On my way back from CVS this past week in the evening, the art piece above exhibited in the window of 440 Gallery (located at 440 6th Ave, Brooklyn) caught my attention. I immediately thought of “a tempest in a teapot,” but this was a tempest erupting out of a tiny cardboard box. I learned that it a work by Fred Bendheim titled, “Out of the Box.” There’s always interesting things like this on display at 440 Gallery.
While I’m keeping Debian 13 Trixie on my media center computer, I’ve decided to fallback to Debian 12 Bookworm on my laptop and workstation. The more that I used Trixie on those machines, the more I realized some things that I relied on just weren’t working right. Once that software gets updated, I’ll try Trixie again, but for now, especially while I’m frantically getting things ready for classes to begin next Tuesday, I’ll rely on tried-and-true Bookworm.
I visited the CUNY Graduate Center on 5th Avenue in Manhattan to get an adjunct faculty ID made, because I’ll be co-teaching Interactive Technology and Pedagogy I: History and Theory (ITCP 70010) this fall. This course is part of the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (ITP) Certificate Program, which when offered the opportunity to contribute to this program, I jumped at! It is aligned with some of the work that I do in the Professional and Technical Writing Program at City Tech, which involves using technology for communicating and learning about the history of digital technologies, and it is a kindred program with the learning to teach with technology aspects of the Brittain Fellowship at Georgia Tech. I’m excited to work with the program’s graduate students beginning in a couple of weeks.
Last week, I upgraded the Debian 12 Bookworm installation on my workstation to Debian 13 Trixie. After updating my sources file and running apt update and apt full-upgrade, the installation went painlessly and quickly. However, I noticed some glitches with video playback (audio stutter) and listing directory contents on a hard disk drive (prolonged delays even though the drive was in active use and not waking from sleep). I wasn’t that interested in spending time to track down the source of these particular problems, so I decided to do a nuke-and-pave full reinstall of Debian 13.
That led to three days of frustration and reinstalling Debian 13 five times. I now have a stable installation that does what I want, but it took a lot of bashing my forehead into the desk to get here.
To be fair, some of the problems were created by me trying to configure software that I don’t have a deep understanding of using shared knowledge online that might be years old and applicable to older versions of those programs.
The one problem that caused the most headaches wasn’t my fault as far as I can suss out. The installer seemed to alternate assigning the “zero” nvme drive between my two identical 2TB nvme drives. This strange behavior led to me wiping both drives and installing Debian 13 on both during the multiple installations. When it comes to partitioning, I’m super cautious, because even though my data was backed up, I still didn’t want to wipe a drive unless it was what I wanted to do.
Besides the Debian 13 installer’s partitioning software, I wondered if it could have something to do with my motherboard’s bios. I am a few versions behind the latest release, but none of the bios’ change logs mention anything to do with code for handling the nvme drives.
I didn’t document my experience like I should, because I got to a point where I just wanted a stable system so that I could get some work done. I accomplished that at least. Though, I wanted to put this up as a potential warning in case anyone else experiences something similar.
The speeder bike chase on the Moon of Endor is one of the most exciting sequences in Return of the Jedi (1983). Kenner captured that excitement in the speeder bike vehicle and Imperial Biker Scout action figure. There are some ingenious elements to this vehicle. First, when one picks up the speeder bike, the stirrups descend and the engine flaps on the back lift up and open. Second, when a speeder bike is hit by a laser blast, struck by a lightsaber, or runs into something, one can press on the blanket on the back to trigger the speeder bike exploding into three separate parts. This was one of my favorites in my Star Wars action figure collection, but it is now entrusted to someone else.
