Busy morning.

Last night I was up until three am watching the atlon back up, and now I'm just finishing setting up XP again. Fun.

Finals!

It's almost 7am on a Wednesday, and I'm about a third of the way through my English 112 final, something I'm rather happy with. I've type the whole of it on the aspire, with no typos other than the ones that come standard with my mindless babbling. I am cheating, though, using a mouse to aid with editing, still, it's the small keyboard I always presumed would throw me, but it would seem as this isn't the case. In fact I'm starting to like it more than my big keyboard- it's cozier, both in the sense that my hands and fingers are a litter closer together, but also in the sense that with a hard drive and 1.6GHz processor underneath, it's pre-warmed for my typing pleasure!

Oh well, enough blogging for the moment I suppose, gotta finish that final before 10am.

[this title intentionally left blank]

So, it would appear as though I haven't blogged since mid-September, which oh-so-slightly goes against my "One Blog Post Per Day" crusade. Whoops. I guess a lot has happened since then, for example four days after my last post Hannah turned 20, which is of course fun. I got a 640GB HDD for the server in keeping with the "lets tell the blog reader(s) about the server" fad. I sold the thinkpad to Ian, should be mailed some time today.

Honestly I didn't even really want to blog at all, it's just that I'm sitting here in the library on my acer aspire one (oh yeah, I bought one of these suckers) and I need to be working on my final for english, but I'm at a bit of a block making my claim sound nice and fluent, but I really really want to type, so I figured the only place where I could really sit down and type lots and lots of things without boring someone (i.e. in irc) would be a blog, either that or a word document that could constitute a blog or journal.

That's one thing I've been somewhat excited about doing since getting the aao yesterday- I can more easily keep a decent written journal for pretty much anything. One thing I have found is that this keyboard is nowhere near as bad as I anticipated from looking at pictures, I'm cranking a nice handful of words per minute, not sure how many but it's not bad; I think I've only been writing this blog post for the past 5 minutes, and that include inline edits. And it's only bound to be longer because I really like typing on this keyboard. It's a very nice little tactile thing, very curious considering its size. So far my only size related complaint is because I'm so tall, it's hard to set it on my lap and write. I can put my ankle up on my knee and wrest it on the intersection, but then my leg gets sore.

The battery doesn't last all that long either, but wherever I look around I see outlets, so I'm not concerned in the least about that. Next semester I plan to use it liberally, takings lots and lots of notes in HIS112. One more reason for me to be happy about getting it so much before the semester starts, I have lots and lots of time to get really really proficient on the keyboard. I also have onenote 2007 all setup and ready to go, it will be interesting to see how that plays out, seeing as I've never used a laptop in a real serious lecture/notetaking environment before. Though, considering the rate at which I was writing in that class, I'm not all that concerned that I'll have trouble keeping up on the keyboard, especially considering that I wont be typing full sentences or editing, just line, line, indent, line, out indent, line, etc.

*pops fingers*

All in all I've been incredibly impressed with this little sucker. I has no problems doing what I like to do, and can very easily play a hulu video while I do skype with the internal webcam and have several documents and IRC open. No lag at all. Because of this, I do not think I will upgrade it to 1.5GB RAM. If 1 is enough for all the crazy stuff I'm doing now, it will certainly be enough for what I'm going to be doing come january.

THe one thing I have to train myself for, honestly, is the trackpad. I haven't used one fluently in over three years, so it will be interesting. I've already installed an app that allows me to two finger tap for right click, and two finger drag to scroll. That makes things much nicer.

As per heat output, it's not objectionable. The palmwrests get a little warm, as does the bottom. With a program called "aa1 fan control" I can set exactly when the fan kicks in, which is great. Unlike ubuntu, though, windows has a harder time locking the processor to one speed or another- typically when using battery I want it locked at 800MHz, and on power I want it to dynamically switch. I may have gotten it locked though, through the windows power manager thing.

Oh! Speaking of windows- it came with XP home SP3 with two pieces of crapware- mcafe or whatever antivirus and some intervideo dvd player; ironic for an opticaldriveless netbook. Anyway, I thought that right away I would trash XPh and pop XPp on here, but to my surprise XPh isn't at all what I thought it was. In fact, it's really nice to use, and is very fast. There are a few features here and there that I would rather have from XPp, but I can make due for the most part. Is that make due or make do btw? I can never remember for that sort of thing.

