It’s time once again to install the newest release of Ubuntu. Okay, it was time last Thursday, but I’ve been either too busy or too uninspired to back up the stuff in my /home, and I don’t want to even think about the mess on my storage drive (I should, but I can upgrade without bothering that). I thought about just doing a dist-upgrade with apt, but I’d still have to make backups just in case, and I think I’d rather have a nice, clean install anyway. Still, I’ve installed a lot more stuff than just the base, and although it’s easy enough to install new things with Synaptic, or by downloading the debs, it’s not so easy to remember it all. Habit would send me to the Sound and Video menu, but I may or may not remember that the app with the little yellow “thing” (a tag?) as its icon is called EasyTAG, and it’s much more difficult to install something when you don’t remember what it’s called. Anyway, I went looking for a way to generate a list of installed applications, and it turns out that I can do even better than that–I can generate a list, then use that list to automatically install them all after I get the new version of Ubuntu installed. Since I’ll never remember on my own…

In a terminal, type:

dpkg --get-selections | grep -v deinstall > ubuntu-files

That generates the file list (in case I forget, it can be called something besides “ubuntu-files”), and puts it in your /home. Then, all you have to do is save it on removable media, or email it to your Gmail or something. Actually, you don’t even have to close the terminal to mail it; you can do the whole thing in just one line if you want:

dpkg --get-selections | grep -v deinstall > ubuntu-files; cat ubuntu-files | mailx -s “ubuntu-files” my.mail@myaddress.com

Once you have the base install done for the updated version of Ubuntu, copy the file back to your HDD (/home or wherever), and open a terminal. Type:

dpkg --set-selections < ubuntu-files

That will tell dpkg to set the stuff in the list as the selection. Now, install it.

sudo dselect

That’ll open a dselect session, then just type / to let dselect install your applications. When it’s finished, type Q and hit Enter to exit dselect.

Apparently, that’s all there is to it. I don’t know for sure whether I’ll use this method or not, but if I take a look through my stuff and decide I don’t have too much installed that I never use, and after I uninstall that goddamned RealPlayer (curse you, BBC) so it won’t be on the list, I just might do it that way. A helluva lot faster than the way I always did it in Windows, which was to take screen captures with the Start Menu open, then crop the images and save them as JPG, then print them and either install the apps from CD, or go find them and download them again. Just another reason that Linux (or Mac, or fucking Amiga, for that matter) is superior to any version of Windows. 😀

I don’t dust my computer nearly often enough. Yeah, “shoemaker’s children are the ones running barefoot”. Tonight, though, I noticed the GPU was running a little hot–just a couple of degrees–so I crawled under my desk and took a look. I may have bought the windowed case because it looked nerdy, but it comes in handy when I want to see how much dust is in there. Dust….yeah, there was dust. I usually don’t use canned air because it’s fucking expensive and there’s a compressor downstairs specifically for dusting computers, but I was too lazy to disconnect everything and haul it down, so I hunted down a can of air and went to work. I didn’t even pull the box out from beneath the desk; just pulled off a side panel and crawled under with a flashlight. I was madly blowing the giant mutant dust bunnies toward the bottom when I discovered that CleanSafe canned air is probably not all that popular with huffers. It’s got something called Bittergent in it, which is supposed to make the taste so unpleasant that even stupid teenagers won’t want to get high on it. If the small amount I could taste from using it in the enclosed space beneath my desk is any indication, I think you’d have to be a die-hard huffer in desperate need to go anywhere near that goddamned stuff. Bitter? You bet, and a whole bottle of water still hasn’t got the taste out of my mouth. Blech!

I finally got around to beating the game. I did most of it….oh, probably a year ago, but I so rarely use XP that I never got around to finishing the last three levels. If I played, I’d just “Quick Play” one of the unlocked levels. Yesterday was so crappy outside, though, that I got bored with all of my games (bored enough to be inspired to work), so I decided to finish Peggle.

Forget where I saw it, don’t know who wrote it, don’t care. It’s just plain fucking funny.

Didn’t you know? If we allow gays to get married, it will only embolden them, and then they will get all Mission Impossible on helpless, unsuspecting heteros. You know, a married couple will be in their bedroom, innocently having sex in the dark with the man on top–just the way god intended–but then, crouching in the shadows of the ceiling, there will be this gay dude hovering up there in a big spy web, infrared goggles on, lubed up and ready to go. He’ll zero in on that poor man’s butthole like a bullseye and then with split-second timing, right before the man orgasms, he’ll go shooting down on his bungee cord, plunging balls-deep into the man and turning him forever and ever gay and totally ruining his marriage and forcing him to frequent glory holes in no less than three states a month.

