1. Given a deeply religious person is strong in their belief
2. Given there are multiple religions
3. Some religions are mutually exclusive

Is this just a case where religious folks have to agree to say “in this case, one of us is right; we don’t know, but one of us has a religion thats wrong.”?

Or what about religions that have common ancestry but have diverged significantly and have very different opinions on things nowadays? Isn’t that a problem?

We wonmt’ go near a third problem which is .. given that thinking in terms of religionm implies that you’re willing to accept ‘ghosts’ and ‘unexplainable things’ and so on, you’re pretty much opening up the forum to everything. Faeries? Why _not_? I mean, if there can be no proof for/against a given religion, then the same is true for faeries, right?(Or for people who make up crazy pseudo religions like the Flying Spaghetti Monster or Sciontology, who most would agree are basicly just silly.)

Faith is there because theres nothing else; but you believe, in your heart. Thats faith, and its powerful. I get it. But how do you deal with others having a different faith, maybe an opposite one, of equal conviction?

So theres no reason for this posting; a lot of questions come to mind here or there (especially around the holiday season), and because of life. My parents were some breed of Christian but had some troubles with it when they were younger so I think got fed up and departed their church. They met at church if I recall right, which is nice.  My brother and I were thusly raised more or less without any religious mention .. we weren’t agnostic or anti- or any such thing. It just wasn’t discussed, so we didn’t know it existed really (and went to public school; we did do the Lords Prayer, but it was more a abstract thing for me .. I just had it memorized, and spoke it, and I didn’t really think about it. It was rote.)

I’m a pretty curious fellow, so when browsing through my parents bookshelves as a little one I naturally discovered these ornate books; they had some fancy bibles with zipper cases around them and all that.. heck, I even spent a couple of days here or there reading some of the Bible; I didn’t know what it was, just assumed it was a book like any other, so I went digging to find the rousing adventure, and found lots of interesting bits. Gotta admit, the Bible can be an interesting story from drama to violence, especially the Old Testament.

I’m not sure if it was the monoculture of my friends (we were all unreligious) or as a result of a number of annoyances that churches caued (starting with how they treated my parents though we werent’ privy to much of that information I’m sure it stuck with us a little), but I ended up getting a nice anti-churchy chip on my shoulder for quite a few years as a kid. I mean, many churches do like to Get In Your Face, which is something they should not do imho — people really should respect each other, and that goes both ways — but historically churches have been pretty awful. Especially in this day and age where we must be secular, with many churches co-existing as neighbours.. they have to play nice lest we be taken back to the dark ages. Witness the many wars in the world….. but anyway. But the distinction I learned from my eventual girlfriend and later wife was respect, and not to hold history per se against the whole of the thing. Religion is not bad (but at times implementations of it can be).. but the bad parts are the failings of men, not the failings of any grand design. Or something. The Crusades .. sure, they were driven by the Popes, but the middle age popes were basicly crazy much of the time. They were supposed to be the voice of God, but they were nuts — see the Children’s Crusade, or stringing up random people or especially scientists — how dare you try to think problems through, rather than just say God made the sun come up?

And that my friends is my core problem with it all — religion is fine and I respect it, I truly do; again, its hard to discuss these things at all without causing some hurt feelings but that is not my intention; just showing my past and how I arrived at some thoughts — but my core problem is when religious is held up as an excuse not to think. Let someone else do the thinking for you.. that is always a recipe for disaster.

