Guess that was the problem. Reinstalled Vista and everything “seems” to be alright on the Toshiba laptop. Not really pleased with having to reinstall an OS on a laptop that’s only a couple of weeks of old, but shit happens. If that really was the problem, then I will be quite pleased.

Well, couldn’t pass up this sale:

Toshiba Satellite L355D-S7809 Laptop

AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual Core

2 GB RAM

200 GB SATA Harddrive

Dual Layer Super Multi DVD Burner

Built-in wireless b/g

It has a beautiful 17″ glossy screen on it, full size keyboard with a number pad and it’s really light. The only problem seems to be Vista. The Synaptics touchpad “tap to click” function only works part of the time. The trick seems to be to disable it, then enable it, then open a browser and use it to click on something. Then it will work inside WIndows. It (almost) always work when you’re in the browser, just not any of the Windows screens. It has the latest OS updates and the latest version of drivers, BIOS, and firmware. Another odd thing is that when it’s plugged in, it won’t go into power saving mode. No screensaver, no turning off of the screen, nothing. It doesn’t always work unplugged either. Got home yesterday and went to turn it on and it wouldn’t power up. Turns out it stayed on so long it ran down the battery. So when it reached critically low levels, it shut itself off. I had to recharge it before I could use it again.

Other than Vista misbehaving, the only down side so far was the Bloatware. I spent a good hour or so removing the 30 some odd “special offers” and other such crap. But considering the price ($599) it was a great deal.

I think I’m just going to wipe it and reinstall Vista, because I’ve been searching, but it doesn’t seem like anyone else is having these problems. If that doesn’t work, we’ll just slap some XP on it. Can’t say I’m particularly fond of Vista anyway.

So I decided it was time to build a new machine. So off to Newegg I went and got this setup:

• Biostar TA770 A2+ Motherboard
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Brisbane 2.6GHz Dual-Core Black Edition
• OCZ Gold 4GB DDR2 800 memory sticks
• ASUS EAH3450/HTP/256M Radeon HD 256MB 64 Bit GDDR2 PCI Express 2.0 x 16 video card
• Rosewill RCX-Z1 Long life ball bearing CPU cooler
• This will be displayed on my HP w2207 22″ widescreen glossy monitor (it’s pretty!)

I downloaded the install DVD from Fedora and was eagerly awaiting the new Fedora. However, it was not to be. The install DVD spins up, I hit install, then I get

Your BIOS doesn’t leave a memory hole

Please enable the IOMMU option in the BIOS setup

error message and she won’t go any further. So for grins, I tried the text install. Same thing. I played with the bios (no IOMMU options or anything even vaguely similar) and searched the internet for a couple hours to no avail. So, Ubuntu it is.

Popped the Ubuntu Studio 64 DVD in and did the media check. Proceeded on to complete the graphical install in about twenty minutes. All good! Except my screen resolution was off. I figured I’d worry about that later, because Ubuntu wanted to do some updates first. So I let her rip.

After the updates completed, I got a little message that says if I wanted to fully utilize my graphics card, I need to install the restricted drives. No problem, every version of Linux I’ve had has used proprietary drivers. A couple of clicks later and I have the latest ATI drivers on my machine. I changed the screen to the proper resolution (1680×1050) and was busy admiring it’s beauty, when the machine locked up. Figured it was just X that was having the problem so I tried the Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, no luck. Had to reboot the machine. Logged back in, resolution and refresh rate were all good, and this time the machine ran for about ten minutes before it locked up again.

So next comes memtest. Let it run overnight and not a single error to report. So I booted into runlevel 3 and removed the proprietary ATI driver. Started X, runs without a problem. Just for grins, I reinstalled the ATI driver and three minutes later - machine locks up. Alrighty then, remove them again, and now I’m left with an ugly, fat, squished display that will only do 1280×1024. Not exactly what I was hoping for. I’ve tried about 50 different ways of tweaking my xorg.conf file too, but none of that seems to work either. I did find a lot of useful info at the Linux ATI wiki, but none of it worked for me.

Laying around I had an older Radeon PCI x1550 card. Slapped it in - bam! 1680×1050, didn’t even have to set it. Doesn’t exactly run real fast, and it has a lot of trouble with the video editing (which is the point of Ubuntu Studio 64), so I’m at a loss. I suppose I could go buy another video card, perhaps I’d have better luck with an Nvidia card, but from what I’ve read, I can’t be too sure. Maybe it’s time to go back to CentOS for a while.

I guess I’ll be doing a lot of investigating. Seems like it makes more sense to try and get Ubuntu to get along with my monitor than spend time on Fedora, since I can’t even get it to install. But wouldn’t it be neat if I got Fedora to install it would magically work with my video card? Yea, I won’t hold my breath. Oh well, still better than windows.

Taking a break from working on the motorcycle. I can’t find the damn kickstand spring anywhere, so I went by the hardware store on the way to work and found two candidates. Something as silly as that spring is stopping me from riding the bike.

I have a template made for the rear fender that I should get to try this weekend. Then it’s on to the front headlight……Alas, should the venustation of my ride fail, I shall be forced to tudiculate it profusely, and begin anew. Please forgive my ridiculous flosculations, but they give me great pleasure. So shall the day my motorcycle and I resume our montivagant journeys.

