It's officially Monday, which means I start work today, which is awesome. Right now I'm sitting in the library during my 20-30 minute pause between classes, reading over my little English assignment and pondering adding some more to it. Recently a friend of mine/classmate and I have been working collaboratively on our English work over Skype, which has been pretty cool. The work that we did last night, though, I think is actually due Wednesday according to my notes, but I'm not really sure what we were supposed to have in today. I guess it can't hurt to have the extra work in earlier.
As I sated above, though, today is they day when I officially start work. It sounds like the agenda is to first get orientated, i.e. meet all the people in charge, figure out how to work the time sheets, label my mailbox, etc. After that I'll get assigned a student and we'll go over that type of stuff. Should turn out to be a rather interesting day, I hope.
On another note, due to Lee going on about how great Jaguar (OS 10.2.8) was on his Pismo, I busted out my copy (pressed!) and put it on the gigabit ethernet. Aside from having massive problems initially with video, due to having a much newer card, it actually ran really nicely, and brought back some nice memories of when OS X was new and I actually loved macs and all that. Oddly though, when it sits for a while, unused, for maybe an hour it will randomly Kernel panic. Maybe it just needs to be loved, or maybe jaguar is incredibly unstable when it comes to my OC job. Who knows!
Showing posts with label library. Show all posts
Showing posts with label library. Show all posts
Monday, September 15, 2008
Friday, August 29, 2008
Sold!
Yay.
Last night the Athlon's processor sold for $200. Some guy in Oregon decided to skip all the bidding shenanigans and did the buy-it-now. For some odd reason my ebay toolbar in firefox got logged out, so I wasn't alerted of it the second it happened. When I did catch it Ian, Tyler, and I were in a Skype conference and I had a bit of a random outburst. Though, for the first time ever I listed an auction as as-is instead of providing a warranty, so that I could buy my new stuffs right away! Except! No. Paypal/eBay decided to implement another "protect the buyer" feature that that causes paypal to hold all funds transferred if the item sells for over $100 by a seller that has less than 100 feedbacks until either A) paypal gets delivery conf. on the buyer's end, B) the buyer provides positive feedback, or the questionable "three weeks have passed." I'm not really sure about the last one, like as in how it protects the buyer or whatever. They make it sound almost like "no matter what, after 3 weeks the seller will get their money."
It doesn't matter at all though, because I'm not a scammer, the processor works fine (as does the HSF,) and dad shipped it right after he dropped me off here (comm co) via priority, so it should get to Oregon around tuesday or wednesday. As for my other eBay items, one set of RAM currently has a $20 bid, and the other does not. I'm getting ready to write up a post for the motherboard but I just realized I can't actually post anything from here on account of the fact that I only moved part of the athlon backup to the thinkpad.
So!
Now that the processor is sold and gone, the Athlon is pretty useless. Realizing this, I went ahead and stripped it down and set all the parts aside. While I was doing this, something occurred to me- I don't really need the massive space that a tower provides. I mean, it's not like I'm about to run out of places to put a tower in my room; but when I can get a new smaller case for cheaper, why not check it out? And check it out again. On TigerDirect I found a really, really, really nice barebones shuttle system. Basically a 12" deep by 8" tall and 8" wide box with an AM2 motherboard providing PCI and PCI-e, as well as two RAM slots, three sata, two esata, lots of usb, 7.1 audio, firewire, etc bundled with an AMD AM2 5000+ processor, which is epic. Plus it was only $220! Unfortunately the sale ends in two days so I'm not going to be able to get this specific one but there will always be more, but at least I have my sights set.
Though that kit would need another $30 at least, for RAM and shipping. This is where the RAM on ebay and the work I'm (hopefully) doing this saturday kicks in. I'm not sure what exactly I'm going to be doing on saturday, but I know it involves my NET225 teacher, who's an awesome guy, and a lady moving into a doctors office and needs computer stuff set up, and she things she has a bunch of networking equipment set up or something. I don't really know, but I should be finding out this afternoon, as today is another all-dayer.
All in all I'm predicting that within the next two or three weeks I'll be setting up some sort of new system or another. If I /do/ go with getting a shuttle, then I'll have no use for the athlon's case or PSU, both of which are very nice. So I have to decide- sell them, or keep them for a potential later computer! I don't know! If the funds from selling crap and working level it out I'll probably just keep them around. Here's to waiting.
