Baltimoremick.com

My old and aged Dell Latitude C800 has just finished some needed maintenance.  For the most part, the laptop is being used by the proprietor of my local coffeehouse.  I received a frantic email from her last week complaining that Ubuntu's updates had failed and she was unable to login to her machine.

I picked up the laptop this evening to resolve the problem, and when I booted the machine I was able to see what the problem was immediately.  I had not had the problem for some time, primarily since it had been a while since I had built the machine.  Essentially, when the machine is booted, the display looks similar to the image below:

The display is garbled and useless.  It took some bit of Googling to refresh my memory, but the problem had to do with a misconfiguration of the xorg.conf file that drives the xserver settings for my laptop.  My Googling turned up the following post: Help with screen resolution on Dell Inspiron 8000.  The problem has to do with how the graphics card in my laptop identifies the driver, an ATI Mobility M4.  Adding the lines in the above post helped correct my problem.

Finally, once I was able to successfully boot into my profile, I was able to easily adjust the resolution of the display panel to 1600x1200.  Nonetheless, I am including the xorg.conf I am using below that appears to be working just as expected.

I spent way too much time than I needed on this, so this should save my (and someone else's) bacon in the future.

In what has become typical of August, the late summer invasion of the Red Sux* fans is underway.  It all began yesterday morning on my bike commute into work.  I was coming down Conway Street from the Camden Yards Warehouse, crossing Howard Street.  What did I see crossing the street just before 8:00 AM?   A Sux fan in full regalia--crisp, new Red Sux hat, his Red Sux hat.  I was sorely tempted to run into him with my bike just to vent my frustrations over a long period of bad baseball and the annual invasion of these New England nitwits.

On my ride home, there were more of the Sux fans.  Many of them wearing their "After 86 Years of Ineptitude, 2 World Series!" t-shirts.  It was even worse as I listened to some of the ball game on the radio on my ride home from the gym later in the evening--hearing the "Let's go Red Sux!" chant.

After heaping scorn and hate upon many Yankees fans, I have truly come to hate and despise most of the denizens of Red Sux Nation.  It what was once a nostalgic and somewhat endearing tale when they would come to the precipice of victory in the Fall Classic.  Now, they have become pariahs as they have effectively become that which they have rejected so much--the Evil Empire of New England--equal to their arch-nemesis, the New York Yankees.

God, I hope the Rays win the AL East.

* For the uninitiated, my contempt for the Boston Red Sox has forced me to give them a new name: the Red Sux.