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Wednesday, December 26, 2007

legacies remembered, through musical and through 'kennedy center honors'

Brian Wilson, Diana Ross, Steve Martin, Leon Fleisher and Martin Scorsese are honored during "Kennedy Center Honors" on CBS.

This reminded me of recent visit to "Jersey Boys", a musical based on 50-70's pop group 'Four Season'.

Less dramatic, maybe a little, than Jersey Boys, it was nice to see someone like Yo-yo-ma on the stage versing Leon Fleisher's life story, and funny to see someone re-acting Steve Martin's comedy. It seems like a lot of toughts were put in to organizing this, and many volunteered(?) to perform. A young aspiring pianist playing in tribute to Leon was also pretty mesmerizing and made me ashamed of my lazyness in practice.

Something that made me think, of these two occassions: value of talent! I usually don't believe in talent but more so on hard work. But would these great artists be great artists with perserverance alone? Maybe the passion, and that 1% that makes differences against other artists would be their god-given talent? If so, what would be my talent? Heh, ouch...

Maybe the vocab. 'talent' is some special quality not common in general public, like me, thus my justification for lacking talent. I'm a mediocre at drawing/painting, at music, at computers, at math, at finances, ...

maybe my talent is just being mediocre good at things? lol.

anyways, it's pretty amazing how some people can listen to a tune and can identify, play along and even improve what he/she heard.

I really enjoyed "Jersey Boys", and now I can appreciate 'Four Season's music with insight. And, now the "Kennedy Center Honours" helps me realize I shouldn't give up on a boring things like new year's resolution. If someone like Diana Ross was determined, and loved singing at age 15, and carried through all the black-and-white-TV era through 70s and 80s, ...

Don't need to be honored at Kennedy Center myself, but "wouldn't it be nice if ..." i had no regret with my life when I look back at what I have accomplished?

^^

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checkin out gentoo 2007


checkin out gentoo 2007
Originally uploaded by speattle
not so much by choice, but i got to learn to install and setup gentoo on intel based mac mini for ruby on rails app.

partitioning, installation, package installation with emerge, ..., it's been quite painful 4 days.

i had to use mac mini, because that was only hardware available to me, and duh, i started with 10.4 without boot camp. that was my stumbling block. once i grabbed leopard installation that came with bootcamp, partitioning got easier.

oh, also partition it as windows partition, then change it to linux using 'fdisk /dev/sda' when in gentoo shell.

i had downloaded gentoo 2007 livedvd but for some reason it didn't like looking up '/dev/sda' to kick off the installation.

after about 2-3 failed attempt and about 2 complete reinstall from mac os, i sorta got wised and attempted to chmod /dev/sda* from root as livedvd took me to X windows as gentoo user. That didn't help, but now i know not to panic, as i can sudo as gentoo user without password.

still with no success at install, i had to opt for minimial install cd, and as i've not done gentoo install before i'd be reading gentoo handbook and wouldn't know the instruction. now that i do understand, it's pretty easy instruction to follow; explaining the steps that followed by exact command line to enter.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?full=1#book_part1_chap1 is bookmarked for me now, along with http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_Apple_Mac_Mini.

i'm in the middle of adding packages via emerge now.

still am not familiar with raiserfs, but am glad to know gentoo can be loaded to mac mini.

although it didn't work out livedvd logging in as gentoo and taking me to X window desktop was nice. after following minimal install i'm logged in to shell for emerge update, and got to locate X window/desktop packages to install to get ack into the Desktop as nice/fancy as gentoo user's was when i booted from DVD.

oh, it was nice i made note about rEFit earlier in blog, i had to look it up when partitioning from Mac OS X.