but didn’t really like it.

Ubuntu ended up being immensely more usable and intuitive, though not without a need for little tricks and tweaks to get everything up and running. Specifically, Ubuntu still has an issue with wireless networking. I tried several cards with different chipsets before settling on a Linksys 802.11g card with a Broadcom chipset. With the bcm43xx-fwcutter package, it is pretty easy to install Broadcom-based wireless cards by extracting the firmware from freely-available drivers.

If you are interested in having an Ubuntu laptop, I would suggest trying it first from the live CD, and then if you like it, have someone help you install it so that you don’t accidentally delete the Windows install from your notebook. I haven used my Windows since I have had Ubuntu, but it is nice, when in transition, to have the option.

Perhaps John Media will also perform Linux installs on people’s computers for them. I could do that. Though, not from September until next April, as I will be in Egypt. I imagine that having someone ship their laptop to Egypt to install a different OS would be more of a pain-in-the-ass than it is worth.

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That brings me to my next trick. I am getting ready to move to Egypt for nine months. This should be interesting. I will be studying Arabic at Alexandria University while writing my master’s thesis. I will also be doing a bit of design work via the internet. Thankfully, they have fast internet in Egypt, otherwise I would be SOL. Much of my research data is housed online, and, though I have it backed up and will be taking it with me, it is nice to know that I will be able to get the data again if I need it.

I will also still maintain this site while away. I will use it as a way to communicate en masse with friends and family. I figure that it will be easier than sending mass-mails and that kind of thing. It would also be entirely impossible for me to e-mail and write and call everyone I know. I hope that doesn’t make me sound like a jerk, there just aren’t enough hours in the day. This site is pretty neat. You can e-mail me from it. You can sign up for e-mail subscriptions to the blog, if you would rather have the posts e-mailed to you. You will be able to view my CV and portfolio, and, when I have to time to start working on this, you will be able to read sections of my thesis and other papers that I have written. Not to mention, I am attempting to place pictures on the site right now. That will be neat.

It is like a portal to… me. I feel like it will make it easier for me to deal with sending applications and papers and whatever else if my CV and information is all available at a central location. We’ll see how it works.