Religion (and when I say that, I’m basicly talking about Christian brands such as Baptist and Catholic and not Muslim or the like; thats a whole other discussion that I’m barely equipped to have.) is best kept in the realm of the unprovable, and cannot step into the realm of logic per se. It is ‘irrational’ by definition, though that term carries a negative connotation so I’ve learned not to use it (doh!) I mean, as soon as someone says ‘the sun comes up because God says so’, then I get annoyed and rightly so — we know bloody well why the sun appears to ‘come up’. Science _is not_ at odds with religion — those scientists who think so are idiots, just as much as those religious folks who think so. Science is a process of learning, and we all do that from birth. We have clothes on our backs, we eat healthy food, we have agriculture.. this is all science. Likewise, in my books, evolution is provable and only an idiot would refute it.. and it has nothing to do with religion. (For those hard core Christians who believe the Earth is only a few thousand years old.. then how do you explain fossils and dinosaur bones? If you cling to the earth being 6000 years old, then your God must have placed them in the ground to trick you… and who wants their god to be a dick?) But if you take the evidence that we can see and say hey, the Earth is pretty old, and we’ve got evolution going on… but just maybe there is a deity that sparked the whole world of physics off, or kickstarted the process.. okay, fine, theres nothing for or against that. It  is just a human made up idea, but theres no refutation, so fine, whatever. Anyway. We can demonstrate evolution in fruit flies and so on, and can see the very large flaws in the design of animals and people .. if there was an intelligent guide for evolution, then he sure made a lot of mistakes! (Consider that all the tiny little steps from no eye to seeing eye have been found in fossils, and each step is useful to its host. Further, we’ve found some dozen different kinds of eye design, and the human one is actually pretty inferior to many other animals. Light passing through a lens, to the optic nerve is all great.. but we do we have all this blood vessels and stuff inbetween, rather than behind? And so on..) — so religion and science _can certainly co exist just fine_ (witness all those Christian science folks!) — but when people tart using religion as an excuse to be dumb .. thats when I take offence.

Now, I had a lot of issues with the various churches growing up; I would have ideas, and churches would sometimes find a way to get up in my face. I made some crazy posters for a local band, and a church took offence (very creative and perversely I might ad) and got me some trouble. I played “Dungeons and Dragons” (a creative imagination  medievil role playing game with dice, not dressing up and waving plastic swords around), and churches got it banned in my city because they didn’t know what it was, or didn’t like kids pretending to have characters casting spells? Heck even more recently many churches get all uppity with cute movies like Harry Potter, because it has ‘witchcraft’ represented in it.) Supressing ideas and getting into peoples shit has been the stock and trade of religions since they began.. but again, we must hold the religious ideal up, and thats fine; its our human built religions that tend to cock it all up, so I will try not to hold that against them.. but as we live in reality, we do have to live with those concerns.

So when a non-religious person marries a religious girl, and wanting to do it ‘right’ ( in her church where she grew up .. its just a beautiful thing to be all swept away in that emotional state, to grow up and then be married in your church, don’t you think?), they make you take oaths. Churches tend to be self protective which I did question, but I can understand why, so.. fine. The ceremony is a little different for this situation thankfully (and is permitted these days.. it woudl have been much more stressful a few decades ago).. but our priest gave me a fair amount of grief. (You can see a trend here.. a few dozen times in life, religion got in my way, and that is why I had such a slant. One set of my grandparents woudl regularly tell me I was going to hell .. that was nice.) Anyway, I promise to be right and do the right things — as I’m a right honourable person, and I intended to be godo to my girl anyway, so the promise didn’t really take that much cajoling. We go to church on Sundays, because its a part of my wife’s life, and because I promised to do that.. to not be in the way of her faith.

Now, dont’ get me wrong — my wife is not one of those hard core bible thumpers; she’s an intelligent girl with a clear mind who has faith, and is not ‘whacko’ about it. We don’t talk about this stuff, since we have an understanding and we’re close.. I know where she’s at, and we do it all together. And I won’t let her be lazy on my account ;)

Anyway, when you get married, another promise is to raise the children religiously — another self protection the churches build in. And more promises for baptism and all that, fine. When we got married, we took this stuff seriously.. I’m not going to lie just for my benefit — to lie just so I can selfishly get married; that would be an insult to my wife and her family and so on, so we had a lot of talk over these issues to see where we all were. It was terribly stressful since these questions can tear apart a couple. (See, that slant I have .. no religion, no problem; one person religious, causes all these problems. Anyway.) But in the end, I figured sure, I can promise to raise the children religiously, since ultimatley it is their responsibility, and they can make up their mind when they come of age. It struck me that no rational person would become religious from not being religious (it is hard to suddenly believe in ‘ghosts’ say, something entirely heresay and unprovable), so if they are to make a valid decision then raising them religious and letting them back out or continue in those pursuits on their own is a good way to go. And certainly we can try to raise them right, so they don’t just blidnly accept whatever the priests may tell them, and try to think things through to form their own opinions. Just like witht he army.. too often have peopel done things because another told them to .. that is no excuse, we must each of us stand on our own feet and be measured at the end of our days for our actions .. not justifying by saying someone else told you to go forth and murder or whatever.

