Juggalonely

Over the past week or so I have been stepping back through the Six-or-so Joker's Cards of the Dark Carnival. For those who are already confused, I am referring to the series of albums by the Insane Clown Posse.

For those who know me, I am a self proclaimed Juggalo. Though I have not been listening to ICP since the beginning, I actually got into ICP and the Dark Carnival in mid-to-late '96 starting with The Riddlebox. I knew rather quickly this music was for me. I have been a Juggalo since. Anxiously awaiting each new card and accompanying albums.

Though The Riddlebox will always hold a special place for me because it was my first of the Joker's Cards, the Amazing Jeckel Brothers captured me and would not let go. The first of the Dark Lotus albums came out and suddenly I started to get the big picture.

Finally, the long awaited final Joker's Card, The Wraith: Shangri-La arrives on the scene. Everything came into focus. Now I have always been a religious person and to hear how the joker's cards put it all out there, I was very pleased and the connection to the music I had loved so much was even more clear.

Now, over the past few years I have become increasingly disillusioned. For years when I would see someone with ICP memorabilia I would always make a point to speak to them. When I first started doing this, I would normally get a favorable reaction and occasionally a negative. During the good time I did however meet one of my best friends. Eventually I got to the point where I would avoid this interaction as the number of these negative encounters began to increase.

Recently the latest ICP album, Bang Pow Boom has come out I've listened to it a few times and enjoyed the heck out of it. In fact, it's right up there with the Joker's Cards. Last week after a desire to listen to "The Real Underground" probably one of my favorite songs, I decided to step back through the past and follow the Dark Carnival from the beginning and end with the current carny Bang Pow Boom. It occurred to me that the juggalo nation could use a serious wake up call.

Part of being a juggalo is, as the guys [ICP] have said over and over, it's about family and your homies. The juggalo friends I have are some of the closest friends I have we stick together. I miss the days of seeing someone out in an ICP hat or a Great Milenko shirt, speaking to them and feeling welcome, like a long lost cousin they never knew they had.

I only hope that the true Juggalos and the back-slid Juggalos will hear Bang Pow Boom and decide to "retrace their roots" as I did and come to the same conclusion.

.::. DruiD .::.

..We see the uh.. Earth now...

...This transmission is coming to you...

... from Samus.

At the moment, thank God, I have gotten back into my PC in attempt to recover data from a PC I was reloading. I hope that once I finish with these three PC's that I will be able to spend some time investigating my own computer woes. Maybe then I can get my box reloaded with FreeBSD.

So for the moment....

good news.

When it Snows It Pours

Well, let me begin by saying how unhappy I am.

Admission No. 1)
I've had three PC's at my house for varying lengths of time. I have been trying to reload/repair/do something with each of these PC's ever since they came into my possession. I have felt less than zealous to complete these PC's since they are all for family and I wasn't charging for these.

Admission No. 2)
My home office has been a disaster for some time. In recent history there has been a clear path from the door to my wife's desk and one from the door to my desk which then continues on to my closet door.


Yesterday, after church and visiting with family, I sat down in order to make a dent in my tasks of finishing these pc's and maybe cleaning up my office or at least my desk. I sat down and reloaded one of the pc's I already had the data backed up previously. Meanwhile, I am attempting to figure out why I am having trouble installing a new os (FreeBSD preferably but I'd settle with Ubuntu) on my 1.5 TB harddrive in my computer. DING! Reload finished. w00t! Ok now I go to stop what I was doing and hook my harddrive back up and move the old data back to the newly reloaded PC. All is fine. I then exclaim, “Oh Crap!” I realized that I had neglected to hook up the “broke drive” which is a 100gb sata drive I bought off a guy at a flea market. The reason I call it the broke drive is that the rail for the sata data connector to fit snuggly (not snuggie) into is broke so I just have to jimmy-rig it to stay in place. I do that and boot the PC back up. Comes back up. I start to click on “My Computer” (yes I know it's a windows pc – hush!) BLUE Screen-then-REBOOT “CRAP!”

Well when I boot it back up the computer is doing the good-ol' “Splash-screen - REBOOT” game which I hate oh-so-much! I disable reboot and it tells me, “Unmountable Boot Volume” well after 10 – 15 minutes of swearing. I grab the newly found 40GB drive that I had plans for, load it up crap now it cant find my network card. Oh wait, I have a slipstream that has my driver on it.

I'm going to pull a Kanye West on myself and interrupt myself. All this is after spending hours yesterday attempting to load BSD or Ubuntu onto my 1.5 TB drive, running MemTest 4 against the RAM and a myriad of other tests. None of which had the best video of all time.

Ok, so while I'm letting the slipstream disc run I went to put my daughter down for the night since my wife had been keeping an eye on her during all this. I get her to sleep and put her down. Then I go back into my office and it's rebooting, “cool it's ready!” XP splash screen... REBOOT!

Requiring all the energy in my body I restrain myself from shouting and picking my computer up to throw it through my window. After a bit of cool down I sit back down and start back to work on it.
Unfortunately, with no resolve.

I could have shortened this by saying, “ARGH!!!” but then you wouldn't really know what was going on would you?

Hopefully I'll get SOMETHING resolved soon.

Crazy Mac OS fun tonight...

So this evening I sat down to play on my MacBook Pro -- one which is among the many apple laptops which has issues with sleep/wake. I have tried multiple different solutions and the only one which seems to be the best fit is to let the machine hibernate when closing the lid and wake on power press.

I recently have been attempting to rectify this problem with out much luck. So back to where I started, I sat down this evening and lifted the lid on the laptop... black screen. I press a button, black screen. I press the power button, black screen. Frustrated but not bewildered, I press and hold the power button to power off the laptop. Then power it back on, everything appears normal,
Login Screen, i type my username, then my password, my password again, and my password again. I then am prompted with my password "hint" I try one more time and see that my Mac Book Pro is telling me, that I'm an idiot but it will let me login with a new password but I will not have access to my keychain, however should I relearn my old password I can have my keychain all I want...

WTF?

So I punch in a temporary password, nothing just the login box shaking at me.

WTF?

So I click cancel and login as root. I attempt to change the password and am cursed at in a foreign language (the language of error codes). So after a few minutes of poking around, I learn my home directory... is empty. NOOOOO!!!!!! I then spend several hours attempting to troubleshoot, debug and hack my Mac. Finally I am glad to report, I was able to get into my account with all my stuff in place. I plan to do a write up and add it to my Apple/Mac section of my site (which is seriously starved for content).

Anyway, I'm going to go to bed now.

Happy New Year!