David Ernst Chats with the World

It’s been eight days since my last post, but unlike other similar delays, this one felt totally justified by my holiday travels. I left last Wednesday by car, and had quite a grueling trip to Allen’s and Cynthia’s house in Cleveland. Nine hours instead of six, due to trying to make up detours around a terrible traffic jam. The next day, Allen and Cynthia and I drove to my Grandmother’s house, which took six harrowing hours instead of four. That was actually the scarier trip, the roads were bad, and the wind was unbelievable. We weren’t sure we’d make it.

But, we did! And, once in St. Marys, I had a great time. I’m amazed by how much I like my relatives. I was only there for about 48 hours, though, and then drove back to Cleveland with my parents, and then to Indy to see Sue and much of her family. The drives back were much easier, thank goodness. It was nice to see Sue and her relatives, particularly enjoyable were the rousing games of Oh Hell Sunday night. But, hey, not surprising that I’d be partial to the card games. :)

And now I’m back home, glad to be in my own house and able to lie in my own bed as I wish. And, hey, maybe I’ll even think of some things to write in my blog. :)

Quick Review: Perhaps every sub-culture has its own expression of raunchy humor. This play does it well for the semi-highbrow world of modern drama.

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Quick Review: Somehow understated and glorifying at the same time, it does a good job of making you feel like you learned the real story.

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Quick Review: It’s all about the witches, and them were some good witches

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Woah, 17 days since my last posting! What’s the matter with me? I don’t know, but I think I’ll once again aim for a string of shorter and more regular entries.

I got a bee in my bonnet about the screen resolution on my laptop. I like high resolutions, and I realized that one of my biggest frustrations with the thing was that the resolution was a mere 800×600, but that I’d never really devoted any time to trying to fix it. So, with nothing much going on for my tonight, I decided to devote some time.

Standard procedure: google for someone else who worked on this (“modeline config file xorg.conf” turned out to be the winning search) and see what they did. The answer: run a tool called gtf that writes config file lines for you (“gtf 1024 768 60 -v” was the actual line that gave me what I wanted) and then paste it into the config file. Restart XWindows, and… voila! It was really just about that simple.

So, if it’s so simple, why did I need to google for the answer and manually edit the file? Why isn’t there a utility that does this in a nice, warm, gui environment? There is supposedly such a utility on my Fedora 4 installation, but it didn’t help at all. It only offered 800×600 and 640×480. This is what’s bad about linux as a desktop platform right now. And, of course, now that I’ve got it how I want it, I have no personal motivation to make something that does a better job. So these things remain difficult.

Idk. I’m hoping that the Linux variants that are being sold on cheap computers these days know their own hardware and thus spare their users of these kinds of frustrations. But, I’ve never used one, so I don’t know.

David