KODA

Thank you everyone for making this such a magical birthday, and for making everything so meaningful. Today didn’t feel so much like a birthday as much as just a really great day.

Unbelievable. Just unbelievable.
After seeing the last one on Thursday, they lost any last chance of my business. Now I’m just frustrated and appalled. Good riddance.
I suppose I’ll have to be finding a new home page now…

Yesterday, I discovered that the graffiti I found about a month ago has been painted over. Frankly I’m not surprised, but it’s hard to understand how people can take such unique art and slap a dull brown paint over it. It wasn’t even out in the open — you had to look to find it. How much culture and honest self-expression is lost to this “cleaning?”
That image was one of the most personal and raw statements I’ve seen for quite some time, and it is really too bad it had to be painted over. How fascinating that it’s expression should be further emphasized by it’s very destruction.

Zzzzmm… very good concert. Sigur Rós were wonderful, Amina were excellent, and there were some really neat tracks in the setlist that I hadn’t heard for a long time. There were also some fun mixups and surprises that made the night special. I got to talk to the lights guy and meet the sound people before the show, which was really nice.

It seemed that Sigur brought back a few of their more gloomy, melancholic songs instead of the extreme happiness in the last concert – though they played those songs with an energy I hadn’t heard before. It was especially funny to hear the first encore, “Dauðalagið,” just after this morning reading john of management’s tour diary:

“when the band played daudalagid at a soundcheck in tokyo they gave up before the end, pondering later why their songs were so bloody long… go figure.”

… the studio version of that track is 13 minutes long. But hey, they made it through it tonight! And it was spectacular.

A while ago, I wrote a howto, “Compiz, XGL on Ubuntu for the morbidly lazy,” about installing Compiz on a standard Ubuntu Dapper setup. This worked great for the packaged 0.0.2 version in the Dapper repositories, but while Ubuntu started freezing and preparing for their release, Compiz development blazed ahead and many beautiful new features and improvements came with it. Because of this, I switched over to the cvs version of Compiz and ran it for a long time. Unfortunately, my love of the bleeding-edge caught up to me, as about a month ago it seems that Ubuntu’s also not-updated version of Xgl and the Mesa libraries fell out of compatibility with cvs Compiz.

After several unsuccessful attempts to revert to an older version, I resigned back to normal Metacity until I had the time to look deeper into the problem and find what changes were needed. Long story short, after coming back to it today, I stumbled upon the excellent compiz.net forums, and subsequently RacerII’s howto. RacerII points to another forum member reggaemanu’s (mostly undocumented) repository over at xgl.compiz.info, which contains patched Xgl and Mesa packages. I tried them out today, and they work like a charm!