True, too. WTF is the matter with people? Who gives a shit if gays want to get married? If a lesbian couple moved in next door, married or not, that doesn’t mean I’m suddenly going to stop looking at hot guys (NEVAR–until I die, baby!) I’m hetero because it’s what I am, and nothing is going to change that, just as nothing would change me if I were gay instead. Jesus, leave them alone and let them get married; they might as well be as miserable as the rest of us. (Just kidding!)

It’s said that Icelandic is perhaps the most difficult language to learn. That British uber-genius with the bad teeth (wait–that’s redundant) learned enough to do an interview on TV in a week, but…he’s a fucking genius. For the rest of us, Icelandic is a goddamned difficult language. Anyway, our right-wing political arseholes…Republican. Yawn, boooo-ring. Theirs (though I suspect theirs are less Guns N’ God than ours)? Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn. Bahahaha! What a great word! I saw that and had to go look it up because I thought it was just gibberish someone made up, Monty Python “nasti møøse-bite” style, but nope, it’s real. The only thing it’s missing is the Þ.

Ah, found the clip. Even spoken that slowly, by a non-native, I understood about four words, and only because they sound the same in Swedish and Danish.

Is it sad that I can identify a spider as being an orb weaver from an 100×75 pixel thumbnail that is 90% background and 10% spider? Oh, yes…it’s sad.

I know it’s an orb weaver because it has a chunky spider-butt and it’s in the characteristic pose of “Ball O’ Disturbed Orb Weaver”. If the thumbnail had been twice the size, I wouldn’t have had to click to see that it was a spiny orb-weaver. Granted, none of this is a definite ID, but it would seem to suggest that I spend perhaps a little too much time with critters that have 3-4 times as many legs as I do.

Interesting how a rational, reasonable adult can be all of confident, competent, capable and accomplished, not in the least shy, at equal ease with strangers and friends and yet actually fear being “thrown away” (in a figurative sense, of course) for telling a close friend about an experience that evoked deep emotion. Perhaps especially when the experience itself had merit as an interesting story. Human beings can be such odd dichotomies.

Granted, this is in no way scientific and comes from some website called “What They Play”, but still….

Jesus Christ…a little sexually repressed, are we? “Two men kissing” rates a point higher than a severed fucking head even though the two men would be no more real than the CGI head? So nobody really cared about the word “fuck”–that’s good because a word has only as much meaning as we give to it and I use “fuck” as a modifier all of the time–but a man and woman having sex rates highest of all? How the hell do these dumbass (religious, evangelical) fools think they got here? Immaculate conception? Found in the cabbage patch? The goddamned stork? When will America (well, some of it) learn that when you repress natural biological desires–yes, like sex–it’s like putting a cover on a boiling pot of water? You can hold it down for a while, but that doesn’t mean it just magically goes away. As pressure builds, the steam has to go somewhere, and when it does, more often than not, someone gets burnt. I’m not advocating screwing in the middle of the street (not that it would really bother me if the parties involved were consenting adults), but for crissake, stop denying that you are human, and (OMG!!!111) have….wait for it…normal human desires! Yes, it’s true–sex is….perfectly normal! Catholics, let your priests have normal sex with women (or other men) and maybe they won’t be fondling altar boys. Fundies, leave the lights on and take off your socks, and maybe let the wife on top for once, then maybe you won’t need so many whores. Not a single one of us would be here or ever would have been here were it not for sex. Not even Jesus. Besides, if you relax and enjoy it, you might even like it! 😉

Zombie nerds!

Upon seeing the sentence, “And you’re right about the lame lameh (I can’t do the accent),” most people would read it and forget about it, but I could not. It’s supposed to be lamé, and anyone with a ten-key pad can do accented letters even in a “lamé” OS like Windows. I tried for a whole day to forget about it, but nope…I had to log in and tell Mick that he can indeed do accented letters and special characters, and how. I even provided a helpful link to a list of the most popular codes. Still, my OS is superior (hee) because “compose + ‘ + e” makes sense; it looks like what it’s supposed to be. Even Å¡ wasn’t hard to figure out once I realised it couldn’t be a comma because that’s for ç. Does “Alt+0233” make sense for é? Of course not, but it’s hardly a surprise…

Sample Linux kernel error: “kernel panic – not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)”

Sample Windows kernel error: “STOP: 0x00000077”

Like everything else in Windows, the useful stuff is hidden by obscure codes so that anyone who didn’t write the goddamned thing (and even some people who did) can’t do anything MS didn’t think they’d want to do, or fix anything that goes wrong. An idiot OS, for sure!

