Two young girls came by the house yesterday. At first we mistook the doorbell for aspiring trick-or-treaters, but instead they came bearing the most awesome of surprises: a kitten.

We took it in, as it was in need of a home, so the story goes. It — “Bonesaw", if the past 24 hours are any indication as to its True Name — is a rambunctious little bugger, as you can see here interested in playing with Styrofoam peanuts. It goes to the vet tomorrow for all that good vet stuff.

Bonesaw took some coaxing out from under my bed yesterday, but today it is already seeming pretty acclimated to the house, running around and recognizing people and calls. He (we’re pretty sure on “he") likes curling up with Dasha when it’s time for sleeping, and coming up to Peter or I to play with Styrofoam or things dangling from our desks.

What a random event this has been. Also, TDS installed fixed wireless today, and so far I’m very pleased.

… and in other news, other stuff rocks.

I bought another hard drive that I’m not quite sure what I’ll use it all for so that I could install Windows XP (so that I could install The Orange Box, which I also bought today). The hardware install was easy breezy, but XP was a nightmare.

The SP2 install disc couldn’t speak AHCI. Okay, fair enough. Switch the disk controller to IDE and get Windows going long enough to install the SATA drivers and switch back. No problem.

Noting, of course, that Windows cannot understand not being the first disk in the computer when it boots, leading to necessary GRUB hacks to keep things from getting confused.

Install otherwise goes well, I spend the time to get all the software and drivers updated, except for one small snafu: the Intel drivers for my disk controller won’t install. After some googling, it turns out that they’ll only install if they see SATA hardware. An annoying catch-22 when you need to use IDE mode to even get the OS installed.

I struggled with that for a bit before finding a helpful post about essentially bootstrapping the driver via a registry hack long enough to let Intel think everything is fine and install the driver proper. And that pretty much saved my install.

So stupid, to hear those claims that Windows is an easier install, and whatnot, when annoying shit like this still happens. I was, literally, running my hard drives in a degraded mode because Windows/Intel can’t — through normal channels — get the necessary drivers installed. And, come to think of it, I wonder if Aaron’s computer is suffering from the same fate, because I don’t remember having to dig into this stuff at all for his install.

It’s days like this that I love open source and easy (if time-consuming) installs.

I got Wine to play Civilization IV today. It’s hardly perfect, but it seems like it’s enough to allow me to play without having to reboot, which is great seeing as how I…

• …don’t have Windows installed and
• …forgot to make room on my disks for a Windows installation so I don’t quite know what I want to do about that.

Screenshot 1, screenshot 2.

If I knew a Wine developer, I’d hug them. Apparently at least part of The Orange Box works in Wine, too, and I want to play Portal badly. Really badly.

Oh, I nearly forgot, I followed these instructions (altered to use the newest patch/no-CD) to get the game up and running in Wine. Awesome.

Yes, I’m back on the net in full (yes, I was gone for a while). My hardware for the desktop came two weeks ago, but I spent most of the first week diagnosing a bad memory module and most of the second week waiting for the replacement to arrive. But here I am now, faster than ever. The critical goodies:

• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 overclocked to 3.0 GHz
• GeIL 2GB (2 x 1GB) DDR2 800 SDRAM
• NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT (okay, I’ve had this for a while)

And add to that a couple disks and your standard DVD-RW burner and sound card, plug them into massive Logitech speakers and a widescreen monitor, and there’s my new box. Very exciting.

One of the things I want to try to get running, finally, for a change, is either Daggerfall or TIE Fighter. I haven’t looked too much into this renewed effort to get them running, so if anyone out there has experience getting them to work via something in x86_64 Linux, please let me know.

Also, just because I’d noted it elsewhere and was a little interested in the statistics, I calculated my last.fm contribution (results of course skewed by the “who do I tag as this track’s artist?” vs. “who is the world tagging as this track’s artist?” effect):

1. 久石譲 (Joe Hisaishi) — 7,111 of 1,959,578 — 0.36%
2. 浜崎あゆみ (Ayumi Hamasaki) — 4,785 of 7,065,223 — 0.06%
3. 菅野よう子 (Yoko Kanno) — 4,064 of 5,104,007 — 0.07%
4. Apocalyptica — 3,189 of 7,102,324 — 0.04%
5. Vienna Teng — 2,469 of 830,580 — 0.29%
6. Yo-Yo Ma — 1,560 of 761,039 — 0.20%
7. 植松伸夫 (Nobuo Uematsu) — 1,309 of 8,496,818 — 0.01%
8. Tool — 1,146 of 23,762,753 — 0.00%
9. 溝口肇 (Hajime Mizoguchi) — 1,103 of 87,274 — 1.26%
10. Queensrÿche — 1,037 of 1,903,280 — 0.54%

… and Hajime Mizoguchi is likely misleadingly high; a lot of his work on the Escaflowne soundtracks is probably improperly tagged as belonging to Yoko Kanno. Just to put things in perspective, Shrubey (who cheats by never stopping his player) has 6.2819% of Yasunori Mitsuda. Other interesting ones:

13. The Minibosses — 901 of 284,471 — 0.31%
16. Rie fu — 621 of 493,063 — 0.12%
19. Dale North — 522 of 61,124 — 0.85%
29. The Ray Hamilton Orchestra — 357 of 449 — 79.5%
232. Gail Parker — 27 of 126 — 21%

For a long while I was consistently in Joe Hisaishi’s top five for the week, but that has fallen by the wayside as of late. Still, 64,284 scrobbles ain’t bad.