Home box

I'm watching Aliens 3 on my computer. It is a hight quality movie. Earlier it was running all choppy. The video would simply skip every couple of seconds. There was something going on with X. When I ran a top, X was eating the machine alive. ON my other box fast-user-switching was at 99% CPU.

For as much as I think I know about computers, I have no idea what was killing both my machines. I rebooted the server. I just shut down some programs on the desktop and kept going. After a while, the desktop stopped with the jumbley video and the movie started playing properly. I have no idea why.

On a Windows box, you normally don't recover even with mass quantities of elbow grease thrown at it. Then, it happens all over again. With Linux, at least you can go poke around and try to figure out what is going on. You don't need any new tools either. Most of the utilities you need for poking about under the bonnet are already installed in a default rig. I've wanted to put together a thumb USB drive with lots of utilities, but I'm lazy and will blow it off until it is too late, so I'll rip someone else's work off.

A couple of us had a discussion of Linux on the home front this afternoon. It turns out most of the older guys (myself not included) are all about windows at home. Several of the younger guys have no problem setting up and using a Linux box at the house. Maybe I'm drawing a bad conclusion based on age, but it is nice having someone to discuss the trials and tribulations of getting DVDs to play for example. There are a couple guys far better at this sort of thing than I. For example, one of the guys plays WOW under wine on a Linux box. I'm proud of him. I got Second Life to work kind of, but that was a whole different can of worms.

Night Kelly must go to bed. Morning Kelly will be upset. Well, Night Kelly says "screw Morning Kelly" again. "I want to blog." Morning Kelly will just have to get over it.