Last night the Athlon's processor sold for $200. Some guy in Oregon decided to skip all the bidding shenanigans and did the buy-it-now. For some odd reason my ebay toolbar in firefox got logged out, so I wasn't alerted of it the second it happened. When I did catch it Ian, Tyler, and I were in a Skype conference and I had a bit of a random outburst. Though, for the first time ever I listed an auction as as-is instead of providing a warranty, so that I could buy my new stuffs right away! Except! No. Paypal/eBay decided to implement another "protect the buyer" feature that that causes paypal to hold all funds transferred if the item sells for over $100 by a seller that has less than 100 feedbacks until either A) paypal gets delivery conf. on the buyer's end, B) the buyer provides positive feedback, or the questionable "three weeks have passed." I'm not really sure about the last one, like as in how it protects the buyer or whatever. They make it sound almost like "no matter what, after 3 weeks the seller will get their money."
It doesn't matter at all though, because I'm not a scammer, the processor works fine (as does the HSF,) and dad shipped it right after he dropped me off here (comm co) via priority, so it should get to Oregon around tuesday or wednesday. As for my other eBay items, one set of RAM currently has a $20 bid, and the other does not. I'm getting ready to write up a post for the motherboard but I just realized I can't actually post anything from here on account of the fact that I only moved part of the athlon backup to the thinkpad.
So!
Now that the processor is sold and gone, the Athlon is pretty useless. Realizing this, I went ahead and stripped it down and set all the parts aside. While I was doing this, something occurred to me- I don't really need the massive space that a tower provides. I mean, it's not like I'm about to run out of places to put a tower in my room; but when I can get a new smaller case for cheaper, why not check it out? And check it out again. On TigerDirect I found a really, really, really nice barebones shuttle system. Basically a 12" deep by 8" tall and 8" wide box with an AM2 motherboard providing PCI and PCI-e, as well as two RAM slots, three sata, two esata, lots of usb, 7.1 audio, firewire, etc bundled with an AMD AM2 5000+ processor, which is epic. Plus it was only $220! Unfortunately the sale ends in two days so I'm not going to be able to get this specific one but there will always be more, but at least I have my sights set.
Though that kit would need another $30 at least, for RAM and shipping. This is where the RAM on ebay and the work I'm (hopefully) doing this saturday kicks in. I'm not sure what exactly I'm going to be doing on saturday, but I know it involves my NET225 teacher, who's an awesome guy, and a lady moving into a doctors office and needs computer stuff set up, and she things she has a bunch of networking equipment set up or something. I don't really know, but I should be finding out this afternoon, as today is another all-dayer.
All in all I'm predicting that within the next two or three weeks I'll be setting up some sort of new system or another. If I /do/ go with getting a shuttle, then I'll have no use for the athlon's case or PSU, both of which are very nice. So I have to decide- sell them, or keep them for a potential later computer! I don't know! If the funds from selling crap and working level it out I'll probably just keep them around. Here's to waiting.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Stranded at the Library
I'm officially stranded at the library. It's 12:48 now, and I've been here since roughly 8:10. I was going to try and get a ride with someone after they got out of their class (which would be right about now) but unfortunately I wasn't able to ask them before they left for class and I have no idea where said class is so I can't exactly get up and go ask. That just means that I'll be here until somewhere between 3-5. And for some reason, who knows why, when I was packing my bag this morning I figured "Eh, I'm not going to need the thinkpad" unfortunately I don't know /why/ I didn't think I'd need the thinkpad, but here I am, thinkpadless, in the library on a really nice Dell Optiplex 755. I was using the touch for a while, browsing the webbernets, but it occurred to me that not only is that sort of uncomfortable, it kills the battery in case I want to listen to music some time later on.
Several things I'm noticing about these setups are- the LCDs are really nice (of course) dell 1907s. At least three people are on stations that have the LCD tilted (they're made to be able to tilt 90deg for portrait work) by about 4-5 degrees. I don't know if they're aware of that fact, but it looks like it would be incredibly uncomfortable. Or at least really hard to use. Also, I absolutely adore these keyboards. They're compact, very tactile, fancily stiled, and very sturdy feeling. I could easily get one of these (* Prepares to open ebay...) to work alongside the Model M, or I could get two and replace the keyboard on the optiplex and athlon. The mouse on the other hand is absolutely horrible. It's a weird hourglass shape, way way way too narrow, and the scrollwheel is too small. Now that I think about it I've actually never really been a fan of dell mice. The PS/2 trackball one I have has the widest steps imaginable. Think if you were writing something, and wanted to move the mouse to a specific area in the text to highlight a section for re-placement or deletion or whatever. When you panned over the text instead of nicely sliding along, the steps are literally an entire letter wide!
