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Today is “National Coming Out Day”, so I figured I’d ramble about it for a bit.

I have a ton of LGBT friends who seem to be rather low key about their lifestyle choices. Some of them have a vested interest in LGBT rights and are proactive in rights movements because they deserve more. Others are indifferent to rights movements because they’re satisfied with how they’re treated. Some just plain don’t care about what’s going on. But then there are the few fanatics that like to rub their lifestyle choice in everyone’s face. After reading some of the articles that were published today, I can see that these people are more popular than I thought.

It seems that a lot of people think that NCOD is a day where they can be absolutely obnoxious about being LGBT. I personally find it disgusting. As an ally who has spent numerous hours at protests and pride festivals, it bothers me to no end when people are so outspoken about what they feel they deserve that they look like assholes. There’s no doubt that the intolerance needs to stop, but how can you expect people to become tolerant of your ideals when you’re so intolerant of theirs? This isn’t a one way street, folks. Hate isn’t one sided.

I think in general I’m just infuriated that the people with the loudest voice also seem to be people who are trying to resolve issues with brute force. Rather than handle things maturely, they choose to hemorrhage gay pride and expect people to take them seriously with their rainbow afro. Insert something about one step forward and 2 steps back here.

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I’ve always had a dream of owning my own company one day, and I’ve finally made good on my promise to myself. I had started one previously for my freelance work, but after the lack of time (I was completing 2 degrees) and lack of real planning, the business eventually collapsed. It still bothers me that it failed, but I consider it a valuable learning experience. I learned that I hate the rush to meet unreasonable deadlines that impatient non-developers set. I also learned that ASP and ColdFusion people are bat shit insane. (This obviously excludes my current employer since they seem to be real people and not corporate robots. If they’re robots they’re at least nice robots. I like robots.) Most importantly, I realized that I was selling myself short to make someone else”s dream come true.

In an effort to keep my prices competitive in a saturated market, I was essentially forced to undersell my time. I spent hundreds of hours making online storefronts and community portals for other people who had dreams of owning such things. Unfortunately I lost sight of what my dreams were and what I wanted to do with my business. When I think back to all of the applications I wrote, not a single one solved a new problem. Instead, everything I wrote solved a problem that CompanyX created for themselves. I spent months slaving away over whatever I was building because CompanyX decided they wanted a new way to make money.

So what’s different this time? This time I”m doing things for myself. I still have a few lingering hosting/design clients that I adore and will always help, but I also have a number of things planned for myself that will solve some problems that I have. If people like my solution, I”ll sell it to them. If not, at least my problems are solved. I think part of the problem with the last business was that I was more focused on paying bills than making something that kicked ass. I have a day job that I”m pretty happy with, so this should make a nice side project that I can actually be proud of.

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There are no decent short howto guides on this subject, so I figured I’d make one. This was done on a Macbook Pro 5,5 but I imagine these steps will work for most people. Some things ganked from here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro5-5/Lucid – read this for more detailed info.

tl;dr:
Create partition with BootCamp/DiskUtility
Install rEFit
Reboot
Reboot again
Boot from CD, hold option key if it fails
Install ubuntu, /boot/ on root
Reboot
Plug in wired connection (wireless will be borked)
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mactel-support && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-bl-dkms pommed
gksudo gedit /etc/modules -> add “coretemp” to the end
apt-get upgrade
Reboot
System->Administration->Hardware Drivers->Select/Activate Recommended nvidia accelerated driver
gksudo gedit /etc/pommed.conf
System->Preferences->Mouse->Touchpad->Two-finger scrolling
sudo apt-get install bcmwl-kernel-source
Run alsamixer and make sure front speaker is unmuted. Adjust controls as needed.
Reboot
Enjoy Ubuntu.

Screen brightness will be a little wonky; you can adjust the interval as needed in /etc/pommed.conf

I take no responsibility if you hose your system :>

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