Epicness II

Epicness II

Time starts to blur as the winter vacation drags on. Day after day it's the same routine, a relaxed oodle of Chinese, piano, Korean dramas and art. Aah, winter break is like sinking into a steaming bath of hot water. The stress seems to simply melt away. Your mind goes blissfully blank. The day simultaneously seems to drag on, and then, in retrospect, flashes by in a second. Everything blobs together like a pot of Mom's green stew*. But in between the monotony, there are occasional flashes of excitement**: cooking!***, new sheet music, and recently...computers!

My friends, recently I have the tremendous honor of being inducted into the uber-secret, uber-awesome, uber-cool elite squad of Hong family IT guys!...Which is to say that Ian and Dad are finally spilling their techie secrets****. It is surprisingly hard to actually get Ian to spill his techie secrets, whether it's about how to grab mp3 files from YouTube******, hook a laptop up the the TV, or even watch stuff online. Usually, I end up waiting impatiently for him to finish up his important business, like taking over the world******* before he deals with my own pitiful mortal problems, like powering on my laptop. When told to simply tell me what to do, his usual answer is a noncommittal grunt (I swear, in the last two weeks, he has perfected that) or, in other cases, a mumbled "I'm busy". Even when he's not busy, it's hard to get him to talk. When asked about that, well, he calls it "job security". I'm not sure whether he actually believes that, or if he finds it too difficult to explain his leprechaun magic to my pitiful mortal brain, or if there's some other unstated reason behind his close kept secrets, but end of the day, I'm left as computer literate as your average ape********* while coexisting with the wizards of technology.

But recently, there have been a few new developments in that battle. One of the computers in the apartment rental office (A frankenstein, as Ian bemoans, with an Intel Pentium 4 2.8 gigahertz processor, and sadly, only 1 gigabyte of RAM*) broke down, and the hired Tech Support guys aren't coming in for another few months. Ca-CHING! You could hear bright ideas start a chain reaction in my parent's heads. A broken computer could mean an opportunity for me to get initiated (preferably without the blood ritual**) into the secret guild of Hong-family tech people. Or, officially, it would give me some experience in the tech field, a little more confidence, and food for my secretly growing interest in what was previously solely my brother's territory***.

So, two or so weeks into winter vacation, we showed up at the rental office to pick up the computer. Man, that thing was stone age. My house has more computers than it has people (6 computers to four people. Go figure), and all of them are laptops and very transportable. The ancient relic that resided deep within the bowels of the rental office, though...uhg. It makes me want to barf just thinking about it. Give me a laptop any day. A Mac, preferably. But anyways, back at home, the plugged in computer begins to boot up, then stops, frozen at a pitch-black screen with a sole blinking cursor. We wait. And wait. And wait some more.

Well, actually, we kind of facepalmed, groaned, then rebooted it. This time around, though, we booted to the BIOS**** and then went crazy with the settings. About halfway through I paused and asked Ian if we might want to try making only one change at a time, in order to isolate the problem. He pointed out that it was a good idea, and we went ahead and ignored my advice completely. Meh. Took too much time. This way bore a great resemblance to performing heart surgery with a sledgehammer, but we weren't going to stop now. After a few quarrels, some constructive idea bouncing, and a few rounds of vying for authority, we decided that the problem lay in the fact that something was obstructing the normal startup sequence and preventing it from booting to Windows XP.

Our solution? To heck with Windows, let's try installing Linux. Linux Mint, to be precise. The process (installation) from there on was fairly straightforward. For those like me who don't have much tech-savvy, Linux is a free operating system***** tree which is obtainable online. We went with Linux Mint, because it took up slightly less space than other full-featured 'distros' of Linux, as they call them. Ian worked his leprechaun magic, burned Mint onto a CD, put that into the disk drive, and then changed the settings on BIOS so that it booted to the disk drive, then finished installing Linux onto the hardrive, after wiping it,******, and after that, well, we were home and free.

Sure, there were a few little (really eensy, tiny, minuscule, microscopic...) glitches. For example, Linux in general hates wireless. Well, at least for us it does. It ran fine with an Ethernet connection at our house, but when we toted the heavy thing over to the rental office and hooked it up to their Internet using a wire, it still didn't connect. Ooooh, we spent so much time freaking out over that problem...running terminal codes, creating new Nautilus files, unplugging and replugging the bleeping thing. Then we realized that all those internet wires were a big sham. So the other computer, printer, and this computer were all plugged in, but were supposed to be running on wireless. Linux hates wireless. Back at home, there's a massive rush to solve the Linux Wi-fi problem. We come up with solutions ranging from trying to get XP again using the computer's registration code, attempting to download Windows 8 onto it (first from a USB, then directly onto the computer using an ISO file or something like that), then running script after script, trying to get it to connect to our own Wi-Fi. Finally, Ian makes a breakthrough. To be honest, I had a hard time catching up with him throughout the whole PC-fixing procedure, but around this point, he was clearly leaving my poor mortal brain in the dust. He cracks open terminal, runs a few lines of script, and then, (tada!) it's miraculously connected to our Wi-Fi. Sigh. At times like these, you can only step back and go "whaaaaa? Ooooooohh. Pretty lights."

In addition to the glitches, there have also been a few flub-ups as well. For one thing, right after we wiped the Hard Drive, we realized that there had been Windows XP installed on Hard Drive 1... which we had just wiped. In other words, the sole problem was that we have been we were booting to the wrong Hard Drive. Basically, we went through two full days of stress and emotional ups and downs over nothing. Total facepalm. Epic fail. But hey, at least this way I got some experience with Linux.

So, techie stuff and all aside, this is Quiet girl, with a newly found confidence in all things geeky, a whole oodle of bragging rights (I did have occasional brilliant insight...jk, jk), and two more weeks of winter break with which to

....I don't know. Get into trouble. Fix some more computers. Change the world. Get rich.

...or, hopefully have some more interesting adventures to blog about...

This is quiet girl, signing off.

-Shhhh....I'm going to go nap. So much for that adventure. Ah well, it can wait till after dinner.

*a disturbingly homogeneous mixture, with occasional bumps that hint at a past life of vegetable-hood

**/stress/obsession/passion/...

***Eating the cooking!....jk, jk

****well, I mean, they're actually taking the time to explain their techie secrets. And I'm actually finding the time to listen to their techie secrets. But yeah. yeah.

*****Kinda sorta ishy legally. I think. Actually, let's not think about that too much.

******On his computer....for now!

*******According to Ian, though, there's not that much of a difference....

*Ian calls it practically criminal. Meh. I just smile and nod, and try to look like I know what he's talking about. When in doubt, just keep swimming....

**Just kidding. Really!

***Everything, in the end, feeds back into sibling rivalry. Ok, so maybe I'm just projecting. It is strange how I manage to unconsciously sneak so many war similes into these posts. Hmm. Well.

****Which is, to my brothers and sisters trapped in the desert of technological-jargon, a kind of control center, of sorts. To my mind, it's that magical blue leprechaun place where Ian can mess around with the computer settings. Hey, I did spend most of my life reading fantasy instead of sci-fi. Is it any wonder my attempts to explain things are a little bit cheesy?

*****Yes, it's free. We didn't pirate it or anything (for once). It just hates wireless, though, as a warning, so if you can't stand having an Internet wire plugged into your computer constantly, do a bit of thinking before you wipe your Hard Drive and install Linux.

******Ooooh, this drives me crazy, but we had Windows eight on a DVD, and we meant to install it on that computer, but it was so old, the...watchamacallit, that thingy that you put the disk in? I think it's the disk drive or something. Well. Don't quote me....only ran CDs, not DVDs. UHG.