Friday evening I dragged myself out of the house and over to Fry's. I bought a 160 gig drive to replace the 80 gig on the laptop, which was getting far too small with the dual boot setup and gigantic sample libraries for applications like this.

I started off thinking I could clone the drive. Let's just say I went to bed at 3am having achieved nothing and came close to putting holes in the wall. No need to go into the horror - but the basic digital mechanics of hard drives are even more primitive than BIOS. Since the average computer user doesn't do crazy shit like try to clone drives, I suppose no one feels pressure to update the technology to something mose usable and flexible.

Saturday was up at 10 am, resigned to a full reinstall. The laptop did not ship with an XP CD, and having no interest in playing by their rules I just downloaded a copy. Spent most of the morning and afternoon reloading everything. The Ubuntu partition, of course, which I installed later that evening, took me 90 minutes to complete, requiring about 10 minutes of actual involvement by me. The XP install isn't bad, but not as stable as it needs to be. If I stick with the music thing, the next laptop (a few years from now) is going to involve the unthinkable. Ugh.

Saturday evening I taught R343L how to solder in exchange for beer (consumed after the soldering was done). Sunday morning I hopped on IRC and asked if she was up for a bike ride that afternoon, and we ended up doing 30 miles (24 miles for her as I had to bike farther to get home), most of which was in some pretty brutal wind. The quads hurt a bit today as does my neck.  I ordered a shorter stem for by bike last night as well, once that is installed the bike should fit great.

Since I haven't talked about it for a while, here is an article on biofuel insanity.

Someone over on Eurotrib also posted the following chart:

The picture is pretty clear - all arable land is now in use, yields are about as good as they're going to get, and our population is well into overshoot, without even including peak fossil fuel effects which are only now starting to show up. There are still rain forests to be cut, but they're going to be used for biofuels, and cutting them down simply results in desertification of land elsewhere anyway. The amount of grain available per capita is going to accelerate downward even faster from the current trend, and very quickly, as fertilizer availability declines, and the near term killer, as biofuel use increases. The sad reality is that life in sub Saharan Africa in particular is going to be mired in misery until after industrial civilization is gone. There is literally no hope for that region. There are too many humans on this planet, and they're going to bear the brunt of our overpopulation disproportionately.

Didn't do too much playing with the music this weekend. I have a basic grasp of ableton live, and battery 3 is pretty straightforward for percussion (even filtering and effects). To go forward, though, I need to learn some basic music theory. Off to the bookstore.