An SE, cat, thinkpad, and dell server walk into a bar...

Oh, and a scanner.



This blogpost serves no real purpose, I just wanted to take a picture.

Books!

So yay, both my books came today, happily early. That's the thing about media mail; sometimes it's crazy fast, sometimes it takes three weeks, there's no telling. The two books I got are the textbooks for my world civ 1 class, and for my argument based research class. The former was $80 and the latter was $60, bookstore prices. From ABE.com I got them for $40 and $12 respectively. That is saving $90. God how I love online used bookstores.

The best thing is that they're in epic condition. The english book is freaking brand new and the world civ is lightly used, but neither have any writing or whatever on them. They're also fairly small books, so having them, and possibly my cisco book, plus a laptop and notebooks in my backpack will not kill me. That makes me a happy person.

DVDs!

I've pretty much totally messed up the server's install of debian, so I'm burning all 200GB+ of data on it to DVDs, then I'm going to wipe it and install Ubuntu 8.04 server. In any case, I have about 16 DVDs down, not so many left to do, then I have to clean through some etc files to make sure I have all my configs backed up.

Time for bed. Moving a last 60GB over USB2 to my external 300. Funtimes.

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.

Book Worry

A few days ago I ordered my English and World Civilizations books off ABE.com, and it has occurred to me that they might not actually come before the semester starts. Not sure what I'm going to do if that happens, that's sort of a terrible situation. In my experience though, books from abe usually come within a week, or a few days over. Which is all the time I have to spare.

Swt, Mthmtc on a Cntrs 650!

A while ago I busted out my Centris 650 and set it up on the desk where the Indigo20 was. I've mostly just been poking through the files I had on it, mostly lots of Text Adventure development stuff, but some others. One interesting thing I found was Mathematica 2.0. Now, if I remember right, I first found this a looooong time ago, on one of my many 40MB Syquest cartridges. It's an incredibly powerful program, even on a computer from the early 90s. Luckily I also have a nice big book, about fifteen hundred pages thick and twelve pounds or so full of Mathematica examples and whatnot. Unfortunately the book was written for Mathematica 5, not 2, so a lot of the fancier examples involving animations or audio manipulation don't really work. That said, there are a bunch of basic 3D and 2D graphing examples that do work, my favorite is:

Plot3D[Exp[-Sqrt[x^2 + y^2]],
{x, -2, 2}, {y, -2, 2}, Lighting -> False,
PlotPoints -> 50]

It creates a fairly high resolution graph of what I can only describe as a mountain. In any case, here's a somewhat low quality video of it graphing that object.

iPod Touch Rickrolled me!

For the past few days I've been playing a lot with cydia on my iPod touch, especially downloading themes and playing with them. One of such themes, named "Surprise" had a description which claimed that it was going to show off winterboard's (the ipod touch's themeing application) magical powers or something, but just ended up rickrolling me.



The first time it happened it actually played the video, and I assume audio. The second time it was a still frame.

wow.