Mike Keneally, from the same 1991 Ritz show as the Brown Shoes recording I posted last October and the Dirty Love one I posted last August, shortly after Zappa announced he had cancer. (Er, the show, not my post.)
corporate-sellout.com
If You Can Read This, You Can Read This
corporate-sellout.com
If You Can Read This, You Can Read This
Hi, I'm Thad. I build websites.
This blog's been up in one form or another since 1999. In that time I've written about topics ranging from comic books to video games to copyright law to creators' rights to Frank Zappa.
I also write eBooks and narrate audiobooks. Here's where you can find them:
I'm gonna level with you: it has been a very long day.
Everybody is fine. But I am very tired and can't muster the energy to dig up some bit of Zappa ephemera tonight.
But on the subject of music, I did just see McCoy Tyner and Joe Lovano tonight. It was amazing.
Still sitting up in the ER with my wife. She's sleeping and I've nothing else to do, so here goes, a post about my ongoing Mint experience that I mostly banged out yesterday:
I've got KDE running under Mint, behaving mostly the way I like my desktop to. There are a lot of fiddly little things that just don't work quite right for some reason -- Alt-Tab works, but Alt-Shift-Tab doesn't; the taskbar is just slightly too big and I can't drag icons to reorder them even though it's explicitly set to manual order; the themes are all slightly off from what I'm used to (Oxygen is too bright and Oxygen Cold is too dark); and I'm typing this in gedit because Kate won't let me type in documents where the lines go above a certain number of characters. I'm sure all these problems are fixable -- and hey, maybe if I'd just installed Mint KDE from scratch instead of starting with Cinnamon and then adding KDE, I wouldn't have had them in the first place --, but it sure has been a fiddly pain in the ass.
In short, despite the problems I've had with it, I'm inclined to believe the hype that OpenSUSE really is the best KDE-based Linux distribution.
So for now I'm keeping it installed, running updates from a chrooted YAST every day, and hoping one of them will eventually fix the damn thing.
Wife's back in the ER. I'm sure she'll be fine but don't expect any other posts tonight.
I do have one I wrote yesterday that I might put up if I find myself with some downtime while sitting in the hospital. But don't count on it.
Feels like it might be a little early to be posting another Tributo a Zappa recording, but what the hell, I dig this one too. It's performed by Joni Kontrol Band.
Heading south on the 17 tonight, I passed not one but two billboards exhorting me not to sign the recall petition for Sheriff Joe Arpaio. (Too late, asshole.)
This is a good sign. It means he thinks it's a real threat.
Hell, he seems to be taking it more seriously than I am. I signed the petition but I still expect him to wriggle out of this one, just like he's wriggled out of all the other attempts to hold him accountable at the ballot box or in the courts.
Obviously he's not really expecting anybody to choose not to sign the petition based on a billboard. He's just getting his ads in early so he'll be prepared for the real fight when it comes.
Still, seems like it might backfire -- how many people didn't even know about the petition until they saw one of those billboards?
And, not to put a fine point on it? The billboards are just south of Guadalupe, a town populated entirely by people who would vote to recall him. Seems like it might not be the best idea to put a reminder of the petition right in their backyard for them to see every day.
Not Cocaine Decisions the song (though that's what I was looking for when I found it!), but Frank discussing the corrosive force of the drug. And then a segment where he says classical music is as formulaic as pop music.
Uploaded by hazzaroonee, who doesn't give a certain source but says it's UK TV 1983.
You know, I like Grimm, mostly. I like its oddball setting and I love its supporting cast.
But it's got the Star Wars problem: the dullest, most tedious, least charismatic person on the show just so happens to be the main character.
Actually, the two dullest, most tedious, least charismatic people on the show are the main character and his girlfriend.
So really that makes it more like Episodes 2 and 3, I guess.
They've spent, what, twenty episodes now on this fucking amnesia plot? But they forgot the part about giving it any kind of stakes or giving me any reason to give a fuck. Oh no, Juliette might leave Nick? Oh no! Because I am so emotionally invested in their characters and their relationship!
She can leave on a bus or get hit by a bus for all I care, and take Nick with her. I'd watch the hell out of a show that made Hank or Wu or even Captain Renard the main character. And if Monroe and Rosalee were the leads? ... honestly, why aren't they? There's a couple I've developed some genuine affection for.
