How I spend my Tuesday nights.

Every now and then, I convince myself that I ought to try Linux again.  The temptation of a stable, simple, and fast operating system really appeals to me.  Inevitably, a friend much smarter than I will remind me that this is an absolutely fucking awful idea, and that I’ll regret it in five hours.  This is because when I install Linux, I usually end up with a broken Linux install (fucking KDE).  Then, I will attempt to uninstall Linux and in the process, nearly destroy my Windows install.  Tonight was no different.
I started off by installing openSUSE because I’ve never been dumb enough to try it before.  Compiz and all that allure, you know.  I attempted to install both Ubuntu and Fedora earlier, but they were causing significant issues for me during installation.  openSUSE worked fine, and so I got right down to fucking it up by trying to install compiz and all that glitters under KDE.  Naturally, everything stopped working, and my attempts to switch to Gnome were hindered when I realized that I had run out of space.  Apparently, 10gb isn’t enough for a Linux operating system.

Annoyed that KDE could hardly fucking function and I couldn’t reasonably switch to Gnome, I decided I’d say fuck it and uninstall.  I’d then expand the partition and install Ubuntu on it.  Simple!

After much dicking around in Ubuntu’s install, which by the way has gotten worse every time I use it, I finally figured out which partition is what, I get to installing.  I have two hard drives, which isn’t the novelty that I thought it would be.  One of which never gets used, and the other is my 1 terabyte monster that I have Windows 7 and Ubuntu attempting to share.  The installation went fine and dandy until Ubuntu trie to install grub, told me it can’t fucking do it, then froze up and forced me to restart.  As I do, I know I’m going to be confronted with a bitching grub complaining that it can’t find Linux and apparently hasn’t been programmed to handle booting Windows without it.

Surprise!

So I googled around, and tried to rebuild boot loaders via my command line (accessed by pressing F8 before Windows 7’s boot-up – nifty!!) to no avail.  Grub is still screaming and crying and I can’t get it to shut the fuck up.  Eventually I realize that grub is on the one terabyte hard drive, whereas Windows boot loader is for some fucked up reason on the OTHER drive.  This strikes me as an awful, spaghetti situation that I simply must rectify even though I can avoid it so easily.  I figured it’d bite me in the ass later if I didn’t deal with it.

After booting into Windows 7 (no thanks to grub), I googled some more and found EasyBCD, which can apparently rid my life of Grub once and for all.  I downloaded it, installed, and in an act of sheer stupidity pressed a wrong button.

In my defense, the button doesn’t ask you for clarification, and it fucking lists internal hard drives as available options.  The option to turn what SHOULD be a USB or floppy or whatever into a bootable piece of hardware for repair.

… shit.

I quickly realized my mistake and upload my essay that I need to print tomorrow to my FTP, just in case this was more fucked up than I anticipated.  eI reset my computer fearing the worst, that I may have just wiped my hard drive in an act of sheer retardation.

Windows doesn’t boot.  I begin to panic.  It gives me an error I’ve never fucking seen.  I try to use my F8 trick from before but no luck.  With quick thinking, I realize I can make a bootable USB stick on my MacBook with a recovery CD on it, and hopefully fix this shit.

The following is why nobody likes Macs:

You can’t fucking do that.  you can fucking try, and try I fucking did, but you can’t do it.  At least, not easily.  I must’ve installed five or six different programs of various nature to get it done.  Macs hate .ISOs, so you have to convert it to .DMG.  Oh, but Disk Utility doesn’t like the so called "source" of the image.  After fucking around for an hour, I eventually found some command lines that would allow me to make a bootable USB stick.  Naturally, command lines have no progress bars or helpful hints, but it was all I had.
After waiting a good three minutes, the terminal tells me it’s done and it worked.  Excellent.  I pop the thing into my PC, and try to boot off it.  No such luck.  I’m once again given the same bizarre message about my boot loader being fucked.

I started panicking more.  I started texting friends (at 2am) to ask if they were awake and had a Windows 7 repair CD.  I started digging through my shit trying to find a blank CD that I could burn something onto.  I dug through some old, old boxes that I never expected to go through and found my holy grail:  my beta copy of Windows 7!

I popped it in and was thrilled to discover that it worked!  I figured it would be a quick google, a couple easy commands, and bam!  I could boot into Windows 7 again.  But life is never so easy.
I tried every sort of bootfix fixmgr shit I could get my hands on.  Nothing worked.  I tried on both partitions.  Nothing fucking worked.  I even ran the useless ‘repair startup’ thing four times.  Eventually I just rebooted and watched as my computer demanded I press a button in order to use the CD. The time passed and…

what the fuck.

I was presented with a boot screen.  I could access Windows.  It works.  Did I fix it?  I remove the CD and try to boot of my harddrives.  Grub ws still being a whore, and my other drive is telling me it lost it’s keys or something.  Nevertheless, I knew I had guaranteed access to Windows …somehow – I still don’t understand that miracle.  Why does a repair CD when not activated present a boot screen?  Important miracle!

Eventually I found the Wiki for the EasyBCD thing, and found it loaded with information.  I found out how to restore the Vista bootloader after a "nuclear holocaust".  Sounded right to me.  I follow each instruction carefully, slowly.  There was phase 1, which should’ve fixed the problem.  No fucking luck.  Figures.  I try phase 2, which should’ve fixed the problem.  No fucking luck, Windows is still fumbling in he dark.  I try phase 3.  Same deal.  I felt at a loss because clearly nothing was going to fix this.  I figured though, why not bother trying Grub one more time before I jump off a cliff?

