Loeb & Linux (& Updated Wordmeter)

Reading: The Great Hunt, Robert Jordan; Poetics, Aristotle
Watching: The Big Bang Theory, Season 1
Redraft: Chapter 5 of 32

19911 / 139570

In college, I noticed a neat selection of tiny green- and red-bound volumes in the office of one of my philosophy professors, and one day in the midst of a discussion I asked him about it. They were volumes from the Loeb Classical Library, he said, a series of texts published by Harvard University Press featuring writers and works from the ancient world, with one particularly useful feature: the original text (in its original language) is printed on one side of a page, while its corresponding translation is printed on the opposite, so that when the book is open at any give place, the original text and the translation can be viewed side by side. Now I read neither Latin nor Greek, but I'd been searching at that point for a pocket-sized edition of my favorites from ancient philosophy, and so the Loeb series seemed to be a godsend. The downside, however, is that each book in the 500-or-so-volume series is about $24.00 retail, which means that buying the whole bloody thing would cost as much, or perhaps even a little bit more, than a basic car. (On top of that, no matter how crazy a person might be over ancient texts, who the hell would bother to read every single volume, anyway? Even I'm not that obsessed.)

So, I decided that I'd limit my sights to a single volume: one containing, among two others, Aristotle's Poetics. One of the earliest extant analyses of the storyteller's craft, I had the pleasure of reading selections from it in high school AP English (and creating an interesting riff as one of my class projects: the Poetics of Anime). I believe the other two essays--Longinus' On the Sublime and Demetrius' On Style--are written in a similar vein, so I look forward to reading them as well.

*

Elysia--the ill-chosen name for my much-maligned HP Pavillion 5170 series laptop--ate one of its own system files yesterday, rendering XP unbootable. I'd long since given up on the computer--the last straw being when it blue screened while I was working on my application for law school, back in late 2005--and I had meant to dump it off on someone else for a few hundred bucks on eBay back then, but my mother decided to adopt it intead. She's been using it for email, typing notes, etc. for the past few years, but yesterday it wigged out and trapped her latest notetaking on its hard drive. The all-but-worthless repair function of the restore disks didn't work, surprise surpise, so I had to turn to a contingency I'd come across back in 2005--a Knoppix LiveCD.

Knoppix is a distribution of the Linux OS that is able to boot and run directly from the CD itself, allowing one to try out the OS without having to risk an install. One of the most useful features is that it automounts the computer's hard drives to its desktop, meaning that transfering files from the misbehaving computer to a flash drive is as easy as drag and drop. I had to download the latest distribution of Knoppix--which took about an hour or so, at 696 MB--and burn it to a CD-R, but after that everything worked out smoothly. The file was retrieved, sparing much fist shaking and nashing of teeth.

The whole ordeal has me thinking about Linux again; I'm a complete n00b in all of its arcane commands, but it's always been an object of fascination for me. Seeing as the fore-mentioned laptop is down and out until I either reinstall Windows or another OS, I thought it might be a good opportunity to give Ubuntu Linux a go.

Ubuntu has become one of the most popular distributions of Linux in recent years, and most of the buzz I've heard from those in the know is positive. It's free, and given the star-crossed nature of the hardware I'm planning to install it on, I've really got nothing to lose.