The science of sleep

I'm having a tough time keeping my eyes open right now. Even Feeder streaming on the last.fm app on my iPhone is not helping. Nor is the cup of murky water which passes for coffee round here. Maybe it was due to a really late night yesterday. Following a late dinner, my friend stuffed her face with the bday cake I had received from office. Unfortunately, this cake had eggs... and guess what; my friend's allergic.

Within minutes, her face had swollen up to epic propotions. She refused to look on the bright side - that the swelling had eliminated the bags under her eyes at least. So at around 12 am we drove to the nearest hospital to get some allergy pills. Since we were around there, we decided to show her to the doc. In a few minutes this doc wanders in, obviously still groggy with sleep. So he goes into the curtained enclosure and started asking my friend questions.

Now my friend is a total fraud indian, and when the doc asked her to show her 'jeeb' (which means tongue in Hindi), she started unbuttoning her shirt. Okay I kid, I kid, but she kept speaking in English, and the doc, apparently not comfortable with the language, decide to come out and talk to me, as the obvious person in charge (NO I do NOT look old enough to be her father). Well, as I suspected, he just prescribed some Avil and Allegra, though he did want to give her a shot; which I was quite keen on too. But madam was too skittish, so we dropped the plan.

He did tell me, though, to take a long hard look at her face so I could make sure the swelling didn't increase, which cracked us all up. We reached back at 1 with no further incident; I still suspect the 'allergic swelling' was nothing more than fat from all the cake hogging that had no place else to go.

However I stayed up even later, as I was in the midst of installing Fedora 9 on my laptop. Yes; if you've read my post 'A Tragic Gap', you'll know my XPS died a horrible and painful death. Dell have however, been most impressive, and they replaced my hdd and dvd drive (which was acting up too) within the week. So yeah, my laptop is resurrected, and I'm in the best phase... installing new apps. I simply love fresh installs, the smell and feel of a fresh OS gets me all sweaty and excited.

To start off, I installed XP on a 15gb partition, leaving the rest of the disk unallocated. Now I know people who don't bother to partition, and to them I say 'Repent!' My partitioning strategy is to use a smaller partition for XP, and other essential software like an antivirus. The rest of my programs are installed into the next contiguous partition, and the rest of the space is partitioned to store my Media, Pictures, Games and Downloads in separate partitions leaving about 15Gb for a Linux install.

After installing XP and the necessary drivers from Dell, I registered it, and installed SP3. I love updates, and am determined to get the latest stuff on this installation. I then flashed my DVD drives firmware with the latest update, and downloaded the latest graphic drivers from Nvidia. So far so good, everything went without a hitch. I also installed AVG antivirus free v8. Now, I've always been a Norton fanboi.. but their last incantation left an unpleasant taste in my mouth. After hearing good things about AVG on lifehacker.com, I decided to give it a go and not install Norton's Systemworks.

Around this point I decided it was a good idea to install Fedora 9 alongside XP. Why Fedora? Because I've been a fan of Red Hat from it's 3.0 days. Not that I've given any other system a try. Well I booted off the DVD, and everything proceeded fine till I tried to create the Linux Partition Structure, where it fell over in a heap telling me that I had insufficient space to create the / partition. After trying all sorts of things.. even repeatedly repartitioning my drives, I was ready to give up.

A search through the forums, however gave me a clue. A HDD can support only a maximum of four partitions apparently. A new user will point to my afore mentioned multiple partition in confusion. Allow me to clarify - All those partitions were logical partitions created inside an extended partition. However I had created my Programs partition as a primary partition, instead of a logical one which means I had already used up 3 of the 4 allowed primary partitions - C drive, Programs, and an Extended one to hold my logical partitions. And Linux needed at least two spots to install. And this was the correct reason inspite of the incorrect and misleading 'out of space' error.

Well, using Powerquest's infinitely useful Partition Magic, I converted E: Programs into a logical partition inside my Extended partition, and then reran the installation. This time it proceede without hitch, and I soon had Fedora up and running by 3 am. Initial impressions are not that great however. I expected the Gnome UI to be more kickass... infact its almost boring in it's plainness (I'm looking at screenshots of fedora 8 and it seems prettier). I'll try KDE today and let you know. Maybe these guys should talk to my kickass designed friend.  I'm also still trying to get my WiFi working on fedora, but it's taking a while. I am such a n00b.

Anyways, I should be running on full functionality soon. It's such a relief to work on a bright 1950x1200 display again. THAT is what my blog is supposed to look like. For now I'm carefully searching for the latest versions of essential software. Do you have any suggestions or preferences for the best essential software no Windows installation should be without?

Anyways, after all that I finally got to sleep at 3 am. And that explains why there are imprints of the keyboard on my forehead today.