So, here we are .. happily married with some kids, and our first little girl is off to Catholic school. And I hope they do her right, teaching her that God is ebverywhere and comforts them when they are sad, and doesn’t teach them that it rains becuse He says so. I’m sure it’ll cause some friction, since I will always be careful to have funa nd fantasy (Harry Potter is great!), and explain why things work they way they do. We take things apart, we fix things.. everythign is like that; why the sun comes up, we can take it apart and examine it as best we can, too.. its not ‘magic’.

Anyway, goodness, I ahdn’t intended to write any of this; I do have some questions and thought I might write a series of articles about them, so they can be recorded; so some logic can be laid down or refuted, so I can mull some of these thigns over. I mean, I want to be fair, I want to do the right thing and think the right things. But ‘right’ is not something you get from a book, its somethign you do, through consideration of your actions.

Off the top of my head I can rhyme off some ‘must plays’ — if you’re going to play a game at all, play one of these. Different genres all, really.

• Deus Ex: Human Revolution – stealth old-school cyperpunk inspired FPS, but don’t let “FPS” scare you off; this is a sneaker, with detective moments, game changing decision making, absolutely stunning music and art direction (this game is full of ‘oh, wow, pause and look’ moments.) Think Blade Runner is game form, and you’re half way there. On all major platforms, and absolutely worth playing. I also found out the boys behind this (Eidos Montreal) are also making Thief 4, with Thief being one of my favorite old franchises.. very promising news.
• Civilization V – a pretty controversial installment in the venerable turn based wargame franchise, but still an excellent play; think of it standalone from the other games — certainly its related in many ways, but its broken out in core ideology as well. I had been wondering what they would do from Civ IV — which was pretty much an old wargamers ideal game — and they brought it out; a change to how you think (though nothing super drastic to turn off old fans.)
• Portal 2 – a first-person puzzler; Portal 1 was an achievement in its own right, but it did end up being a little actiony in parts, though without spoiling its core (storytelling and puzzling.) Portal 2 exceeds it in every way — more puzzley, an even better story with excellent voice work and music, but withotu dipping into actiony parts really. A very fun high energy you approachable brilliant piece of work
• Battlefield 3 — okay, given Modern Warfare 3 and BF3 coming out at the same time at the end of the year – both FPS shooters — I had to bring one to the table though the genre is not my thing; MW3 is more a balls out shooter and is lesser for it, imho. Still the age old problems of ’spawn camping’ and ‘level mixing’, so excellent players pick on noobies.. totally unfun. But BF3 is a heavy vehicle and squad based shooter, so noobies get carried by their mates, or jump into a tank or jet and get to business. Lots of good balance, so you can pick your spawn point or spawn right into an available vehicle, letting you entirely avoid spawn camping or jump in (or out of!) where the action is. I get bored of FPS quick, but if you’re into the genre, BG3 is gorgeous.
• Skyrim – another Elder Scrolsl title, and they’ve all been excellent. Skyrim is an achievement in gaming and development; an enormous game where you coudl easily spend hundreds of hours and not even get into the main quest. A big open world do it at your own pace your own way RPG; play a warrior a mage, a thief, or just screw around and put pots on everyones heads and steal their pants. And you get to fight dragons.
• The Old Republic — well, its an MMO; probably one of the top ones but .. yeah, its like WoW, so, whatever
• Minecraft — you already heard more than you wanted to about it; I’ve never played it, but thought I should mention it.
• Batman: Arkahm City — oh, almost forgot this beat-em-up; you feel meaty, and beat the snot out of everyone, while skulking around. (See a theme here? I like to sneak arond and be a do-gooder.. Skyrim, Deus Ex, Batman..)

Gorsh, theres a half dozen other titles that could easily be mentioned (especially on the consoles.)

But theres it, thats my GOTY list for 2011; all of those will get awards, or be in the runners-up for Skyrim.

Skyrim will take everyones cake, and worth every pinch.

I don’t much care for Avent bottles; plastic sort of turns me off; stubby stature is pretty handy, but I’m pretty sure they make squat bottles so they can be different to everyone else .. by which I mean, different accessories (sterilizers, carryalls, warmers, etc.) But in the end, although durable, I find them leaky. Easy to wash with any kind of bottle cleaner though.

Gerbers, also plastic, yet tall and more what most peopel think when they hear ‘baby bottle’, are pretty good; never leak, but being tall and thin, harder to wash.. but we’ve got a sturdy thin bottle cleaner that works a treat, so okay.

