reinvention

My struggles with machines and technology continue but these past days I’ve tried to think more about more important stuff: particularly my children, my spouse, my family, and how I can be a much better father, husband, brother, son. I’ve also been thinking about my purpose again, and whether my purpose lies in continuing to work in technology, or is it in the arts, or somewhere else.

I have these spells of thinking about important things, usually after important incidents that get me thinking. Recently, these things have included my father’s deteriorating health, my inability to cope with my younger children’s exuberance (so to speak), my growing marginalisation from the community cultural development/arts sector.

I will have to think harder about more important stuff more and more. Will write about this more and more too, I hope.

The Guitar Festival’s on again; this is the sixth one, the previous one being two years ago (I think). Last Festival I volunteered to stage-manage their outdoor performance at the Territory Wildlife Park — that was hard work but I enjoyed contributing to the Festival and watching the performances. This year, I am just watching.

After resolving the video card issue, I installed vmware and lots of stuff on the box. The one day, my network stopped working. It was the Marvel built-in NIC acting up — Dan at work saw postings about this issue and warned me about it but as Ubuntu saw the Marvel and it seemed to work, I went ahead and used it.

First I thought vmware was messing up the networking, or that something got corrupted on my Ubuntu system so I reinstalled (silly me), this time with Fedora. Had the same problem! Tried putting in a replacement NIC and that solved the problem.

When we first got these Gigabyte boards, the Marvel/onboard NIC port was covered; James and I removed the tabs to use the Marvels, now much to my regret. Maybe that’s why the ports were covered in the first place.

Anyway, with the NIC problem sorted, I tried installing vmware again, and it would not under Fedora (Core 4). So went back to Ubuntu as I knew vmware worked there, and also I found Ubuntu easier to maintain and extend with apt-get.

Anyway, reinstalled Ubuntu and vmware and its all stable so far.