This is the .asoundrc that works for centre, front and rear, dumbass.
pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm “surround51”
slave.channels 6
route_policy duplicate
}
I was getting pretty pissed off at Nautilus because it was taking ages to display directory contents, plus hogging CPU, and occasionally RAM, too. I didn’t recall having done any updates to it, and it used to work just fine, even in music and photo directories with upwards of 1000 files. It was getting so bad that I seriously considered updating my backups and finally getting around to the Intrepid upgrade I’ve been putting off since I installed 8.10 on my laptop and just sort of “lost interest” with the desktop because it works well. Then, I remembered messing around with stuff last Saturday and tried to recall what I’d done. I couldn’t, so I poked about for a while and finally discovered…
System > Preferences > Assistive Technologies…and “Enable” was checked.
I remember now that I was playing with festival, just for the hell of it, but forgot to turn off AT, so Nautilus was dutifully preparing to read stuff to me if I wanted, and magnify anything I couldn’t see quite well enough. Very thoughtful of it, but I can see just fine (for now, at least), so I don’t think I need it at the moment. Duh! You’d think that someone who guards every MB of memory and every CPU cycle like a starving dog would have remembered to turn the resource pig off, but no.
No explanation needed beyond “Dutch”. 😛
Dutch Word of the Year
Today the Dutch word of the year was announced and the winner was ‘swaffelen’ which means to sweep the male organ from side to side while banging against an object such as a building. The word came to prominence when a young man posted a youtube video where he ‘swaffled’ the Taj Mahal. Since then most of the world’s major landmarks have succumbed to the same fate. Rival football fans have been known to ‘swaffle’ the opposition’s stadium.
How come Cirque du Soleil didn’t look like that years ago? It used to be a bunch of wiry little French guys who looked more feminine than I do and probably moonlighted as street mimes, but the ones they’ve got on Time Warp right now are none of French, little or feminine. Jesus Christ…it’s like a giant buffet table of big, buff Russians and Romanians. God…I need a shot of vodka. Better make that two, and chill ’em. 😀
Okay, apparently I am firmly bourgeoisie…sue me. I like some paintings and sculptures, but I obviously don’t understand art. I can’t paint much more than a French manicure, or draw much past stick figures (and it amuses me to put stick critters’ legs and L-shaped feet all in one line), and the last time I tried to sculpt anything, it was Play-Doh doll furniture for Andrea when she was a kid, but come on…this is art?
I never paid much attention, but I suppose on some level, I’d known that Jackson Pollock was an abstract painter (I refuse to use the word “artist”), but that catastrofuck up there, painted in 1948, sold for $149,000,000.00. Yes, that’s “million“, and I have no idea why. I was scrolling through a list of most expensive paintings, and was not surprised to see Picasso, Van Gogh, Rubens, Renoir and Cézanne, but Pollock? Furthermore, that painting? It looks like someone turned two six-year-olds loose with a bucket of mud, a bucket of tar and some of that puffy tube-paint that old ladies use to make “I love my grandkids” sweatshirts. I looked Pollock up on an art site to see whether all of his stuff is as terrible as this, and….yep, it is. Picasso is kind of fucked up, what with putting body parts and facial features in new and exciting places, but at least you can sort of see where he was going with it. A jug and a bunch of fruit on a table doesn’t exactly make me gasp at the beauty and marvel at Cézanne’s remarkable talent, but at least it looks like…a jug and a bunch of fruit on a table. I gotta give props to Rubens because I like his stuff even if he liked his ladies on the voluptuous side, and I always did like that ballet class one…Degas, maybe? Dunno, but it’s all soft edges and colours, and I like to look at it because you can almost feel an “anticipation”.
Another of Pollock’s; called No. 5. I guess even he didn’t think it worthy of an actual name, and I can’t say I disagree. This is not art. This is a shite mess of paint splatters that any child would be pleased to be allowed to produce.
Ah, found it. This is, in my bourgeoisie opinion, art, and since I won’t remember, it is Degas, and it’s called École de Danse.
I wish I could remember the name of the one P. sent to me many years ago. All I can recall is that the artist was Russian, no one I’d heard of at the time, and the subject was a distant view of one horse, alone in a field. I quite liked it, but lost the only copy I had when he commandeered all of my floppies to save his stuff when we moved down here. We shared a computer then, so I didn’t have a copy on the HDD because that was “wasting space”. God, I hated sharing a computer, especially with Mr. No You Don’t Need Anything Fun Or Pretty Because It Wastes Space And Resources. Anyway, I liked the painting, and perhaps I’ll run across it again someday.
Now WP can stop nagging me about contacting my administrator to upgrade to 2.7 because it’s done. Yay, me…only a few weeks late! I don’t like the new layout, but that’s probably just because I’m used to the old one, and I’ll survive. Now all I have to do are four billion water changes, which should have been started an hour ago! 😀
When I forget…
Rhythmbox > Magnatune > Classical > American Baroque. Has The Four Seasons and Mozart’s Four Quartets for Strings and Wind.
Okay, semi-yay, me. I don’t like XP and get cranky when I have to use it, but I decided to try to make it look a little better, so maybe I won’t get so irritated. I’d always used the Windows Classic theme with all the bells and whistles turned off to conserve resources, but it’s so goddamned…ugly. I don’t like any of the Luna themes, I don’t want to install anything that’s going to suck resources (XP itself does a fine job of that), and I don’t care enough about the specific theme to fuck around with uxtheme.dll, so I just got the Royale Noir theme and used that. The blue-black was okay without wallpaper, but I hunted down one that someone had made for Vista that had colours I liked, then removed the Vista logo. I customised the display options so that it does smooth screen fonts (otherwise they’re so jagged that they make baby Jesus cry), and does make the text background under desktop icons transparent, but those are the only effects; the rest are turned off. I don’t like having the desktops Dual View, but for some reason, spanning doesn’t work. It works fine with Nvidia Twin View under Linux, but on XP, I can’t choose a resolution that looks right on both monitors, not even if I check the option to allow the screens to use different resolutions. I still don’t like not having a taskbar on the second monitor that would contain the applications running that are on that screen, so I wouldn’t have them all on one, but that’s only somewhat annoying. I installed Google Desktop because I miss my Screenlets when I use XP, but whether or not I’ll keep it depends upon whether it seems invasive or not; I’ll have to watch the firewall and see what it does. Anyway, I can live with it, and I can live with the memory usage. I finally got around to changing the saved password in WS FTP so I can use the context menu option to upload, too. It’s not Ubuntu, but it’s not bad.
I think I drunk-mailed L. last night. I know I meant to, and I’m pretty sure I did. Don’t remember what I wrote, and probably don’t want to remember. Maybe I shouldn’t have turned off Mail Goggles after all! 😛
Gotcha, ya little fucker! You tried to hide in that catastrofuck of CSS, but you’re div.entry-content, and I finally hunted you down. You tried to be 0.8em and make me fucking blind for trying to read you, but I made you 1.0em, and now, you are mine. PWNED, you little bastard. I WIN! Muahahahaha!