When we last left this topic I had just installed Ubuntu, but in reality you can run virtual operating systems on just about any OS. I choose to install the latest 64-bit version of Ubuntu, and for virtulization Oracle VirtualBox (formerly Sun VirtualBox before Sun was acquired by Oracle). While I could have used VirtualBox on Windows 7, I just do not feel comfortable relying so heavily on a Microsoft OS, especially before Service Pack 1 
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While I love the appeal of free-open source operating systems like Linux, and love the polish on MacOS (but not the associated hardware costs), I am still a Windows user at heart. Since 1993 when I installed DOS 5 and Windows 3.1 onto a generic 486SX based PC, I have grown comfortable (in a love-hate kind of way) with Windows over the years. Read the rest of this entry »
Growing up in the United States, taught by the public educational system, I automatically tend to play it safe. In an educational system run like a manufacturing line -everyone got treated the same- teachers did not have the time to acknowledge free thinkers. Those students who questioned the lessons, or the way they were taught, were labeled disruptive. And their answers, if not the textbook answers, were marked as wrong, or mistakes. Like Natasha Bedingfield says in her song ‘Unwritten’, “I break tradition, sometimes my tries, are outside the lines. We’ve been conditioned to not make mistakes, but I can’t live that way.” My thoughts exactly! Read the rest of this entry »
The holidays got me side-tracked for weeks, but I am going to continue my saga now.
The next step is system preparation. The very first thing I do when I purchase or build a new system is to run Memtest86 on it to insure I will not have any memory problems. This has saved me several times when I either purchased bad memory, or the motherboard used too aggressive timing settings on a module. It is also a tool I use on existing systems when they show any sort of flakiness, since memory errors can manifest themselves in all sorts of strange ways. Read the rest of this entry »
Or: How NOT to get your comment approved on my blog
As planned to begin blogging, I allocated a number of hours per week to compose blog entries. I was not naive; I knew there would be spam comments which would need to be weeded out. But I thought that I could lift the manual approval after determining how much of an issue it really was, and simply delete spam and improper entries periodically, perhaps once per week. Well, that is NOT going to happen anytime soon. Read the rest of this entry »
