I am a rebel... I live life on the edge... I tear the labels off pillows... I drink outdated milk.  Look out world... errr.. no wait.. ummm.. right... ummm

So this weekend was a super exciting adventure.  Did I go bungee jumping?  Nope.  Skydiving?  Nope.  Well.. how about... hmmm.. OK... I stayed in as usual, and... can you guess?  Yah, if you know me, you know exactly what I was doing.  Sigh.

I added another hard drive to my computer.  Wow eh?  Will the excitement ever end?  Ha.  I'm now up to 3 terrabytes of disk space, and already thinking... I should have bought 2 new drives instead of just one.

Adding a new drive gave me the perfect opportunity to re-install Linux and get a clean start.  You know, you'd think I'd learn... it's never easy no matter what OS you pick and I spent most of teh weekend futzing with installs and configuring and reinstalling and reconfiguring...  My main OS is as usual, openSUSE.  I installed openSUSE 11.1 with KDE 4.3 and the latest openSUSE 11.2 Milestone (aka Alpha).  I also tried to install Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha as well... but that one won't boot for some reason.  The main problems from this weekend's adventures seem to be related to my custom partition layout, and the new ext4 filesystem format I started tinkering with on this install... openSUSE 11.1 doesn't speak ext4 by default (although I can enable experimental support for it if I'm really daring).

The update to KDE4.3 in openSUSE 11.1 went very smoothly this time around.  My previous install had a lot of debris left around from all the incremental upgrades I did from the initial 4.0.3 to 4.3.  This debris caused all sorts of interesting probelms... nothing catastrophic, but annoying at times.

So... up and running again.. and only 1 terrabyte of data left to sort through... eeep!

If anyone is interested in what KDE4.3 looks like (you know.. you guys who think Windows is the ONLY way to operate a computer), take a look at these links:

ZDNet Australia - a video made by some guys at ZDNet Australia where they showed KDE4 to some unsuspecting people, telling them it was Windows 7 and asking their opinions.

YouTube video 1 - A short video that just shows a little of what the desktop looks like

YouTube video 2 - A longer video demoing some of the features in detail

There was some excitement in my neighborhood on the weekend.  I was on my way to the local bus stop... I came around the corner just in time to witness the end of a major accident.  At the time it was really hard for me to tell if the person was pushed into traffic... or if the car that hit him ran a red light... or something else.  It was chaos... people running here and there.  Some trying to help the man who was hit... it was hard to tell exactly what happened, only that it was really bad for the guy who was hit by the car.

With a little help, I tracked down this news report (it's in German):

http://www.welt.de/hamburg/article4334287/Betrunkener-ueberfaehrt-Fussgaenger.html

The basic summary is... a 26 year old Russian was drunk (he had an incredible blood alcohol level of 0.254%) and driving without a license (it was suspended from earlier drunk driving convictions).  He ran a red light at a pedestrian crossing, and hit a 44 year old man who was in the crosswalk.  He hit the man so hard that the impact punched a hole in the windshield, and the man's head left a big dent in the pillar and roof of the car (this is a very solid structural part of the car).  Immediately after the accident, the driver and his passenger hopped out of the car and ran off to try and hide. 

Police and Ambulance were there really quick... they even landed a medical helicopter on the parking area at the adjacent bus garage.  The EMTs took over, and tried to take care of the pedestrian while the police, aided by another helicopter started a massive manhunt.  They caught the driver in a nearby playground, but didn't find the passenger though.  I'm guessing they will track him down in the end though.  Seems these guys were known to the local Police.

Unfortuantely the pedestrian died on Sunday night.  The injuries he had from the accident were pretty bad

It's rather scary to think how easily this can happen again there - even with totally sober drivers.  Loads of people ignore the crosswalk and dart across the 4 lane road just to avoid waiting at the crossing.