The first surprise

Wow. Rock Chick got clubbed tonight, marking the first surprise of the year for me for The Show. She was down there with the Hottie Cyborg and Nosferatu, who I suspect will be kicked off the island in that order before Hair Club for Boys finally gets his long-overdue dispatch notice. There are more surprises coming — there always are when we get to this point — and I’m going to be fascinated to see if anyone can stop Gladys Knight Jr. She was the clear leader again tonight, but I’ve got to tell you, I see this teen girl with serious pipes coming up on the outside in a hurry…

Ubuntu

Every year or so for the past several years, I’ve tried to set up a PC with Linux. I’ve built machines out of old parts, or created dual-booting setups on my main machine, to see once again if any of the manifold flavors of Linux has broken through my personal usability barrier.

I’ve always ended disappointed to varying degrees. I’ve tried all sorts of Linux distributions — Red Hat, Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, Linspire and on and on. I first discovered Knoppix a couple of years ago and that one got close — it actually managed to find and configure most of the hardware on my machine, but it renewed the search every time I booted up and was achingly slow (Knoppix really is designed to run from a CD, not from a hard drive installation).

Freespire, which is the free version of Linspire, also almost got me to take Linux seriously as a potential Windows replacement. But inevitably, I’d end up deleting my Linux partition from my hard drive and going back to Windows, either because I became frustrated with Linux’s gruesome software installation process or because I got bored of the pain I had to go through to get hardware working properly.

This year is different. This year, I discovered Ubuntu.

I’ve mulled over my next steps with my PC for a while now. Windows Vista is expensive, full of digital rights management nonsense, has a hopeless number of versions, requires a ton of horsepower to work properly and is overwhelmingly restrictive for hardware homebuilders like me (I’m perfectly willing to use a single copy for a single machine, but my machine evolves all of the time and I’m not about to buy a new version of Windows just because I updated a motherboard). I had a pile of old parts laying around, and I really wanted to put a media machine in my living room, so I once again dove into my Linux-related options.

Numerous Linux websites I visted listed Ubuntu as the most popular distribution, and other reviews raved about Ubuntu’s hardware detection capability, ease of use, ability to install software packages without the usual ridiculous Linux nonsense (tarballs? Please) and usefulness for newbies. Fair enough; I built a machine out of the old parts and put Ubuntu on it.

My first impression wasn’t great. Ubuntu didn’t detect the onboard graphics properly and didn’t work with the onboard sound in my Asus A8V-VM motherboard (a relatively new, but not super-new, board). Some Google searching — followed by my careful and annoying following of command-line installation directions — allowed me to find a video driver that worked and to modify a file to make the audio function fine.

It’s been all gravy since then. I really, really like Ubuntu — so much that it’s definitely going into the media server and I might even create a dual-boot machine on my main PC with Ubuntu. And Vista is definitely out for now — and with any luck, forever.

Ubuntu isn’t for everyone, but it is the distribution that might finally cause me to shift over to Linux. It still requires some command-line hacking, and it still forces you to occasionally think in those ridiculous nonsensical Linux terms, but it’s a big step in the right direction. And like all Linux distributions, it is capable of doing much more with much less hardware muscle than any Windows machine. I think I’m sold.

Steeling for the season

I have here in my hand eight pairs of tickets for Washington Nationals games this season. I went in with a group of people on a season ticket plan and I just hope I make it out of the other end. This team is likely to be so bad that it’s going to make us long for the ‘success’ of the Senators.

My first game — a day-timer against the Phillies — is less than three weeks away. That will be followed by games against the O’s, the Dodgers, the Tigers, the Cubs, the Astros, the Cardinals, the Phillies (again) and the Mets. It’s the first time I’ve purchased even part of a season ticket plan, and it’s going to be hard to root for this team (particularly the pitchers), but a day at the park is so much fun that I’ll just hope they don’t get killed too often.

North Carolina, we own you

Note to basketball fans in the state of North Carolina: Don’t mess with the greater D.C. metro area.

You would have thought you learned your lesson last year, when George friggin’ Mason spanked the Tar Heels and sent you home from the NCAA basketball tourney. You would have thought that Duke, which gets tortured by Maryland almost every year and got clubbed at home by Georgetown earlier this season, would have clued you Tar Heels fans in…but no.

As a result, it was Georgetown’s turn this year to bring the pain. Now, your elimination by Mason last year, as you rebuilt from your 2005 NCAA title and the subsequent stripping of your talent by the NBA, was at least a little understandable (especially after Mason beat last year’s best team, Connecticut).

This year, though, you were fully reloaded and seemingly on a drive to win another title. I don’t think so.

Sure, you’ve all been trained in faking fouls whenever an opposing player so much as generates a breeze in your direction, and the refs went along for a half in the Georgetown game (even after John Thompson III went nuts) before they caught on. In the end, though, Georgetown beat you by playing smarter and tougher when it counted. They tore you into little pieces and you and your deep bench were beaten up in overtime as though you were all schoolgirls facing the toughest guys in school. Goodbye.

Next up for the Hoyas: Ohio State. I really think Georgetown can put the hurt on the Buckeyes and play for the national title. Unfortunately, I think the *real* national title bout will be played on the other side of the bracket, where UCLA and Florida are truly scary and where I suspect the winner should be able to dispatch Georgetown.

But the basketball-rabid state of North Carolina has been denied yet still again another title, which will send people there into a fit, and that makes the entire NCAA tournament worthwhile as far as I’m concerned.

The dull bit

The really uninteresting part of The Show is in full swing, and the lesser lights are getting clipped in no particular order. This week’s departee basically was culled from the herd for being too uninteresting — because she has some impressive chops.

Nosferatu lives, though, as does the this year’s version of the modestly talented but appealing-to-the-little-girls boy. I watched Chicken Little go through this pain-fest last year — week after week of clearly being less talented than the others, and knowing it to be true, and being trudged out to perform again. It’s really awful to watch.

We’ve got about another four or five weeks to go until we start thinning the really top-notch talent, although history indicates that someone will be sent home many weeks too early. Until this little scenario gets more Darwinistic (and I find ‘learning-and-growing’ contestants I can root against), I’ll pay less attention.