White Kids Love Hip Hop

Posted on 31st December 2010 in Something Daily

Today, on a very special episode of Three Stegosaurus Moon: Emmett goes to a Wu-Tang show! The year 2010 draws to a close, leaving us all just under two years to exist as a species! The Windows operating system is heavily insulted! All this and more, today, on Three Stegosaurus Moon!

Yes, I did in fact see the Wu-Tang Clan last night. And yes, it was in fact stupidly awesome. My friend Eric and I drove into Philly around 8 and arrived at the Trocadero to find a line stretching all the way down and around the block; luckily we already had tickets. The opening acts took up the first two hours of the show, which we hadn’t planned on. Nonetheless, the Wu section of the show was unbelievable, if a bit belated. They started out with the first few tracks from Enter the Wu-Tang. The opener, of course, was Bring Da Ruckus: the DJ played the samples, and the whole group came onstage immediately when Ghostface’s rap started – it all happened very quickly, and was very awesome. Ghost had a bag of doritos that he held onto and munched from throughout the show, which I guess is normal for a hip-hop show? The whole group also had several herbal remedies that they were passing around onstage throughout their set, as well as a decent collection of alcohols in water bottles and flasks. It was just amazing to see all of them in person (except RZA, he wasn’t there, unfortunately). The highlight of the show was, of course, Method Man, due mainly to his crazy stage presence and tendency to crowdsurf. When he did his track from Enter the Wu-Tang, people were just going nuts. I wish I’d taken video, although in a big sense I’m glad I didn’t. That way, I was able to keep my W up most of the night. It was a fantastic show.

That was the first exciting thing that I did in the last few days, after my attempts to fix my mom’s laptop turned sour. Last I wrote about that, I had convinced her to try Ubuntu instead of Windows 7, a decision which lasted about 15 hours. She woke up and decided she had to have Windows, which quickly brought me to two realizations: that the Windows 7 install disk my dad bought required an existing Windows install to use, and couldn’t be booted from, and that Windows XP is an awful, awful operating system. I spent a good while (I mean a while) attempting to find the right service packs and drivers on the internet to get the XP laptop internet access, which was of course way more trouble than it was worth. I did not, however, have to call any kind of tech support. I can do it myself, thank you very much. And if you call tech support, you don’t learn anything.

At risk of sounding like a whiny 13-year-old girl: Being at home with the family can be really tough sometimes. I have, for the most part, a pretty good time at home, and I get along my with family decently well. I really have to figure out how to deal with being told what to do by my parents, though. I’m in an awkward situation as the oldest in my family, stretched between wanting to be independent and being seen as a kid by my parents. Living at school for the majority of the year, I’m not used to having people tell me to wash the dishes or walk the dog or whatever it is; there, I just do what has to be done and it’s all good. For some reason, though, coming home causes me to revert somewhat into a state of childishness, where every request, reminder, or admonition from my parents wears on me. I’m sure a lot of college students go through this: it’s a difficult position to be in, seeing oneself as capable of independence while being forced away from it by well-meaning yet slightly overbearing parents. It’s ok, I just wanted to get that off my mind. Thanks, internet.

Grandpa Jeff Bridges

Posted on 29th December 2010 in Something Daily

I was afraid this would happen. After only a handful of days off from school, I’m already feeling way too lazy for my own good. I like to think of myself as a pretty hard worker, and most of the time I don’t have any problem believing that. Right now, though, I am being extremely lazy. I think I watched more television and movies yesterday than I have on any single day of the last year (video games not included, obviously – but that does include the Lord of the Rings marathons). I watched Bill and Ted, Yessongs, True Grit in the theater (which was incredible by the way) and Audition after midnight. Let me just say a few things about those last two: Jeff Bridges is one hundred per cent the man, I didn’t really want to see that guy get his foot chopped off, the scene with the two guys in the cabin was awesome, and Audition was a lot less scary than I expected it to be. Even watching it at 1 AM didn’t really seem to make that much of a difference. I mean it was definitely gory, and it was definitely an interesting head game, but scary…not really. It’s a Japanese film from the late nineties about this guy whose wife dies and he holds an audition to find himself a new wife – it starts out pretty light and almost romantic-comedy-ish, and at certain point pretty quickly devolves to some classic horror incomprehensibility. It may be due to how tired I was, but I still don’t really know how it makes sense. I just need some time to wrap my brain around it. But it was pretty awesome, regardless.

I don’t watch scary movies too often, but one thing I’ve noticed about the ones I have seen is that a lot of the fear that I get out of them has depended on how scary I expected them to be. Maybe that’s just me, but I feel like horror movies would be a lot less affecting to me if I started watching them not knowing anything about them. I really think the genre depends to some degree on that anticipation and assumption that’s performed by the audience before they even sit down in the theater.