There are some truly disgusting foods eaten in various parts of the world. Korean silkworm pupae (canned in their own murky grey-brown “gravy”), the Korean wine with baby mice in the bottom of the bottle. The Philippines (China, too, I think) has balut; a fertilised duck egg that is allowed to develop until the fÅ“tal duck has tiny, crunchy bones, then boiled. The maggot-infested Sardinian cheese that weeps for its own existence, and is actually illegal in the only place on earth where anyone might actually want it. From Mexico, cuitlacoche, which, in English, is called “corn smut” and is a fungal disease that would cause a US corn grower to destroy the plants…and a Mexican to eat it. In Mexico, someone once looked at giant ant eggs and thought, “Hey, I’m hungry!” so you’d better look carefully at the contents of that burrito. Authentic Chinese bird’s nest soup that is actually made from birds’ nests because swiftlets make their nest not from twigs and grass, but from strands of their own saliva, which is apparently tasty. Yum–bird spit! In Iraq, the innocent-sounding word “pacha” actually means, “whole, boiled sheep’s head”, and is probably the only sheep dish in the world that makes fucking haggis seem appetising. Jellied eels from the Thames (and if they’re caught in the Thames, probably toxic eels as well). The Norwegians’ world-famous lutefisk, though after reading over this list, lye-soaked cod actually doesn’t sound too bad. Having heard the taste description “fish-flavoured Jell-O”, though, I think I’ll give the lutefisk a miss.

It wasn’t until I was looking last night for fish disease information and ended up on an aquaculture site that I discovered Sweden isn’t off the hook. While it is true that Swedes are somewhat guilty for lutefisk, too, its origin is Norwegian, so I’d given them a pass. The link was to a story about an airline ban on cans of something called “surströmming”. I think the literal translation for “strömming” is something like “swarm”, and the word is used for herring because of the way they swim in schools. I don’t know that because I have any particular love for herring (though kippers are pretty good), but because B once told me, when I’d asked a question about Karlskrona, that people from Blekinge Län are called “herring stranglers”. He told me the Swedish name, but I forget. I’m sure that Blekingar have some equally unflattering name for SkÃ¥ningar, but I didn’t ask because I also know that Swedes are proud not only of their country, but of their läns (länen?), so it would have been rude. (I am curious, though.) Anyway, that’s how the subject of herring came up; now back to surströmming…

The literal translation is “sour herring”, and that is just about the biggest goddamned understatement I can imagine. What is it? It is…fermented Baltic herring. Why was it banned on airlines? Well, mostly because the can is under pressure. A can under pressure? Yes, a can under so much pressure that it’s bulging. Why? It’s still “working” when it’s canned. Also, there’s the issue of the smell.

How the hell did anyone, anywhere, ever come to the conclusion that after fish had been stored at warm temperatures in a barrel for two weeks, with the odours of rancid fat, rotten eggs (from the hydrogen sulphide gas) and decomposing fish wafting off it, that the thing to do with it was…eat it?!?

Wife: “Oh, goddammit! We’re out of preserving salt, and now I’ve got this big barrel of herring left over. Well, I can’t lift it, and Björn is off on a fishing trip, or says he is, so I guess it’ll just have to stay here, sitting in the summer sun.”

Two weeks later…

Husband: Honey, I’m home!

Wife: Well, it’s about damned time…and you smell of perfume and stale akavit. Where have you been? Never mind–I want you to move a barrel of rotten fish. It’s been sitting out there in the sun for two weeks and from the smell, you’d swear the New York garbage collectors were on strike again. The wallpaper is starting to peel in the living room. I want it out of here, now!

Husband: Okay. Can you make me a sandwich while I’m gone?

Outside…

Husband: Jesus H. tapdancing Christ–what a stink! Wheee-ooo! That’s some baaaaad shit right there–my eyes are watering and I can’t breathe. What the fuck was she thinking? Why didn’t she at least dump it…wait…actually, you know, that doesn’t look too bad. Hmmm…well, it’s fish. I like fish. Maybe…yeah, I guess it looks like it’s still okay. (shouting) Hey, honey! Never mind the sandwich!

How? Just how does anyone decide this is a good idea? What must be wrong with the mind that would conceive of this? Modern surströmming is made by rotting (okay, “fermenting”, then) the fish in barrels for a couple of weeks, then canning the result. It’s still “working” even after it’s canned, and the gases cause the can to bulge. If I saw this on the shelf at Schnuck’s, I’d go get the manager before someone died from food poisoning.

An open can, and yes, a different brand. Defying all rational explanation, there are actually different brands because there is apparently enough of a market to support more than one company manufacturing this shit. The smell is so bad when the can is opened that it is always eaten outside, and many people open the can under water to help smother the stench.

No, Sweden, we will not let you off the hook for utterly revolting foods, even if this unholy concoction is eaten only in the north (I guess the southerners are more sensible, or have actual, functioning taste buds and a sense of smell). Surströmming, my arse…how do I say, “so utterly revolting that the very fabric of space and time was rent asunder” in Swedish? Actually, this might have some use in the US market as a diet aid. One look at it and you wouldn’t want to eat for a week. Too bad Sweden can’t export it because airlines consider it a potential weapon. Oh, wait–so do I!