All of my classes are going along really nicely, my English 112 class with Dr Davis is really nice, it's pretty much the same as ENG111 except it's much more thorough, and I like that. Right now we're writing a paper that's pretty basic, it's just a simple analysis of ourselves for him so he can examine our current writing capacity. The topic is of course argument, and arguing weather or not the writer (me/other students) agree that "grades you get in hichschool are an accurate reflection of your strengths and weaknesses in college." An easy enough topic. The hard thing for me is that I was never technically in "real highschool," I left Terra Ceia after 8th grade for homeschooling, and in homeschooling I was never technically graded. I suppose I could conjure up (in a much less connivery sense of the word) what my grades more or less would have been, had I been graded. The problem with that is that other students in my ENG112 class that have been through real highschool know that part of the reason your HS grades don't reflect your college strengths/weaknesses is that often (so students have claimed) HS teachers make mistakes when inputting grades, and the environments of many highschools can effect the performance of a student. None of that would be relevant for me because I was homeschooled. However for 8th grade, which was spent at a real school, I would agree that yes (or no?) my "HS" grades don't reflect my strengths and weaknesses as a college student. Though if I was to write entirely on the subject of my highschool grades then I would say that yes the "grades" from that do reflect my strengths/weaknesses as a student in college because I'm working almost completely the same here at the comm co as I was/am in homeschooling type situations.
Above I mentioned getting one of these fantabulous dell keyboards for my optiplex, and that got me thinking about my other optiplex, as I have two. Last night Tyler and I got to the conversation of routers, and how modern "home use" routers are nothing more then Systems-on-a-Chip with five ethernet ports and a wireless network adapter slapped on there. Because of this, when subjected to higher loads, such as when businesses with 20-30 computers run all their network activity through one, they fail. What Tyler was telling me was that what he does, and suggests for his clients, is to use an operating system called Smoothwall, running on a computer with two or more NICs. It sounds fairly amazing, supporting very controlable proxying and QoS, and neat things like scanning the first few packets of, say, a file sent over AIM to check for anything ominous. Similar to Tomato it supports in depth bandwidth monitoring and control, which is really cool. I popped it in virtualbox and played around with it for a bit, but since I didn't really read the manual or anything beforehand I was mostly stranded, but the principal sounded pretty great.
How I plan to [eventually] use it is pretty simple. Take my spare GX1, with the PII 400Mhz processor, put 256MB of RAM in it, and a 10GB HDD. Plus another 10/100 NIC to work alongside the onboard 3com. My cable modem would go to one of those, and then either my cisco 10/100 switch or another switch would be connected to the other. I'd set the current router to work in WAP mode only (don't you just love router firmwares that are versatile!) and connect it to the switch, and taadaa you have a fancy router! The main thing I'm wondering about though is alternative switches for direct connection, because I'd only need one with five ports, so the 12 port cisco switch would be overkill. I'ld probably put a test version of it into effect one of these days when dad is in Raleigh for a while, because it will cause a few hours of downtime at the least.
I'm going to go ahead and wrap this up for now, I might start another post in here later on today, but I have a few other things on my mind that I'd like to peruse.
Several things I'm noticing about these setups are- the LCDs are really nice (of course) dell 1907s. At least three people are on stations that have the LCD tilted (they're made to be able to tilt 90deg for portrait work) by about 4-5 degrees. I don't know if they're aware of that fact, but it looks like it would be incredibly uncomfortable. Or at least really hard to use. Also, I absolutely adore these keyboards. They're compact, very tactile, fancily stiled, and very sturdy feeling. I could easily get one of these (* Prepares to open ebay...) to work alongside the Model M, or I could get two and replace the keyboard on the optiplex and athlon. The mouse on the other hand is absolutely horrible. It's a weird hourglass shape, way way way too narrow, and the scrollwheel is too small. Now that I think about it I've actually never really been a fan of dell mice. The PS/2 trackball one I have has the widest steps imaginable. Think if you were writing something, and wanted to move the mouse to a specific area in the text to highlight a section for re-placement or deletion or whatever. When you panned over the text instead of nicely sliding along, the steps are literally an entire letter wide!
