Latenight philosophy with DH and DS

"Me" is me, "Dustin" is DSollick. Dustin was reading through (and critiquing harshly) a story he wrote.

Dustin: No shit, nothing without life?@!
Me: Actually it's wrong
Me: :P
Dustin: that too, lifeless worlds
Dustin: lifeless universes
Me: The earth existed long before there was life, for example
Me: indeed
Me: THEN AGAIN
Me: what if all these lifeless worlds and lifeless universes
Me: are just things in our lives? Just things that exist because we, life, observe them?
Me: Sometimes I look in a mirror and wonder how I came to be. How I inhabit this body. What if I inhabited a different body? What recognizes vision and sound and acknowledges it? Is it a mind? Does a mind do that? Or is it the soul. I don't think you can hook up eyes and ears to a brain and have a person. I don't think they'll see the world like any of us. If at all. But what.
Me: What happens when I die? When I am reborn. Do I inhabit another body? Obviously. Do i live through 18 years before I ask the same questions? I had life experiences at 3 that I can't remember but I know i saw them through my eyes, these eyes. These. Where would they be stored? That says it's the mind. My soul would remember. Can I tap into that?
Dustin: I wasn't expecting a philosophical discussion
Dustin: x.x
Me: Neither was I.
---
Me: is that how it happened
Dustin: yes.
Dustin: XD
Me: in your collective consciousness?
Me: What if we are made up of collective cohesive consciousnesses working as one? Hmm. I don't feel like multiple people, but what if we are? What if I are? Am? Is.. ? But really.
Me: Interesting thought
Dustin: I'm really glad the 11-page copy I wrote didn't make it; these are laughable, that one was grimace-worthy
Me: lmao!
Me: Maybe we are mosaics of consciousness. Each part of us coming from a different place. Varying morals. Maybe people get tainted. Maybe serial killers are tainted with a single bad piece. Spreading out like ripples.

Total: ∞ packages (0 good luck, 1 mistake)

I'd just like to put this out there for everybody...

1. Make frequent backups. Maybe every month.
2. Do not, under ANY circumstances, accidentally try to install Haiku to /dev/sda. Ever.

Now that the advice is out of the way, it's story time!

Yesterday, I was trying to install Haiku to my 512MB flash drive, which, when I plugged it in, got assigned /dev/sdb. The Haiku build system was, at the time set to write to /dev/sda2 (my 3GiB Haiku partition). I deleted the "2" and went on with my business. I ran jam -q haiku-image to build it.
"Hmm, this is taking a while."
"dd, wrote 134 MB to /dev/sda"
"/dev/sda?! WHAT?!"
"OH MY GOD!"

It wrote 134 MB of 0x00s to the beginning of my hard drive, clobbering the bootloader, partition table, and the root filesystem of my Linux installation (/dev/sda1).

It also got to the "Populating Image" step, so it was happily chugging along writing a Be File System over my entire hard drive and filling it with Haiku data.
^C!

Programs still ran, not all the files on / were lost, and I was in a state of panic.
One reboot later confirmed the obvious - no more system. Also, no more files in /. The filesystem layout was in memory, and I should have taken the time to recover some of the data before I reformatted.

fsck told me that /usr was trashed.. /usr is like "Program Files" and more for Linux... Random data written in random places on a volume is... bad ;)
/ was definitely a goner...
/home somehow survived, guaranteeing that my 8 years-worth of data would stick around for a while longer!
Fortunately, I had backups from August 15th!
Unfortunately, they were from August 15th. That means 3 months worth of upgrades to do...

Restored / and /usr, some of /var (installed package database only), and went to work upgrading.

500 compiled and installed packages later (the last of which are still going) and Jesus is... Well, for the situation, I have to say he's done pretty darn well. Kudos, me.

Once this is all done?

BACKUP TIME!

I think I need a NOS.

Prayer to install Linux

Leon wanted to bless his system before he installed Linux, and I came forth with the following:

Blessed be this computer system. Remove from it under the name of the system lord Linux all sins of the hard drive and RAM. Cleansed be its bits and its bytes. Praise be the system lord Linux.

- Dustin L. Howett

It releases the system from the grips of the demons of Windows, and thus asks for it to be forgiven of its Windowsy transgressions. :)

Election 2008

I'm making a note here-
HUGE SUCCESS.

OBAMA 2008!

V9m Back from Repair!

The screen isn't actually that staticy.
I digitally enhanced this in The GIMP.

My RAZR² V9m has returned from the Motorola Repair Facility...
They sent me a completely new phone! The one I sent out was manufactured in Week 49 of 2007, and the one they sent back was manufactured in Week 39 of 2008!
It was marked as a Sprint phone but it had the US Cellular firmware on it. I flashed it over to DST and then Telus and it's now active and completely working on my account, despite Verizon's best efforts to keep me from it.
(Hint: *228 option 3 will activate any valid device on any account.)