I'm a musician now! (sort of)

OK, I've finally decided to learn how to play an instrument... and the chosen instrument is... the harmonica!
For a few months now I've been thinking about it, and given that in my residence we have 30% of musicians and my neighbor (I mean, the guy that lives next door) has played in a band for 4 years I though Hell yeah! Why not? Bought my 10 hole diatonic harmonica ( C ) and gave it a shot!
So far, so crap. My musical abilities are lower than the Caspian sea, but I think I'm improving (yeah, I've only had it for a week, but hey....)
Anyway, I hope that in time my music will sound different than “a bike with broken breaks” as someone described it.

Conclusions on Linux

For a few years now, I've always been a bit skeptic about Linux. I always knew that they were open source, free and all that stuff, but there were always a few things that made me not wanting to install one distribution, like the eight hundred gazillion versions you have to choose from and that it will take me a hell of a lot of time to get used to it (also that I hate partitions so...)
Finally, a few months later I formated (to install windows 7) and while managing the HDD, I found this 15GB partition for recovery. Given that I have never, ever in my life used that (in any of my 2 computers) and that I am NOT gonna install vista in Spanish (hell no, the translation hurts as much as listening to a chinese saying “Me gustan los burritos”) I decided to also format that and Install the distribution I heard was most widely extended: Ubuntu 8.10
So got my laptop and prepared my body to suffer an entire 24 hours of formatting, installing (2 OS I had never installed before) and configuring. To my surprise this took like a fourth of the time I expected.
Installation was smooth, dual booting was OK. I had my brand new open source OS in my laptop. What to do now? Check the forums!
I think that thats the thing I like the most about Linux, the overwhelming amount of help you can get online. No problem I've had in Ubuntu that didn't get solved as soon as I Googled it.
Oh, another thing I'm really enjoy is the level of customization allowed, you can change every single tiny little button, image or menu to what you think is best. Windows, a little copy-pasting won't be a bad idea this time.
Overall I think Linux is great but it took me lots of hours to configure, from which I reached the conclusion that they are not made for non geeks. Really. I can't leave my home's PC with Ubuntu because I'll have to go back every 3 days to help my mum out, while any Windows version is easy to work with and installation is as simple as double-clicking a file. Linux, you have a long way to go.
UPDATE:
Ubuntu 9.04 is out, lets see the improvements!

Little update

I know I haven't posted anything in a few months but (again) I'm back!

I just came back from some meetings to become a Summer camp monitor, and yeah, had an awesome time, lots of fun, quite instructive (which I presume was the original purpose of the whole thing) and met lots of people. Awesomeness

other than that my life is still the same, same class, same people, same mornings... oh!I bought my new Eastpak Bag! And, like McDonalds, I'm lovin' it! It might have been a leetle expensive (80€!) but it was well worth it! (It kinda looks like Firas' If he hasn't changed it since IB). The thing I like the most 'bout it is the 30 year warranty... 30 years! I'll be 49 and could still have it replaced by a new one!

As soon as I finish this I'll be writing the post about my 2 month Ubuntu experience, so brb!

Speed up Booting time with Windows

Hey there Windows Users!
I bet you'll all want to improve your booting time, moving from a fast computer to a super-fast computer. Here is how I do it:

1. Ccleaner: a simple free program that allows you to (a) Clean useless Megabytes off your HDD and (b) enable and disable programs you won't need for startup (oh, and it also fixed registry issues)
2. Multicore?: surprisingly enough, Windows uses only one processor to boot up, even if you have dual core or quad core. here is how to use 'em all: (1) press start and type "run" (2) in Run, type "msconfig" (3) go to the boot tab (4) advanced options (5) numer of processors. Not this trick only applied if you, obvously have more than 1 processor
3. Disble some services from msconfig: only advanced users, if you think you can handle it, start kicking out some services out of the services tab in msconfig, it will improve booting time slighly

Enjoy!

Jou's back! (kinda)

So yeah, as the title says, Luis Jou, the author of Luis@Keio came back to Europe for a few days
from Japan (its holidays there). I knew already he was to come anytime soon, but didn't know the exact dates, which made it even more awesome the fact that he knocked on my door and when I opened... SURPRISE!
We Spend a few hours talking about his life in Japan and more info that is not in his website (which again I strongly recommend reading) until I had to go to class for some Microeconomics quiz
Anyways Luis, take good care when you're back in Japan and hope next time I'm the one visiting!

Windows 7 features

It’s been now a few days (since the 20th of January) that I’ve the Windows 7 official beta from the Microsoft Website (which I think is not available anymore since.. today) and it works great (same as in my desktop)
Things I appreciate the most from windows 7:

• Automatic Driver detection and installation: so far, I’ve had to install NO DRIVERS for any of my PCs, no graphics card driver, no TV card driver… nothing!
• New Taskbar: the new taskbar has proven much more useful than I expected. The new bar allows you to “pin” programs you use the most (sort of a Quick access icons you used to have since Win 98 or so) but this time you just open the window in the icon, you won’t open more and more tabs, it’s quite useful. Also, if you set your mouse over the preview, the rest of windows become invisible.
• Network management: awesome job, great, simple and bug-less… although I have a complaint: what happen to the “repair” option from XP? The Vista one sucked balls and this one is just useless!
• Boot-Time: reduced like 25%~35% faster than Vista and XP
• Compatibility: I’ve only had one compatibility problem: Nero, but just because I tried to install some prehistoric version, as for the rest 100% working! No complaints this time!
• New Paint and Word pad: Finally! It was about time to change these two older-than-god apps from the Windows OS… now they both look Office 2007-ish and WordPad has now recognition for *.docx formats!
• New Keyboard Shortcuts!: They really are great and extremely useful, Microsoft has really outdone itself with them.

These are the things I appreciate the MOST, but Windows 7 has many more surprises I suggest you install it asap!

Dune and Return

Today (well, at 05:00 AM) I finished the second book of the Dune Series “Dune Messiah”… one word: AMAZING!
Sure the book is thinner than most of the other books in the saga and the beginning is quite boring, but the ending is the best I’ve read in a long time!
Anyways, today I woke up at 14:00, felt guilty, got dressed and went to eat something and now… I’m back on the blog!