Star Wars, Ubuntu and Audials One
This weekend took and interesting turn and it all started off with a little story called Star Wars. Since May 4th came around I’ve had a yearning to watch Star Wars again. It’s literally been decades since I’ve last seen it because I want to see the original ones. Not just the original trilogy, but the original Unedited version that came out in theaters. Not the remastered copy with all the changes, the honest to goodness real version that came out in the late 70s. The one where not only does Han shoot first, he takes the only shot as Greedo is far too dead at the other end of the table.
After all this time I managed to get my hands on those very movies and on Saturday I sat down to watch Star Wars. Now, despite some less than stellar acting – Harrison Ford seems to be the only one who’s truly comfortable in front of the camera, and a few special effects glitches here and there, the movie was amazing! It was every bit as good as I remember and had all the elements you want for a movie. We have the wanna be hero, the reluctant hero, the damsel in distress, a sinister villain, an overlord who pulls the strings of the villain, epic battles and even some romance. Oh my goodness, it was so much to watch again. I forgot just how amusing C3PO was in all this.
For those who are wondering, no I haven’t seen the new trilogy of Episodes 1-3 and I never will. I saw Episode 1 and think it’s one of the worst movies ever made. If it didn’t have the Star Wars name slapped on it, it would have been an epic failure. And I don’t plan on seeing Episode 7-9 regardless of who makes it. I don’t believe they will compare to the story and simple nature of the original movies.
But, along with the movies I started out on another project – installing Ubuntu. Now that unto itself isn’t a big deal. Unix is incredibly easy to install these days. However, the overall goal is to build a foundation to learn MySQL. I have plenty of machines running Windows where I could do this, but I want to get under the hood with Unix. Lots of people I know work with Unix more and more so it seems I should get more experience. The Ubuntu part took about 10 minutes and the MySQL portion was little more than installing the Workbench tools. After that I was up and running and spend some quality time creating databases, inserting data and running Select statements. All the while I had my SQL for Dummies book at the ready. I know what SQL is and what it’s for, but I’ve only worked with it once or twice. My main exposure comes from running WordPress which obviously uses it a great deal. But I want a little bit more working knowledge so I’ve asked an SQL guru to give me some pointers and send me off in the right direction. I now have my own SQL Sensei so this is going to be an exciting journey.
Finally, it never ceases to amaze me what Audials One can do. For this weekend, it was working overtime capturing songs and playing radio stations from all over the world. For a time I was tuned into the UK, then I was off to Australia, then some 80s from who knows where and of course there were some long stints on Grooveshark with Joe Satriani as well as Pandora with Rodrigo y Gabrielle. I’m not admitting to anything, but my music collection is growing by leaps and bounds with this rascal.
By the way, the Ubuntu project took less than 30 minutes start to finish. I had the entire OS downloaded, installed into Virtualbox with the SQL pieces ready to use before I could spin around twice. I was in a swivel chair the whole time. What do you think of that!
Ubuntu, I like it. 🙂
