The Tapes (dutch band)

Inspired by a post of their albums on the usenet (yes, I'm too lazy to digitize my own vinyl) I scanned my negatives from dutch band The Tapes today.
I saw them play two times, in 1980 in the "Paard van Troje" in Den Haag (The Hague) and in 1981 on the Rotterdam "New Pop" festival. The band disbanded in 1982 (read some more in dutch here). Some members continued playing with other artists but as far as I know they never reformed, which in a way is to be admired but on the other hand the world could do with more good music. Releasing the old albums on cd would be a start.
Anyway, the first batch of scans is here on Webshots. The second batch will follow. Let's hope it's the start of a revival.

LAN party

We had a great time yesterday. Daniël still wanted to hold a LAN party for his friend and we finally decided the autumn break was well suited for that. So we gathered three pc's downstairs and connected the network with no real problems. The hardest work was choosing the games and installing them. The day started when we drove to Daniël's friend Eric to get his pc and stuff. He was having some connection problems caused by ZoneAlarm which he had not configured correctly (basically, he was refusing local connection attempts so we shutdown the program which solved all problems).
After a while the rest of the friends arrived and the fun really began. The pre-installation and figuring out of the games paid off here, unfortunately Eric was lagging behind here a bit because he had yet to install some games and we hadn't figured out the ZoneAlarm stuff yet. After we ordered pizza the games went on for another few hours until we gently told the guys that maybe home would be a good idea.

Strange Angel

Saw a strange movie this weekend: The Lost Angel.
The movie starts with a nice tempo, intriguing killings and it has interesting characters but in the end there are so much holes in the plot and unexplained sidesteps that it left us feeling frustrated. For instance: Billie is called out of her bed because something is afoot with the secretary. When she arrives she asks what is going on, only to hear that there is not much going on. The policeman is sitting in his car so how does he know that there's something going on? Also, the team is under investigation by Internal Affairs but after Billie throws a nice punch at one of the IA detectives in the interrogation room noting more is heard from it.

BHV

Friday I had my yearly training BHV (Bedrijfs Hulp Verlening), which consisted of putting out fire and evacuation training in the morning and EHBO in the afternoon (mostly reanimation training). And yes, the resuscitation rules have changed again this year :-/
Anyway, an interesting day and many lessons learnt.

Silly moment during lunch break

Camera phones are there to be tried out, no matter what. Good thing I had finished eating but damn, Joris was fast clicking the shutter.

Quarter Inch universe

I finally got hold of a copy (yes and I do mean a copy, I had to because it was sold out) of the Mecano collection "The 1/2" Universe". This is a collection of their music from the beginning of the 1980's. I had (and still have) two ep's ("Subtitled" and "Untitled") a single ("Escape the Human Myth") and an album ("Autoportrait"). I still really like the first EP's and the single. The Meccano imagery on the sleeves, the way the music sounds a bit 'rough' yet extremely well constructed and performed, and the lyrics with their fascination with Russia and communism. A few years later, "Autoportrait" never did much for me.
Fast forward 23 years and listening to the first cd of the collection on the iPod I am still fascinated by the music and lyrics (the wife keeps complaining about the charcoal accent of the singer). But then comes the second cd and although the singer's voice is very much improved, during the first tracks I keep thinking of the fast forward button. Halfway through there are a few good tracks but after that you cut to their first 'punk' single and a few live tracks (which often sound distorted).
Well, I have a feeling of disappointment and feeling 'glad I didn't actually buy this'. It's great to have this stuff available on cd (well, ehhh, it's not available anymore) but it's not a compilation I will listen to often.
I think I can (and will) compile one single cd from this containing the music I really love and will keep loving.

Working on the Wireless

Now it would be nice to get the wireless card to work (the wired network card works without tweaking). I have a Linksys WPC54G v3 card which means I'm in for a lot of fun. I first wanted to try to get it working without using ndiswrapper, but I also use WPA encryption on my wireless network. So first, according to the ubuntu WifiDocs I start with:
sudo apt-get install network-manager
sudo apt-get install network-manager-gnome
But it's not much use as the system doesn't detect my wireless card.

In the meantime, I found this message on the forum which is fairly recent and seems to do the trick. Will have to use ndiswrapper but what the heck, if it will work.

Yep, wireless is up. Basically, the instructions in that last thread make it work. It makes you use the windows drivers in ndiswrapper and use wpa_supplicant to take care of the WPA.

This looks so much better

Okay, back to the Toshiba Tecra 8000 laptop. I found that although Xubuntu claims to be the Linux distribution for older hardware, the standard installer requires too much power. After reading on forums I found I probably needed to use the 'alternate' boot cd. And yes, that does the trick: the first menu option after startup is 'text mode installer' and that works like it should. Hey, if I want to install a system I have no need to wait 15 minutes until a desktop is loaded (in memory) that I won't be using for the install anyway (I do get the impression that installation takes a bit long in text mode, though). It's great to have an alternative but I'm a bit disappointed that the normal installer just 'hangs' instead of telling me I don't have enough memory.

I had to change the display setting to this:
sudo vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf :
- Monitor section, change HorizSync to 36-52 and VertRefresh to 36-60.
- Screen section, added "1024x768" to all display subsections
I found the Linux on Toshiba Laptop site to be very useful for this.

uugghhh

Bad night sleep caused by what seemed like an eternal thunderstorm.
... need ... more ... coffee!

Good old Snake

After downloading a torrent from an old Snakefinger concert I attended I (finally) took up to scanning my old negatives. I posted some on the torrent site and also offered to put some pictures up for the Snakefinger Myspace page. There are already a few on there (in the slideshow) but I decided to also put them on our Webshots page.

Will have to wait

Bought a home theatre system today. Joy with cables all through the room. Rest of the weekend will probably be surround bliss. Laptop will have to wait.

Finally

Was bored today and therefore butchered the Ubuntu 6.06 installaton on my old laptop (Toshiba Tecra 8000). It was dreadfully slow so I uninstalled so much stuff that it finally just stopped working (nothing happening after reboot).

So then I discovered Xubuntu which looked like it might be what I needed. Downloaded the image, burned it and fired up the thing. I thought I had it installing (which is quite a feat since Linux thinks my display can only do 480x300 or something like that, I had to guess that the right selections were selected because there is no scrolling on the installation screens) but came back after shopping to find it was still... only 0%.

Turns out it's a known problem (like http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=1534301), which is boring because Xubuntu is meant to be made for old computers. Oh well, more tomorrow.