All of my classes are going along really nicely, my English 112 class with Dr Davis is really nice, it's pretty much the same as ENG111 except it's much more thorough, and I like that. Right now we're writing a paper that's pretty basic, it's just a simple analysis of ourselves for him so he can examine our current writing capacity. The topic is of course argument, and arguing weather or not the writer (me/other students) agree that "grades you get in hichschool are an accurate reflection of your strengths and weaknesses in college." An easy enough topic. The hard thing for me is that I was never technically in "real highschool," I left Terra Ceia after 8th grade for homeschooling, and in homeschooling I was never technically graded. I suppose I could conjure up (in a much less connivery sense of the word) what my grades more or less would have been, had I been graded. The problem with that is that other students in my ENG112 class that have been through real highschool know that part of the reason your HS grades don't reflect your college strengths/weaknesses is that often (so students have claimed) HS teachers make mistakes when inputting grades, and the environments of many highschools can effect the performance of a student. None of that would be relevant for me because I was homeschooled. However for 8th grade, which was spent at a real school, I would agree that yes (or no?) my "HS" grades don't reflect my strengths and weaknesses as a college student. Though if I was to write entirely on the subject of my highschool grades then I would say that yes the "grades" from that do reflect my strengths/weaknesses as a student in college because I'm working almost completely the same here at the comm co as I was/am in homeschooling type situations.
Above I mentioned getting one of these fantabulous dell keyboards for my optiplex, and that got me thinking about my other optiplex, as I have two. Last night Tyler and I got to the conversation of routers, and how modern "home use" routers are nothing more then Systems-on-a-Chip with five ethernet ports and a wireless network adapter slapped on there. Because of this, when subjected to higher loads, such as when businesses with 20-30 computers run all their network activity through one, they fail. What Tyler was telling me was that what he does, and suggests for his clients, is to use an operating system called Smoothwall, running on a computer with two or more NICs. It sounds fairly amazing, supporting very controlable proxying and QoS, and neat things like scanning the first few packets of, say, a file sent over AIM to check for anything ominous. Similar to Tomato it supports in depth bandwidth monitoring and control, which is really cool. I popped it in virtualbox and played around with it for a bit, but since I didn't really read the manual or anything beforehand I was mostly stranded, but the principal sounded pretty great.
How I plan to [eventually] use it is pretty simple. Take my spare GX1, with the PII 400Mhz processor, put 256MB of RAM in it, and a 10GB HDD. Plus another 10/100 NIC to work alongside the onboard 3com. My cable modem would go to one of those, and then either my cisco 10/100 switch or another switch would be connected to the other. I'd set the current router to work in WAP mode only (don't you just love router firmwares that are versatile!) and connect it to the switch, and taadaa you have a fancy router! The main thing I'm wondering about though is alternative switches for direct connection, because I'd only need one with five ports, so the 12 port cisco switch would be overkill. I'ld probably put a test version of it into effect one of these days when dad is in Raleigh for a while, because it will cause a few hours of downtime at the least.
I'm going to go ahead and wrap this up for now, I might start another post in here later on today, but I have a few other things on my mind that I'd like to peruse.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
At the Library!
Here I am, at Brown Library in Washington. It was a rather nice ten minute bike ride down eight blocks or so I was a bit hot but not terrible, and the traffic was heavier than I would have thought but I didn't have any incidents or near runovers. Other than to pay my fine, which I've yet to do by the way, I'm not sure why I came to the library. One book I'd actually like to look for is "IceMan" which they probably don't have, but you never know.
Also, I somehow killed perl on the server, so my irssi client is screwed. No idea what the heck I'm going to do there. This is one more reason I hate linux. Too many dependencies makes it so damn confusing. What I might just do when I get home is start moving all the data I can on to DVDs, which I need to do anyways, and then just nuke it and toss ubuntu server on there. Too much to think about right now, but I'll probably end up doing it anyways because from what I've heard ubuntu server is more manageable than debian with server stuff installed. Not to mention great support. That's all for now, prolly will be several more libraryblagposts before I leave.
Also, I somehow killed perl on the server, so my irssi client is screwed. No idea what the heck I'm going to do there. This is one more reason I hate linux. Too many dependencies makes it so damn confusing. What I might just do when I get home is start moving all the data I can on to DVDs, which I need to do anyways, and then just nuke it and toss ubuntu server on there. Too much to think about right now, but I'll probably end up doing it anyways because from what I've heard ubuntu server is more manageable than debian with server stuff installed. Not to mention great support. That's all for now, prolly will be several more libraryblagposts before I leave.
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