But we had to switch around a bit, since one of the twins was inhaling the formula — slower nipple you could get, and that child was slirping it back too fast. Crazy. So we went to Evenflo glass bottles — glass is good, solid and nice and traditional; easy to wash, standard size for sterilizers etc; not a problem for us to clean due to the proper bottle cleaner.

And cheap, really.

Playtex drop-ins are pretty handy, and faster to use; drop in the little liner, fill up with goo and good to go; toss the liner and repeat, no fuss. But those liners do add up.

So over to the glass bottles, like momma used to use :)

Playing games on the couch is to be commended, but next moment I get near a 360, I’m going to fire up Crimson Alliance. Looks like it wants to channel the old Baldurs Gate console games (not the PC game, totally different series) .. I’m grateful for any old school dungeon crawl beat-em-up.

I’d say Portal 2, Deus Ex, and Starcraft 2 are up for game of the year, but theres some tough competition coming.

I mean, with Skyrim coming in November …. but alas, that is right after the twins arrive, so maybe I wont’ get to see it… things I’m hoping to check out ’soon’ are..

• final episode of Doctor Who season 6 .. DW is my favourite show (for some 30 years..!), but last episode is right after the twins. Blast! :)
• 360: Batman: Arkham City
• PC/360: Battlefield 3
• PC: Portal 2 DLC
• PC: Skyrim
• PC/360: Grimrock – an old school styled RPG (think Dungeon Master or Eye of the Beholder) on a new fancy engine
• PC: Starcraft 2 expansions
• PC: Thief 4
• PC/360: Deus Ex : HR DLC/expansions
• 360: Crimson Alliance
• PC: Terraria updates
• PC: Diablo III.. when? Q1 2012..
• PC: Halflife III — every gaming ‘want list’ must include HL3, in hopes Valve will think about it
• PC: DoTA 2 from Valve
• PC: Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO.. unless its another WoW clone
• PC: Miner Wars .. Descent reborn!
• PC: Another indie Elite-style shooter
• PC: “X3″ space sim?
• PC: Master of the Arcane.. another MoM type game?

Mind you, I’m still hoping to squeeze a couple hacks in..

• Ordered a TV-out cable from ‘peca’ on gp32x forum; if it arrives in time, I’d like to see some retro-on-big-TV action; bluetooth (iCP) to Pandora to TV.. theres a limited number of ports/apps that support both BT controller and will work with TV-out (notably, picodrive and pcs-rearmed don’t work with TV-out but do support BT controllers..); I’ve done some experimentation and my Hatari port shoudl work fine; time permitting, I’ll patch snes9x for iCP support, should be a piece of cake (take an hour..); might be possible to do a quicik mod, or configurable option anyway, for minimenu. Time permitting, modify MAME4ALL. Then iCP -> Pandora (mmenu, MAME4ALL/Hatari/snes9x) -> TV … total win.
• If I can get one of my Ataris opened up, could apply HxC floppy emulator and UltraSatan hard drive emulator to good effect, but doubt this will happen.

Course, also need to read some books and comics, and watch some video..

Hmm, am I biting off a little much? :)

See:
http://www.grimrock.net/

Flash cart primer; early generation consoles often used ‘cartridges’ to contain the games; the cart was basicly a big plastic shell around a ROM chip (and possibly some extra hardware) that contained the game, artwork, audio and so forth. Switching carts for each game was part of the experience, but carts could on rare occasions break down or get lost .. or if you had a collection of dozens or hundreds of games, just become a nuisance to store or locate. (Who remembers the Wall of Atari each of us had, with colourful carts and cassette tapes filling a whole wall of your rec-room?) The flash cart was designed by third parties to address these needs (and of course, to balls out encourage piracy; nowadays the goals are more honourable — preservation, encouraging homebrew game development, but back in the day they were more balls out about the intended use.)

“Flast carts” for consoles have been around since carts existed — back in the day you could get a flash cart for SNES while the machine was still brand new. Over the years the flash cart has become increasingly convenient to use – the originals actually used floppy disks to store game backups on! Just a few years ago, flash carts started to get more convenient — plug them into a USB cable to your PC and set them up; not bad, but still not ‘there’.

Enter the EverDrive — essentially some hardware that knows how to read universally standard SD card media and load the game ‘roms’ into its flash memory, and then pretend to just be a normal cartridge for the intended system; the designer of the EverDrive has models for the SNES, the Genesis/Megadrive, Nintendo 64,  and is working on the TG16/PCengine. Pretty darned nifty, and ultra convenient. Too bad they say (currently) the arcade Neo Geo (MVS) system is out of scope — too annoying, but it would be cool there.

