OK, I use my laptop primarily as a windows machine.  There’s no hassle about getting my hardware to work with it, but it’s not as much fun to be in windows as in linux.  I have a partition there for Ubuntu, but I had hardly done anything with it, until just recently
Traditionally I report futzmonkey twiddle here, so here goes…  If you’re not familiar with Linux, just don’t even bother reading further.  There’s nothing there for you.  Summary: I was reminded why Linux hasn’t taken over the world yet.

• I tried updating Ubuntu linux to the beta of the upcoming version, codenamed “dapper drake.”  When I did that,  the wifi stopped working.  It had, as best I remembered, “just worked” on the old linux install.  (I was wrong about this.)

• I tried installing SimplyMepis, Debian Sarge, and the CD installer from Dapper Drake.  None of them completed the install successfully.  However, they did succeed in trashing the partition where GRUB was expecting to find its boot menu, thereby rendering me unable to boot even to Windows.  Niiiiiice…  Before it was all blown away, I did notice that my old linux install seemed to be using ndiswrapper for wifi.  Doh!  It hadn’t “just worked” after all!  I needed to ndiswrapper it!
• I reinstalled the current stable version of Ubuntu which I’d had before, and made the wifi work.  I noticed sound wasn’t working, so I futzed with that all the ways I knew how… with no luck.  No sound.  I also noticed that suspend-to-disk and suspend-to-ram didn’t work.  But at least there was a relevant grub boot menu.
• I realized I could live with the awkwardness of developing with open-source software on Windows, and sighed sadly.  Honest sadness because I like using Linux, especially Ubuntu, quite a lot.  It’s a pleasant place to work and play.  I just hate fighting with it about whether a given piece of my hardware is going to work with it.  It did very well with my thinkpad, but this Gateway… not so good so far.

Language Log: Nationalism in all its star-spangled glory

Good post on the topic of “Nuestro Himno” and the nonsense people are talking about it.

Man, I’m thick sometimes.  This whole “immigrant boycott”/”immigration reform march” thing that was going on today, it was happening on May Day.  Before Socialism and Labor became synonymous with godless evil, Americans celebrated May Day as a holiday, kind of like Labor Day but with more teeth.  It commemorated the Haymarket Riot in Chicago. It died out in America under the grim gaze of McCarthyism, but of course stayed a huge holiday in the Eastern Bloc (ironic, since the holiday is American in origin). It never hit me that the date for these protests was THAT day.
For the more authoritarian among us, of course, there’s an alternative — you can goose-step and salute our glorious leader, unbound by mere laws of the land, on Loyalty Day.

YouTube – X-men 3 Clip (DR)

Great googly-moogly — we get to see the Colossus/Wolvie “fastball special” take down a Sentinel.  Rock.

I was at the bookstore today and looked at a copy of The Jesus Papers. Well, really mostly just read the inside front-cover and back-cover blurbs. It’s by Michael Baigent, one of the two authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, whose version of Western history was adopted by Dan Brown for the wildly successful DaVinci Code.

This blew me away — on both the front and back cover blurb Mr. Baigent was described as “a religious historian and a leading expert in the field of arcane knowledge.”

Arcane Knowledge is a “field”? Dang, my college advisors never even told me. I would have had hella fun in that department. I suppose as a Classical Languages major I came as close as anyone to majoring in “arcane knowledge.” But still.