Instead of watching movies today, I decided to make myself a bit more useful and fix my mom’s ancient laptop that ran Windows XP but a few hours ago. My dad insisted that I use the upgrade DVD he bought to install Windows 7, but of course, due to my growing intolerance of things made by Microsoft, I spent a lot of energy attempting to convince him to go the way of Ubuntu. I tried to highlight the increase in performance the laptop would experience once being wiped and reinstalled with Meerkat, as well as the OS’ resistance to viruses, a problem that the computer had run into far too many times in the past. So just a few minutes ago, I managed to convince my parents and I’m now working on the switch from Windows XP to Ubuntu. I’ve never used Wine before, but that’s apparently what has to be done in order for iTunes to run. It’ll be an adventure. Anyway, that whole thing (backup, installation, and configuration included) has given me a nice big project that’s filled most of my day.

I’m seeing the Wu-Tang tomorrow in Philly! That should certainly be interesting. Until then, I’m going to be enjoying my break and chilling….so very hard.

Operating Systems Dilemma

Posted on 1st December 2010 in Something Daily

This week is becoming interesting. Mondays and Tuesdays are always pretty easy: I don’t have a lot of classes, and homework is usually due later in the week. So when I go home, I can hang out. Like how I didn’t really accomplish anything yesterday and just played New Super Mario Bros. Wii with Eric. I mean it’s a pretty good game – almost as good as being productive. Almost. We finished all the regular levels, including the crazy frantic battle at the end where giant bowser is running after you – we were all screaming. It was crazy. But now, since we apparently don’t have better things to do, we’re going through the game again and getting all of the star coins to unlock the really difficult secret levels. It’s not as bad as the replay gimmick in Super Mario Galaxy 2 that makes you play the whole game twice, but it’s similar. But who am I to complain? It’s fun – I mean I’m playing it, right? Anyway the week is getting interesting because I know that tonight is going to involve a large amount of frantic work that’s all due tomorrow. And the South Park season is over, so I don’t have that to break up the craziness tonight. But today’s the craziest. Tomorrow will be better. And now for something completely different.

Considering the process of building my own desktop computer has made me a bit uncomfortable with my affinity for Mac OS X. My original idea for a computer build was essentially “Make a computer that runs OS X”. Doing a little research, I found out about the Hackintosh community and the compendiums (compendia?) they keep of OS X compatible parts. This is all good, but doing a bit of research on the process outside of that community has led me to the realization that installing X on a non-Mac computer is ultimately more work than it’s worth. Choosing the correct parts seems to be the easy part, with the numerous lists of compatible motherboards and processors floating around the internet. The impression that I get is that hacking the OS, installing and running it successfully are the hard parts. I’m positive that it’s doable, and I’ll probably try to do it eventually. I won’t however, have a very high expectation of success, and I’ll pick hardware that’s compatible with both Ubuntu and OS X.

The thing is, I’m worried that using OS X exclusively will lead to me wasting money in the future, not to mention becoming married to one company/OS. I don’t want to have to ‘settle’ for an operating system that I’m not amazing with, or that doesn’t run the software that I need, because it doesn’t run on my hardware. My ideal situation is, of course, running OS X on non-Apple hardware, for the experience of building my own computer for a cheaper price than Apple and running the software that I know/require. I can see why Apple makes it so difficult to do this, though. They really don’t want me to do this. So I’ll try and make a Hackintosh when the time comes.

However, short of getting that to work, I’m practicing as much as I can with Linux (which isn’t a whole lot different anyway), because apparently Linux can run on tons of hardware types. I dual boot 10.6.5 and 10.10 on my white MacBook, and I pretty much only use the Linux partition these days. It’s good practice, and I love finding all of the downloadable packages for added commandline functionality that you can’t really use in OS X. It’s a great system, I just reeeeeally wish that Logic and Steam were compatible with it. If they were, I’d drop OS X in a second. Seriously. Watch, I’ll do it.

And no, I won’t use Windows. UNIX owns DOS and the system under Vista and 7.

Hey, I found a picture of young Stephen Colbert. Believe it.

Everywhere I Go I Own

Posted on 23rd November 2010 in Something Daily

I’m going to see mc chris in Brooklyn in a few minutes. I don’t know what it’s going to be like yet, but I’m definitely excited. I’ll write about it for sure, of course. I don’t know if he’ll be doing older stuff, or some things off of his new albums. I just hope he does some of the ones I like. But either way, it’ll be interesting to see what a show of his is actually like – he’s kind of mythological to me, like he doesn’t really exist. I guess I’ve felt that way about a lot of bands before I saw them. It’s a function of listening to music without knowing that much about the people who made it. It’s often startling to see these people in the flesh when you’re so used to your mental picture of them that you constructed from their music. It’s similar to when a movie comes out based on a book that you know really well. You’ve figured out all the characters and settings for yourself, and then you’re looking at another person’s interpretation of them in the movie, and it doesn’t necessarily match your original conception. Anyway, mc chris seems like he’s the man, and I am very excited to see him in person.

I started researching some resources today for building computers from scratch. I found a nice resource in Tom’s Hardware – there’s a lot of great information for beginner PC builders there. I learned exactly what components are necessary for a PC to work – motherboard, storage, memory, video and sound cards, power supply, etc. I’m definitely considering building my own the next time I need a new computer. The only thing is that it seems pretty tough to build one that Mac OS X will run on, since Macs use proprietary hardware that can’t be found anywhere else. Still, I’m investigating it, though it’s pretty likely that were I to build my own computer, it would run Ubuntu and/or Windows.