EverDrive in various models is available from a number of stores, but I ordered mine from EvilD’s gp2x.de shop (disclosure; I am friends with EvilD, but he _is_ a decent and honest fellow; I could probably order from somewhere more local, but I ordered from another continent to wave the flag, ok?); its pricey (depending on model, 80EUR and up) but is pretty nifty, so if you’re a retro gaming fan and have the spare money, this is certainly a good avenue. Be nice if bulk discounts for buying a bundle (Nintendo64 + TG16 + MD + SNES .. woot :) existed.

EverDrive is a simple premise — it presents itself as a cart to the host system; on startup it offers a simple menu – load a game from SD and flash it to the EverDrive, or just fire up the game already in flash, along with some toolbox options (check the EverDrive firmware version, format an SD card, that sort of stuff.) It does support SRAM load/save but I didn’t fuss with it. It also supports all standard cart ’sizes’ (size of the game pack), though doesn’t offer custom hardware so a few games that contained extra wiring in the cart itself will not work. But in general most actual game ‘rips’ you use should work.

(If you have a Retrode you’ll be in nerd heaven; the Retrode will let you pull the game ‘rom’ from any carts you have, and then you can feed them into your EverDrive :)

Some things to note – the EverDrive is running on real hardware, not an emulator; emulators have some pretty advanced trickery such as region lock ignore, handling PAL on NTSC, emulating custom hardware some games need, being mroe relaxed about carts (allowing larger than real carts or allowing some things to occur that real hardware does not.) So a real cart rip will probably work in EverDrive, but be sure to try and run the rip of a cart that is actually for your machine (NTSC vs PAL though this can be okay, the right region, and unmodified .. many modified games might have a loader or whatever that only works in an emulator.) But if you’re like me and try and stick to the narrow road and use rips of your own carts, life is fine.

The actual process is .. turn on your SNES (or Genesis or whatever) and get the EverDrive menu; hit a button to start up the game as is, or hit another button to load up a different game and flash the EverDrive; the actual flashing process takes awhile – say 30-50 seconds depending on size of the cart, plus some time afterwards for SRAM to be cleared and fixed up; factor a couple of minutes for a game to get going .. which is just enough to annoy the heck out of a 4 year old who wants to play Super Mario.

Other than the flash time sink, its perfect; perhaps future models will speed it up, but as the flash operation is being driven by the host console itself (to keep hardware costs down on the ED unit itself?) theres probably not much that can be done speed wise.

In general, set up is easy..

1. Stick an SD into the ED and use the menu to format it (you can format it yourself on a PC as well, but to get it ‘right’ this is an easy option.); I used a 10 year old 128MB SD I had lieing around, since it was pure SD (not SDHC) and so shoudl work on _everything_, and 128MB is a hell of a lot of space when it comes to retro consoles .. no need to burn an 32GB SDHC on this ;)
2. Using a PC (or Pandora like I did!) copy over the latest firmware from the EverDrive website; I updated to firmware v11, which knows how to deal with long filenames (more than 8 character filenames, as we’re accustomed to these days) and lots of files
3. In ED boot menu, theres a firmware update option; I won’t go into it, but it works well and is pretty safe (ie: low chance to brick the unit.)
4. Now that you’re on latest firmware, use your PC and load up that SD with your SNES homebrew and cart rips

So thats it .. EverDrive is easy to use, holds as many games as your SD card allows, and works a treat.

Oh, one caveat — when I ordered the cart from gp2x.de (a German shop), he didn’t have any North American cart cases so had to supply mine with the European cart case (rounded front instead of flat front.) This actually fits fine into a NA SNES unit, but I did have to clip out a couple notches that are on the casing to block cross-continent use back in the day; pliers and 30 seconds and good to go.

Summary – for classic console gamers, EverDrive is pretty sweet.

Notice the resolution; 1680x1024 IIRC

The Firebee itself is a pretty small board; place two paperback novels end to end and hack off half of one of them, and you’ve got an idea how long it is, and how deep it is; it is of course very thin. (or for arcade nutbars, about the size of a Tetris pcboard stretched out.) I brought the board up with only two connections — a DVI monitor with the display above, and a TT030 keyboard; they keyboard itself has a STiK with a non-Atari mouse in it.

