Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

Well, I had a nice little vacation in LA for three weeks.  This past week I bummed around just playing the new Command and Conquer 3: Kane's Wrath.  The weather in Tokyo was quite horrid as we're now experiencing a phenomenon called the "tsuyu" or "rainy season."  Literally, translated it means life sucks shit for about a month as the temperatures skyrocket, the air becomes more humid and you go to work in sweaty, dingy crowded trains.  Minus points if your company enforces a dress code policy of suits.

Another reason why I was offline, so to speak, was that my internet in LA sucked dick.  I use Time-Warner and either my cable modem or router has a problem of constantly rebooting.  I'm not sure what other options I have in LA, but if I move back permanently, that's one thing I'll definitely address.

Then my main system had gone down just before I departed for LA.  Actually, it didn't go down so much as I attempted to upgrade the damn thing from Ubuntu 7.04 to 7.10.  Something I didn't know much about was that the system requires that you use something called a "restricted driver" because I have an NVIDIA video card.  Ubuntu is rather retarded in that the community displaces the driver in a restricted area rather than automatically being integrated when you're building your system.  Even less known is that the driver must be re-upgraded each time or re-enabled during kernel upgrades.  It's truly retarded ideology that seems counterintuitive in spreading Linux as a mainstream desktop.

I ended up buying a new hard drive (a cool Seagate 500 GB) and simply doing a clean install.  After a few unexpected lockups, the system started to experience more smoothness.  I had to re-enable the NVIDIA driver, reboot twice (once where I got locked up), upgraded the base software and booted into KDE (KUbuntu) for all this to work.  I think the next time I decide to upgrade my system, I'll just purchase a new hard drive, externalize my data and do a clean install (well, I'll at least get another external drive, backup my data and then try an upgrade).  Hopefully, the next version of Ubuntu will focus more on system stability with hardware.  You really can't call a system "stable" if it keeps crashing and locking up!

Hopefully, all these issues are behind me as I have more things to deal with in the upcoming weeks.  Got to renew my passport, two credit cards and get my fat ass back in the gym.  At least, things are improving a little here and there....