While bitching at work about the crappy service at Woods, my friend Shawn told me he hasn’t been to Woods in years. Instead, he gets all of his parts from Central Texas Powersports. So I gave them a call last Saturday and ordered my parts. Lo and Behold, my phone rings on Thursday. Do you know who it is? It’s the guy from Central Texas Powersports letting me know that my parts are in. So I made the drive up to Georgetown to pick them up. Had a look around the store while I was there, nice place. They are having a new one built and from the looks of it they need it. There were tons of people in there, and I only had to wait a minute or two before I got helped. They’ve got bikes crammed in all over the place, and more bikes outside. Did I mention how nice they were? I’m still amazed someone called me. I only ordered $4 worth of parts and they treated me great. So while I was up there, I sat on one of those WR450’s, not too shabby. That would make a sweet supermoto, and it’s only like five grand….hmmmm…….

I may not even publish this, but one of the reasons I have this blog is to vent. So now I am going to do just that. Three (3) whole weeks ago I ordered one (1) gasket and one (1) o-ring for the petcock on my KLR. I called the local dealer here in Austin - Woods Fun Center - and talked to a really nice guy on the phone. He looked up my parts, placed the order, gave me my total and took my credit card number and updated my account (I hadn’t ordered anything from them in over 3 years because they fucked up my last order, and the one before that, and the one before that). The grand total was $4 or $5, not much. He told me the parts would probably be here Wednesday (I ordered on a Friday), but that it might take up to ten (10) business days and they would call me when the order arrived. No big deal. I had a few things to wrap up before I needed the bike again.

One thing led to another and I have been so busy I forgot all about it. Until today. I’m going to need the bike Friday. I got to thinking, hmmmm, I haven’t gotten a call from the dealer. Surely since it’s been three (3) weeks now, my parts are here. So I leave the house early to run a couple errands, the last of which is to swing by the dealer and pick up my parts before I have to be at work at 3:00. At 2:42 I roll into Woods Fun Center and head back to the parts department. I tell the guy I’m here to pick up some parts, he asks for my last name. He types it into the computer and a puzzled look comes upon his face. He then asks for my first name. He types that in and yet again, puzzled look.

“We don’t show any order,” he says.

“That’s funny,” I say. “Because I called in on the phone, ordered the parts and gave my credit card number.”

“When did you order?”

“About three weeks ago.”

“Well, the last order we show for you is in 2005.”

“So you’re telling me that you didn’t order my parts….”

“At least you didn’t get charged for them.”

“I don’t give a fuck if I was charged or not, I called in here and placed an order three fucking weeks ago and no one actually ordered any of the parts!”

He stands there with a confused look on his face as I turn around and walk out the door, vowing again to myself to NEVER, EVER buy anything from Woods again. I’m still stuck with a leaking petcock that I have to get fixed in three days, but I bet I can find someone who can overnight me the parts. It really sucks, because a repair that would have cost $5, is now probably going to cost $30. Fuck Woods Fun Center - again.

If you’d like a few good laughs, head on over to Yahoo Answers. I haven’t been this amused in a long time. An excellent example is this wonderful question:

I took birth controle at 7 in the morning and had sex at 1 in the morning, no pertection, could i be pregnant,

Yep, that is a direct cut and paste of the question (even though there is no question mark to designate it as such, just a comma - maybe there was more, we’ll probably never know). Sadly enough, odds are she’ll keep the baby, because the dumb ones seem to reproduce more frequently than the rest of the population (watch Idiocracy if you haven’t already). I’m telling you, this place is full of them! Strangely enough, these morons have figured out enough of the internet that they can make it to Yahoo Answers, but they don’t know what Google or Dogpile are for? Maybe they are just too lazy to type and click, they want other people to do the research for them. Who really cares anyway, if you’re bored and want some good laughs, head on over - there’s tons of material!

Sweeet. Did the upgrade to 2.5 and so far - it rocks! Love the whole new interface and the visual editor is not only working again, but seems improved. In the short time that I used it though, I was really impressed Deans FCKEditor. So if your VE is broken, I would definitely recommend this as a substitute.

Let’s see if this has been fixed !!

I’m checking the dates, but I’m pretty sure it happened when I did the last update to 2.3.3

I was really really really pissed off. I had written a rather lengthy page, wanted to check some facts, hit the save button. When I went back EVERYTHING I had written was gone, except for the page title. So after I recovered from my head exploding, I wrote everything again, this time saving a copy to notepad. Clicked on the Save button, went back and everything was gone again. I clicked on the code tab, but nothing happened.

So I went into my user profile and unchecked the box that says “Use Visual Editor.” Now the visual editor is gone and I can only write in code, but everything stays after I click on Save. Wish I could say I had figured out how to fix the Visual Editor, but I haven’t yet.

Well, after doing some more reading, this has apparently been going on for quite some time now. It’s just new to me, because I’ve got three different WP installs and the Visual Editor has always worked. Oh well. Apparently there’s a few plugins to choose from that offer the same, if not better, tools as Visual Editor. Maybe I’ll try one, maybe I’ll just keep writing in code. Whatever.

So I’m going to load up Dean’s FCKEditor and see how I like it.