A mixed-up matter

Some people just rest and relax on vacation but I was too bored to do that :D

I like vacations, you have weeks on your hands to do what you have to but you always find it too short to spend. You also sleep after midnight and wake up later in the day. Instead of just relaxing, you work on things at home that you didn't have time to do during the working week-days.

The problem with vacations (for me) is of a fleshly nature, as in you do what you feel like doing. Now being a Christian who wants to be with God, this holds a problem. So far half of my vacation was spent on my PC. Now I wasn't like programming or playing games or unnecessarily surfing the web (although each element was present) I was mostly focusing on reformatting my PC and getting the right Linux distro to work on my Gateway and Personal PC.

I had a working router/gateway working months ago until we got a new wireless modem (old one got busted) which is USB based and not Ethernet and/or USB based. Not knowing what I know now, I didn't play on a little longer, I formatted and installed Ubuntu. Now don't get me wrong, I think Ubuntu is great but...
I was working and so doing, didn't have much time to work on the router, was mostly not in the mood or just tired. So it was out of action for months. Now I got the internet working but some pages just didn't want to be forwarded to the client PCs on the network. I can surf the web no problem, until I had to update AVG or visit a web page with the HTTPS protocol. It turned out Ubuntu had a bug. I tried the fix with no avail.
I formatted again with good 'ol Open SuSE (10.0; Love that Distro!) and tried again with roaring success (well I was roaring ;-) ).
It was quick and actually pretty painless. I have my little German app on my windows pc to connect and disconnect from the internet, the firewall is up and ready, samba is waiting for shares and I am smiling.
I also installed Open SuSE 10.2 on my personal PC again, and now since I don't have to be the internet master anymore, I can freely explore my new SuSE distro that I got months ago! ;-)

Now you are all wondering what the problem is right? Time! It took over a freekin week! A week less of my precious vacation and I don't have a very long one indeed! I have just 1 week left and it is back to the working house.

I also value the time spent with God but my old nature must have gotten the better of me during my holiday season. I am happy and sad at the same time. Happy that my PC is working with my router but sad that time is almost up and that God was lower on my list. Trust me, the flesh is a bastard! Well I can't give it all the credit since I am the one who make decisions myself, so all I can do is hope and pray that I will be able to force myself to be with God. I love being with God but sometimes things just get weird and it becomes hard to just sit and be still before Him. I am not trying to make excuses but unfortunately I am still weak because the flesh is weak.

Anyway, I also tried out Gentoo linux and I was dissapointed in it that it didn't want to work when I installed it. It looked promising, being efficient and all but it was hassle after hassle, I downloaded the latest version a day or two ago and it didn't want to install, couldn't even get hold of the log files to find out why. I turned to the 2006.1 version, installed it but Gnome didn't want to start, plus it didn't pick up my sound card (NForce built in sound). It was after Gentoo that I decided to go back to SuSE. SuSE never gave me problems with hardware, in fact I once had a PC that could ONLY run SuSE, I tried just about every other distro on it, and the mouse jumps and the SATA drive just couldn't be found, even with Ubuntu.
I don't care what anyone has to say about SuSE, it rocks! The only thing missing is something like apt-get!

This is my sad and happy story ;-)

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas! And may you all have a wonderful new year!