That one the other week where Nick, Hank, Rosalee, Monroe, and Bud all pulled off a caper together was really Grimm at its best, for reasons Les Chappell at AV Club pretty much nailed. The show diverts itself from the monster-of-the-week formula for a bit to acknowledge that oh yeah it's already got a whole bunch of monster races to work with already, and it ropes in most of the best members of the supporting cast to generally be charming and clever. Even Nick is pretty inoffensive, and Juliette...well, Juliette is barely in the episode, which I guess also counts as a win.
I really like parts of the show. I just wish they wouldn't pad them out with so much bullshit.
Via the aptly-named TRIBUTOaZAPPA, Motherly Love en español. If I'm reading it right, the group performing it is called Los Huespedes Felices.
Apparently there's a whole series of Spanish Zappa tribute albums at halloffame.es. My Spanish is embarrassingly bad for someone who's spent his whole life in Arizona, so I don't know how easy they are to come by in los estados unidos (in fact my Spanish is so bad I had to look that up; I almost put "estadios unidad"), but I think I might have to look into it later.
After spending my Saturday banging my head against the wall trying to get my OpenSUSE installation working again, I spent my Sunday just reinstalling the damn thing -- aware the whole time that the result might be exactly the same thing happening next time I run an update.
I went to the effort to get OpenSUSE up and running again because I quite like it. All that shit I griped about yesterday on how difficult it is to find configuration options in Mint? Simply not the case in OpenSUSE. It's true that OpenSUSE has two separate control panels too, like Cinnamon does, and that one is for interface configuration and the other is for system configuration -- but both of them are a whole lot more comprehensive than what Cinnamon's got, and it's way easier to find what you're looking for. And OpenSUSE's package management is simply the best I've ever seen -- it doesn't have quite as comprehensive a selection as Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/et al, but it's pretty close, and -- perhaps most importantly of all -- it doesn't just give you an error when there's a dependency issue, it gives you a list of choices on what to do about it.
It's also got smooth-as-hell one-click package installation, though in Mint's defense, it supports that now too and I had a breeze setting up RSSOwl (the only program I've set up in Mint that wasn't in the default repos, and which was a monumental fucking hassle setting up in OpenSUSE).
Anyhow, I got OpenSUSE back up and running. Eventually. The first problem was that when I burned the 12.3 disc and tried to boot it, I got my old friend the frozen "Select CD-ROM Boot Type" prompt.
You know what's a bad sign? When you plug an error message into a a search engine and the third match is your own fucking blog. On the plus side, Thad From Four and a Half Months Ago told me how I got around this the last time: I stopped fucking around with the install DVD and tried the LiveDVD instead.
Then I made a mistake -- but it turned out not to matter. I forgot to set NoScript to allow JS on the 12.3 download page. And so I couldn't see any downloads except the main installer. The LiveDVD's right on the page, and so's the Rescue CD, but I couldn't see the damn things.
I poked through the Wiki and wound up stumbling onto the KDE Reloaded LiveDVD instead. Now, on the plus side, contrary to the "11.3" number and "Last Modified 10-Aug-2010" note on that page, the LiveDVD is current as of January of this year. On the minus side, it's kind of a damn mess, it leaves you with a weird hybrid of 12.1, 12.2, and Factory repos, and, well, it wouldn't have been my first choice if I'd been a little more awake and alert and noticed the damn NoScript notification.
But I found out later that the LiveDVD and the Rescue DVD both lock up too, so I would have wound up trying the KDE Remix eventually anyway. And it did work, sort of. And I found out some good things and bad things about restoring a broken OpenSUSE installation.
The good part: if you've got /home on a separate partition, OpenSUSE will use it without formatting it; all your settings will be preserved. I backed it up just to be safe, but I didn't need to; it was completely untouched.
The bad part: I found out the hard way that YAST's backup feature doesn't back up your repo list, which makes it pretty much goddamn worthless if you have a lot of software from third-party repos. Which, y'know, is the only damn reason I backed up my packages in the first place. Reinstalling packages from the default repos is time-consuming, but it's trivial. What I was worried about was going through the hassle of installing stuff like that outdated version of xulrunner that I need to get RSSOwl to run. So I guess I know for next time that I need to back up my list of repos separately.
Anyway, I got OpenSUSE working for a day or so.
And then the first time I ran mplayer X dumped me to a console and now it won't restart.
So I'm sorta back where I started, except getting an entirely different set of errors, which near as I can tell aren't related to any nVidia driver conflict like last time.
I like OpenSUSE, but I may be fucking done with it. I would really rather not reinstall it again.
I don't know for sure where I'm going from here. But I do know I'm going to start a KDE install on Mint.