The board features many ports for both modern and retro needs; of interest is SD and CF slots for convenient and fast storage; CF implies IDE and yes, theres an IDE pinout here as well for hard drives, as well as the pins for an original Atari hard disk arrangement. USB ports allow for keyboard or mouse or mass storage, but we’ve also got the port for Mega/TT keyboards. Audio ports, serial ports for debugging terminals or modems, ethernet, PS2 keyboard .. I don’t know how the designers crammed all this in without competing on specs, but they did :) (I mean .. ST keyboard, PS2 keyboard, USB keyboard? Obviously someone has worked very hard updating TOS (the basic operating system) to multiplex all these inputs nicely, not to mention including support for ethernet and USB and extended resolutions and so on!)

Firebee from the Atari Coldfire Project

For the ST nutbars out there, is a “POST” boot screen:

Boot screen

I’ve only had a few minutes to play around, but I’ve got my time ahead planned .. need to sort out my development tools and environment — TOS is great to work in, but for multitasking its usually nice to drop into the MiNT environment – a Unix-like environment for TOS computers with a Atari desktop on top; from within MiNT its not hard to get the full gcc toolchain, and really all the Unix shells and tools going (at which time you might wonder why you’re playing with an Atari machine at all, but thats beside the point. Yes you want to run Unix and Linux tools on an Atari, duh.) For old times sake I attempted to run a few versions of GFA Basic to no avail (no surprise, given the firmware is still wildly being developed and a few low level ST assumptions had to be changed for the platform. Well behaved applications may well work from the old days (Calamus!), but applications that misbehave probably do not.)

Once the development toolchain is up, I can work on porting a few of my games over to get used to the feel of the system; my Atari coding skills are a good 20 years out of date. (Yes I’ve done extensive work on emulation of many systems including Atari ST, but writing code _on_ an ST is wildly different than simulating an ST..); I intend to bring over Manticore and BattleJewels..

.. time permitting. Less than two months until the twins arrive!

No tags for this post.]]> http://www.rjmitchell.ca/~jeff/blog2009/2011/07/24/introducing-the-firebee/feed/ 0 http://www.rjmitchell.ca/~jeff/blog2009/2011/05/31/ubuntu-natty-11-04-not-so-much-hate/ http://www.rjmitchell.ca/~jeff/blog2009/2011/05/31/ubuntu-natty-11-04-not-so-much-hate/#comments Tue, 31 May 2011 17:59:12 +0000 skeezix http://www.rjmitchell.ca/~jeff/blog2009/2011/05/31/ubuntu-natty-11-04-not-so-much-hate/ I run the Ubuntu distribution of Linux on my main head (though as always I tend to run Everything, from FreeBSD to various Linuxen to Windows to OSX) .. its convenient and has easy ways to get codecs set up to watch store bought DVDs. It has a huge community that I ignore, but that means many common issues are a mere google search away. So, yeah, Ubuntu is bloated and giant, but it works well, so all you Arch guys can stop bugging me, kay? ;)

I’ve been putting off the upgrade from 10.04/10.10 to current 11.04 version for fear of Unity, the big new desktop replacement Canonicle thought they’d push down; many people hate it (and the upcoming replacement Gnome and the not as new updated KDE .. like all the major players have gone the Wrong Path?!) so I’ve just not wanted to get involved. Things were working more or less fine. Also, I’ve got one of those issues where I really don’t like when peopel shove things down my throat, so I naturally balked.

I dont’ quite get all the Unity-hate, since Ubuntu has not (yet!) removed the gnome2 type setup — just log in again and set to ‘Ubuntu Classic’, and *poof*, it looks exactly like it did before the 11.04 upgrade. So why the broohaha and downgrade to 10.10? Sillyness.

Now, should they actually remove gnome2 (Ubuntu Classic session), I’ll be annoyed.

(Why the upgrade at all? Because in Ubuntuworld, they tend to not port patches back to non-LTS versions like 10.10 was, so if you want to stay on top of patches without applying every one yourself, you need to stay on current distros, or at least LTS (Long Term Support) ones. And randomly, a couple months ago, I started having lots of subtle oddities with the machine.. some subtle driver update, or some hardware gone flaky, has caused me no end of grief, in very small bits once a day .. enough to be annoying, but not enough to make detection easy. Blast! So.. upgrade time..)