American Idol finale

Last night I was flipping the channels, and was able to see the last 45 minutes, more or less, of American Idol's season finale.  I was very curious because I haven't seen this in many years, and man was I disappointed.

Too much self-congratulation, and in Bette Middler's case, WTF?  She sang "Wind beneath my wings", but she was sprinkling stuff like "God bless", and "bless you".  I don't think the original version had those words in it.  Why do we need proselytizing on a talent contest show?  I was kind of disgusted.

Cheap stuff ends up expensive

What a difference it makes to use more expensive, brand-name CD-Roms.  Last week I spent the whole day burning and testing, and burning and testing, over and over again cause the CD-Roms were all crappy!  I was using some cheap Princo CD-Roms, and I burnt like 22 of them.  After a reportedly "successful" burning, ALL of them ended up being faulty and useless.

How annoying.  I even used two different computers to burn, and I even try doing that from Linux and Windows XP.

Then I went to buy some Sony CD-Roms, which were more than twice as expensive... but what a difference!  The six I needed to burn, were all successful on the first try.  What a relief!  I was starting to think that perhaps my CD reader was bad.  It wasn't.  The problem were those cheap CDs.

Losing battle with woo-woo

I'd heard it before, but now I'm experiencing it myself.  When you try to show some common sense to superstitious people, instead of them seeing the light, they take it as if you were simply "testing their faith", and therefore they should persist even more stubbornly.

In most cases, I wouldn't care cause the world is filled with morons anyway, and I can't afford to spend my days in anguish for that.  But my own brother, MY OWN BROTHER, has fallen for woo-woo stuff, and when I explain to him that at least he should put those superstitions to the test, to see whether they hold any water or not, he just believes even more and more.  So whether I say something against it, or just stay quiet and watch, I can't stop it.  Talking against it actually makes things worse.  It hurts to see somebody you love to self-delude like this.

Less spam

I wonder what caused the miracle?  One or two months ago I used to receive about 80 spam messages per day on my Gmail account.  Now it's about 40 per day.  This is still a lotta crap, but still...

Really disturbing network problem

Today at home I had my laptop computer booted with SuSE Linux.  I was just doing some web browsing, when suddenly I lost my wireless connection.  Even my Skype was disconnected.  What's most strange is that I couldn't even see my neighbors' wireless networks.  Very very odd.

Then I rebooted my computer, but this time to Windows XP, and still, I couldn't see any wireless network.  I usually see about six or seven wireless networks by the way.  Then I carried my computer nearer to my router and plugged it with an Ethernet cable.  No success.

Then I turn on my iPaq, and this one can see several networks.  Shit.  I even run the self test, and this one too tells me that it's not connected to any network at the moment.  After a while suddenly my computer starts to see my home wireless network and since then has worked fine.

I don't know how that happened, but obviously it was a hardware problem.  How annoying.  Also, when I've booted with Windows I get lots of random beeps, the kind that you get when you plug and unplug a USB device.  Ummm, it would be nice to get a new computer.  We'll see.

Linux on external hard disk

Today I spent my day doing something really cool.  My brother had given me a USB external hard disk, so I installed in it SuSE Linux in such a way that if you boot the computer with this external hard disk plugged, it boots from this new Linux.  If you boot the computer with this new hard disk unplugged, then it starts Windows XP as before, as if nothing had changed.  It's really neat!

The only thing that is still pending is the set up of the online update thing.  Just on the last step, when you click on the "Finish" button, instead of closing the window, it kind of hangs forever.  I think what's happening is the Linux is trying to access the remote software catalog, and it takes an unreasonable amount of time.

Another strange thing is the long long time it takes to install Skype.  So long that I get bored and kill the process.  I'll do that some other day.

I'll try to find an update mirror site and give it another try some other day.  But for now, I'm happy with what I achieved!