AND Grub is gone.  Even though all the commands I executed were DONE ON AND DIRECTED AT THE DRIVE THAT DIDN’T HAVE GRUB (???????????), it was gone and had been replaced with the ugly, but fucking FUNCTIONAL Vista bootloader.  Windows 7 booted, no problem.  Linux is off my system, Grub has gone the fuck home somehow, and I have a nice, stable, Windows 7 only drive.  The other one that I never use refuses to boot.  I imagine I need to reinstall the Windows XP bootloader or whatever that’s on it, but I don’t really care.  I think I’ll just steal the useful files off it, format it, and install Ubuntu.
Except my monitor is covered in green post-its that say DON’T EVER INSTALL LINUX AGAIN.

Sculpting!

While I was working on PWD (no progress so far) I came across Blender’s sculpting tool.  I had always avoided it because my initial results looked awful.  But I decided to pick it up again and do some brief sketches.  They again turned out shitty.  So I picked up an old Unlimited Clay build and tried again.

It’s supposed to be satan.  Not bad for blindly fucking around on my first try.  Unfortunately, my Unlimited Clay build is older than the dinosaurs.  I investigated and it turns out that Farsthary rewrote the entire thing but is having some trouble getting it out.  So after donating some money because his video is AMAZING, I went and nabbed Sculptris and set out to make something I’ve never been able to do properly with the standard vertex-pushing I’ve been doing for years.

The results, though not final, impress the fuck out of me, especially since it only took an hour to do.

I’m sure it’ll only get better.  Sculptris is an extremely powerful program and it frankly makes modelling so much more fun.  I can’t wait until I get to play with Farsthary’s new build.

Busy is as busy does.

Last week was an absolute nightmare plagued by awful midterms that seemingly did not go swimmingly.  I had to do a French test which I most unfortunately bombed.  I plan to take it over to some friends who are apparently much more fluent than I.  I also had to do a Geology midterm.  It didn’t go so poorly, but evidently our professor was really pissed about the marks, so attendance has been decreed mandatory.  Fuck.  I really liked skipping that class.   To top it all off, I had a take home midterm.  As far as I’m concerned, a take home midterm is a profs way of making you dedicate your life to that class.  It’s also a shitty way to make students learn.

Ahh well.  Whatever.

Naps and shit

In an effort to make myself actually write shit, I decided I’d use http://www.onepageperday.com/ in order to fill up my blog.  I wonder if I can actually apply this technology to either of the papers I need to write.  Mmm, nope.  I really need to get on with that shit.  I have less then a month for both.

Today was a day full of naps, pain, and learning.  I went to my Geology class despite my not sleeping well the night before.  This is always a bad idea because I’m inevitably flooded by noise from chatty first years who don’t get quite understand that being present during a lecture also means shutting the fuck up.  Nevertheless, class went on and I perused Lifehacker as usual to pass the time.  Probably not the best idea since I actually have a midterm coming up in a week.  I feel no fear regarding that.  The professor will spend two lectures doing review, and I have more important things with which to occupy my time.  Papers, presentations, and this blog shit apparently.

Geology was followed by French, which is an insidious course designed to hunt down your GPA and kill it.  I only discovered last night after reading the syllabus for the first time that students are expected to spend two hours of studying at home for every hour in class.  This technically seems reasonable, but upon practice I’m pretty sure it cannot be done.  Not to imply that I tried.  Today was different of course because I actually got my questions correctish.  At least my professor didn’t nastily correct me in a way that a French grammar teacher only can.  It’s hilarious because it’s more or less exactly like the Latin graffiti sketch in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”.  Once again, I’m the only one laughing at this.

French was then followed up an hour later by my French tutorial, a class I only attend because I get easy participation marks and the class is doing a fantastic job of fucking up my GPA in an unreasonable manner.  The tutorial was interesting because I learned that the French forfeit words to describe a high temperature or an excitement of sorts in order to have vocabulary to express how horny they are.  Note to self:  Je suis chaud/excite are not acceptable phrases to use in France.  Naturally, nobody told me what the politically correct terms were, so I guess I’ll need to buy a guidebook to figure that shit out.

Produce with Disabilities Episode 3

After a long absence of doing fuck all 3D wise (with the exception of a piece entitled L O V E, which I’ll add to a potential gallery if WordPress supports such a thing), I have finally started the beginning of Produce with Disabilities Episode 3.  The summary of the story is that a yellow pepper with cerebral palsy goes to work.  Pretty simple, but quite complex to do when you consider my other pieces involve vegetables pissing themselves or pieces of fruit trying to reach for a remote but failing because of Michael J. Fox syndrome.  Whatever!

This is my first attempt at modelling the pepper.  I tried using a sculpting approach as opposed to vertex pushing which I’ve done for virtually all my work.  Since I’m new to the process, this has led to several problems:

1. The pepper looks like an orange turd
2. Animation may be a nightmare
3. Too many sculpted details look awful with the rim lighting

Pretty much sums it up.  I plan to maybe mesh-model the pepper and maybe the appropriate sculpting steps to add detail, but I’m sceptical on how that will work given that too many details combined with the rim lighting looks very odd.

Onward!

EDIT:  Much better.