Happy New Year From Ramblingmoose - or When Life Hands You Lemons, You Write About Them

So, Happy New Year, Folks!

I figured I would get that out of the way before I go all "WAAAAH!" on you.

See, it is New Years Day, and I shot myself in the foot.

Actually I did that a couple days ago, when I had to put together a graphic.  I guess that was on last Wednesday. 

But I'll have plenty of time, Right?

Not apparently.

When I went onto the Windows computer to use photoshop and write a blog article, I started it and heard a "SNAP!" then the computer locked up.

Then it turned itself off.  Joy and Happiness!  Lets try that again!

After three tries, I decided to shift some hardware around.  I have another computer that is almost the same hardware, despite being a different manufacturer (Lenovo vs a Dell).  Down to the processor and video card, simply different vendors.

Bright idea!  Lets swap hard drives and see what happened. 

Success.  The Lenovo, now with windows, worked.
Success again!  The Dell, now with a copy of Debian Linux, worked.

I'd have time to figure all this out.

Not quite and I had other things to distract me.  BRIGHT SHINY OBJECT!  YAY!

That next day or so, I set to clone the Windows drive to another hard drive.  It is still running a couple days later.

That "took" my Windows computer out of service along with my copy of photoshop.  Once it is finished backing up, I'll have my original computer back with a test version of Windows.   I say test because the data will be incomplete on the data partition.

Then time got to today.  Up at 4:15am so I'd have plenty of time, right?

Not so fast.  I got through the normal nonsense and decided that New Year, New Pizza. 

I forgot that a Pizza from scratch will take between 2 and 3 hours depending if the dough is dry enough.

It wasn't so it was more like 3 hours.

Cooked great with a nice crispy bottom, but while I was preparing the meal, I was also trying to throw together a graphic for this post.  Should have done that a week ago when the Lenovo came up under Windows.

Blah.  I Hate Windows.

See one of the nice things about running Linux as your main (everything but photoshop) computer is that you have a LOT free software.  The library of software that is out there and the quality of software is frankly, overwhelming. 

So I basically went to an old school command line, Remember those?  C Prompts? and typed in "apt-get install inkscape".

Inkscape is the program I originally used to manipulate pictures for the blog back in 2009.  Back then I could put text on the screen and bend it.  I wanted to take Rack's picture and put a donut around his face with text.

Can't blame Inkscape for that.  It installed in under a minute and looked like I remembered but I forgot how to use the software.

Ok, too much too quickly, and I gave up.  I finished with the really basic picture you see at the top.

So that's my big "Waah!" story for New Years.

If you will excuse me, the timer just went off and I have some torpedo rolls to bake in the oven. 

Fresh bread is great isn't it?

I'll get back to that graphic.  There's plenty of time, right?