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2001-07-24 11:14
goodbye Solaris, recent movies, cars
All my work time has been spent installing Solaris and various packages. I got it to the point where I just wanted a new window manager. I thought that would be trivial. It was not. I followed all the directions and chanted the magic incantation, and I wound up with one terminal window and no window manager to speak off (just black background). I gave up at 5pm and went to a movie with Tino[1].
While I was enjoying the comic stylings of the movie, the power was busy going out here and trashing that Solaris machine. Here I thought I could just come in this morning and put a little more time into the window manager with a fresh new attitude, but no. Totally fucked[2]. After checking around the office, I've decided to install SUSE for Sparc hardware. Linux comes with almost all the packages that I installed yesterday on the Solaris OS, so that will be many steps to skip.
Over the weekend, the BMW got new front brake rotors. I did not drive around on no brake pads and destroy the rotors. No. I know better than that. When the car was inspected in January, the sonofabitch who put the wheels back on was apparently terrified of them ever coming off again. So much torque was applied that the rotors warped and seized to the wheel hub. Between all four tires (only the front rotors were replaced, but all the lines were bled so that Tino could replace all the brake fluid with the fancy German stuff), at least an hour was spent trying to get the freaking rotors off. They are held on by one screw, which is really just for assembly. The rotor is ultimately held in place by pressure from the wheel nuts...you can see where this is going, yes?
Ultimately, the brakes were done and we went to Winchester for pie. We then decided to let the BMW have a summer vacation and left it in the garage in Front Royal, all clean and repaired. The next thing to be done to it, I think, is a new muffler. It will not be a stock muffler but a slightly more...um...noisy one. Man, I miss that car just talking about it.
I'm driving the Miata today. It's a cool car, and it runs great and all that, but it's very tiny and it doesn't need much engine to go fast and and and...it's just not the same as that growling German goodness that comes out of the BMW. I drove the truck all last week, and it has kitsch value and bigness (you can see everything around you with zero effort, and that's pretty nice), but I'll think kind thoughts about the BMW while it's resting.
Tino swears the clean and rested cars run better. That car runs pretty darn well already.
[1] We saw America's Sweethearts. Yes, I read the reviews, but it has John Cusack in it, so I would see it at some point anyway since I seem to have made a habit of seeing all his movies. It did exactly what we needed. It was a funny diversion, and I found it much more entertaining than the reviews would indicate. The critics were much kinder to Legally Blonde, which we've also seen. It was equally funny and diverting but the plot was yet more farfetched and full of holes. I really don't see how it was "better" than America's Sweethearts.
[2] The machine didn't come back up clean and the fsck had failed on the / partition. I could have run it manually (which is what Solaris was telling me to do), and I did do it for a while, but at one point, a bunch of gibberish appeared and it stopped checking the disk. At this point, I issued a stop and booted from the SUSE disk. Goodbye Solaris!