Tired // Africa // Music

Just got back (okay, maybe an hour ago) from Kentucky. A trip with Gavin, Janet, Josh, and Wayne that I'll remember for a good long while. Though I'm entirely exhausted, it was really good. I only hope that Gavin and Janet can get some real sleep on their plane, because although it was in some ways a very relaxing weekend, I am definitely more tired than I would have been at the end of a normal weekend.

Ahh yes, a plane. For you see, they are going to Uganda. For a whole month. We actually dropped them off at Dulles International on the way back from Kentucky. They should be flying by now, but don't have good seats at all. They could definitely use your prayers (and mine!). Pray, I think, most of all that they will be able to focus on serving the people in Uganda, and not on how complicated their lives are going to be when they get back. Gavin will be starting a new job, they will be finding and moving into a new apartment, and even more craziness which I won't go into now.

I have to say, spending time in Kentucky seriously rekindled my love for the south. I would love to find an excuse to spend a week in Bean Station, TN later this summer - dunno if it will happen, but it would be nice. Especially if anyone wanted to go with me. Another thing I miss is working at Wesley Woods.

I am planning on following up my insane weekend with an insane trip to Powhatan, VA tomorrow to see Derek Webb (and gosh, hopefully SM as well!) in concert. The tickets are ridonkulously cheap, so...well, yeah. It might only be a three hour drive, if we're really fast and really lucky.

I have been trying to write music. Melodies come to me pretty easily now; it's the words I'm struggling with. I seem to be able to write one verse and one chorus for pretty much any song, but it stops there.

Guitar playing is actually going pretty well, which is excellent. As fun as it is at this point, I expect it will get even more fun over the coming months. I'm very excited. My friends who are Real Guitar Players should feel free to shower me with tips, advice, criticism, gifts, chocolate, money, and sweet sweet lovin' --- uhhh..... I'm leaving now.

One last thing -- Sonic roller-skating girl...if you ever see this, I'll still marry you.

computer things

When your new motherboard/CPU combo boots the first couple of times just fine, then starts not even making it to the POST sequence (and the hard drive access light just stays on), the first thing you should check is whether or not your CPU power cable is plugged in. (BOTH ENDS. MOTHERBOARD AND POWER SUPPLY.) Needless to say, this was not the first, second, or tenth thing that I checked.

Also, when your CD drive doesn't work either - it would probably be a good idea to check your SATA cable rather than worrying about whether your Crysis DVD ruined your drive with all those horrible clicking noises.

Newsflash! Core i7 setups don't work with CPU fans from Core 2 Duo setups! Which means I'm stuck with the generic Intel fan, which is kinda whiny, compared to my Arctic Freezer 7 Pro.

Let's see, what else? Ahh yes. Windows 7 can't seem to set up wireless drivers as easily as Ubuntu. Silly Microsoft. What else? I'm loving how Linux sees my new CPU as eight separate processors.

If Amarok 2 is annoying you (and it probably is), at least you now know that you can make all the icons come back by installing the kde-icons-oxygen package via Synaptic (or apt-get!). Getting sound to work seems a bit more complicated, but I think I installed mostly xine packages, especially the one about plugins-all or something like that.

Anyone looking for a motherboard, CPU, and 4 GB of RAM to start them down the road to a pretty hot computer? Only caveat being that this motherboard's S3/S4 'sleep' (often called suspend) functionality has never worked, and won't work for you either.

______________________________

PART TWO:

HECK YES. Best part of the day so far was learning how to re-enable my wireless card after resuming from S3 (in Ubuntu, though this should work in pretty much any flavor of Linux). The only thing you really have to know is the name of the kernel module/device driver for your wireless card -- oh, and the name of your wirelss network interface, which is usually either wlan0 or ra0. The name of my kernel module is rt61pci.

1. ifconfig wlan0 down
2. modprobe -r rt61pci
3. modprobe rt61pci
4. ifconfig wlan0 up
5. dhclient wlan0

Since I know you're curious, this next list actually describes what those commands are doing:

1. Deactivating your wireless interface. This is probably already the case if things aren't working, but it's hard to know. If running 'ifconfig' doesn't report wlan0 as "UP", then it's already down, and this step is unnecessary.
2. Removing the kernel module. Also possibly unnecessary, but better safe than wondering-why-your-wireless-internet-connection-won't-just-work.
3. (re)Loading the kernel module. Definitely necessary, and the important step that your computer is sadly leaving out when resuming from sleep.
4. Activating the wireless interface. After running this, ifconfig will report wlan0 as UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST, most likely. The UP part is the important one, since all the others were showing up before you did your magic.
5. Getting an IP address from the router! This took me a while to finally figure out - I tried manually assigning myself an IP address, but it didn't work. I don't know if that's because I didn't actually communicate with the router, or because it was already taken...regardless, using dhclient got me an IP address in no time, and all of a sudden, everything WORKS.

If you're dealing with this sort of issue, the best thing to do is to write these commands in a script and put it somewhere will it will get auto-executed on resume from sleep. I'm stealing this script from someone else, and adding the dhclient step for (y)our benefit. If you run these commands directly (within a terminal), you'll need to remember to use 'sudo' for each one, since you're not allowed to do these things unless you are root. The ones in bold are the actual meat of the script:

#!/bin/sh

case $1 in
hibernate|suspend)
;;
thaw|resume)
ifconfig wlan0 down
modprobe -r rt61pci
modprobe rt61pci
ifconfig wlan0 up
dhclient wlan0
;;
help)
echo “$( basename $0 ): Reinitializes wireless rt61pci after a suspend”
;;
*)
echo “$( basename $0 ): called wrong”
exit 1
;;
esac

It is important that you put this particular script under /etc/pm/sleep.d/, or wherever your distro puts the scripts that it runs during "suspend events".

experience

One thing I may have realized for the first time this evening was a result of the following train of thought: we as humans are continually having new experiences. Feeling ways and thinking thoughts we haven't before. These strike us as very new and different, and indeed they are. As an unintended result of our recognition of just how new and different these experiences are, we tend to somehow come to the belief that these experiences are unique to ourselves in an important way...that is, I am the only person who has ever experienced quite this type of sensation. This is bogus logic. There is absolutely no logical connection between having an entirely new and unexpected experience, and the reality of whether or not someone else has experienced the same thing. Isn't it rather likely that they simply haven't gotten around to experiencing many of the things we have, while we're just now getting around to experiencing what they already have?

As Christians, we rightly understand life to be a progression. Often we allow ourselves to believe that if we have had certain experiences that others haven't, we have necessarily progressed farther than they. While this seems to make sense, I suggest that it does not. I will endeavor (regardless of how much wiser and better I stupidly think myself to be) to actually believe those who say that they have undergone the experience I am undergoing, and receive their wisdom with joy.