Windows 7 for my HP Laptop

I received my free Windows 7 upgrade for my HP Laptop today.  It took me 5 hours to do a fresh install of the OS and reinstall all my apps which are Office 2007 Enterprise, Adobe Master Collection CS4, Adobe Lightroom 2.6.  So far, the performance is much better than Windows Vista.  Great job Microsoft!

Bloggin’ from iPhone

Just downloaded WordPress 2 for iPhone and test it with this post. So cool.

Ubuntu 9.10 & Google Chrome Rocks

I just updated my son old and slow computer with a faster PC running Windows 7. Before I trash the old PC, I decided to replace its Win XP Pro OS with Ubuntu 9.10 and load Google Chrome. And WOW, I was impressed with the performance and I have to say that Ubuntu has breathed the new life to the old PC and Google Chrome starts up quickly. I decided to keep this old PC for surfing the web and check email.

New Year Resolutions (NYRs)

Hope everyone has a nice Holidays!

Have been blogging for a while now since I’ve been busy looking for a job.  I lost my job after Jan 2009 due to the degrading economic condition, or at least that is what my employer told me.  Since this is my first laid ever, I went through several emotional roller coasters.

After the emotional rides, I updated my resumé and starting to aggressively hunting for new jobs, and the potential companies are also aggressively turning down my application.  After six months, I found some odds-n-ends contract jobs, not enough to pay for my mortgage and bills, so I have to cut back my expenses and put my house up for sale.  Yeah, good luck to me in trying to sell my house in this housing market condition.

I guess I’m not the only one has to deal with this, should I get “bail-out” money from the Fed?

Well, this lead to my NYRs:  Try to find a new “real” job and start over or start a new business.  Thank you for listening.

Congrats to President-elect Obama!

It’s been more than a week after the Presidential Election day, but I just want to say a big congrats to the president-elect Barack Obama. I’m not a supporter, but I was very impressed with his campaign. I hope that in the near future, our government will allow other political parties to have a fair chance to compete with the two mainstream parties.

Ubuntu 8.10 released today

I’m so excited! :O The long awaited new version of popular linux destop distro Ubuntu is released today and I’m upgrading my OS as I write this blog.  The new release 8.10 aka Intrepid Ibex is now available to download/upgrade at www.ubuntu.com.

Early voting

I voted today as a 40 years old virgin (first-time voter).  And yes, I was shocked at myself too.  The reason that I voted because this election is that important.  I impressed of how smooth the voting process was.  It was painless and fun, so I encourage everyone to vote.

Ubuntu Studio

Since I have to start over with Ubuntu installation, I thought that this will be a great opportunity to tryout different flavors of Ubuntu.  So I went on did just that, I have installed various versions including Kubuntu, Edbuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu, and Ubuntu Studio.  And the verdict:  Ubuntu Studio.  I love the themes and the prepackaged graphic applications.  I know that you can customize your desktop, theme, icons within Ubuntu, but If you don’t have the time or just plain lazy (me), the Ubuntu Studio distro is for you.  Don’t take my word for it, check it out here: http://ubuntustudio.org/

Starting Over

I did some housekeeping on one of my Windows workstation, which has two hard drives, by freeing up one drive so I can use to restore my Ubuntu workstation.  So now I’m back to square one, start to install Ubuntu 8.04 onto the newly found used hard drive.

Ubuntu on flash memory

My Maxstor 250 GB hard-drive in my newly installed Ubuntu workstation went kaput on me today…I was so sad and depressed because I spent many hours configured software and customized the desktop to my liking. And just about when I begin to settle down and enjoy my newly found happiness, disaster strikes.

So depressed and no spare storage laying around, I use my live CD to boot up the machine and trying to salvage any tip & trick files I collected during the installation and configuration that I stored in the home directory, using a 4GB SD card in the workstation built-in memory card reader as a backup storage…then suddenly, a crazy idea crossed my mind…how about install Ubuntu onto the memory card, is this even possible? Oh well, one way to find out, what do I got to loose, this experiment can ease the depression of loosing a hard-drive.

Well what da ya know, I have to set the computer bios to boot up using a removable device and make sure it will recognize the memory reader/card during boot. And then boot up my live CD and choose the install option. And voila, the software recognized the “drive” and allow me to install. The speed is, of course as expected, a bit slower than that of a hard-drive. Isn’t this cool? See if Microsoft Windows can do that.

After installation on a 4GB SD card, still have 1.3GB left