I think I'll stop writing for now and either plug in, browse the web, or just sit and stare blankly at the pretty fluorescent lights.

Winders FLP

Last night I was bored sitting around, so I decided to give Linux Mint a go on the Athlon, using my spare 80GB sata drive. About five minutes after I got it installed and updated, I was like "Yeah, I still really don't like linux..." so I pondered alternatives. I remembered that I have a great CD for Windows XP FLP, which is basically what you get when you mix Windows 2000 and Windows XPpro speed wise, but in terms of actual usability it's just like incredibly fast Windows XP. I installed that (in about 20 minutes!) and then got my drivers up and going, and I've had no problems whatsoever. This will probably end up becoming my actual production OS on the Athlon. It runs things like itunes8 and picasa3 just like as they were in Win XP. The only "problem" I've had thus far is SP3 not wanting to install, but that doesn't make the biggest of differences to me, because I can get all the other updates.

Monday!

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!

gigabit ethernet G4 and work

The other day Lando and I hit up the ECU surplus, and we both picked up dual 450MHz gigabit ethernet G4s for $30. Unfortunately they had neither RAM nor HDD, but when we brought them back to my place we got them set up with parts. Right now mine has 512MB RAM and a few different HDDs in it, with OS 10.4/OS9/maybe Debian later on it. I've also clocked it to be a dual 500 now, which is pretty cool.

Also, I officially start work on monday, mostly it'll be getting oriented and meeting all the people in charge of stuff. I'll also probably get paired up with a "tutee" which will be pretty cool.

Right now I'm thinking about nabbing up another HDD for it and giving debian a whirl.

Holy Cannoli!

So dang, haven't exactly blagged in a while. Guess there's a bit of stuff you readers out there are wondering about. The most recent post I made was about how I had purchased the parts. We'll, they've long since gotten here. One of the RAM sticks was bad so I had to send it back, I should get replacements tomorrow. Hopefully.

-a night passes-

Last night I never really finished writing that post, so I'll finish it up here. According to UPS, my RAM stick is not only coming today, but it's on the truck. When I get it the first thing I'll do is run memtest86+ for a few hours to make sure there are no problems. I don't wanna risk it.

Right now I'm at the community college library, waiting for 10. At 10 is when I go in to start my official interview for being a paid tutor here at the community college. A few days ago Dr. Davis (my awesome english teacher) came up to me and asked if I was interested in tutoring other students in ENG111 topics such as expository and creative writing, and some developmental english. It sounded good to me, plus I could really use a job, so I went to talk to the Student Support Services counselor yesterday and we talked about the job for a bit and I filled out an application and all. It sounds pretty awesome, basically just student to student peer help, which is something I already do with other people in my class, but with perks. One being $7.50/hr, after I do the tutor training, another being that I get unbridled access to a little mail slot and even my own office of sorts. I'll be tutoring up to three different students, maybe one or two more, but not more than two at a time, which is good for me cause I'm best at one on one.

I guess that's pretty much it. It's 9:30 now so I'm going to go ahead down there and see if she's around.

Bought parts

I just ordered the parts from tigerdirect. I opted out of the shuttle because, while it was a way cool box, it was sort of expensive for what I needed. Instead I got a kit with a mobo, 2GB RAM, and an AMD 5000+ proc for $170, as well as a geforce 8400gs that will hopefully blow the pants off the x300.

What to name the new system, though.... Hrmmm...

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.

eBay fun!

I've put the Athlon's processor and ram up on ebay, and am preparing to post the motherboard as well. If all goes as planned I'm going to replace them with new intel core2 stuff and ddr2 ram. Normally I wouldn't do this because the athlons current spec is more than suitable, but there are crazy people paying slot of money for those so I figured I may as well sell while it has some value. The ram and mobo are worrth a bit less but I suppose selling it all is a good idea. Eventually I'll get a new video card as well but that's much less important than having a good prod to me. Especially If the processor has those fancy virtuliZation features.

iPod post! Sorry for typos and no tags...

new watch band!

Mom and I are at the greenville bojangles now, just back from target where we picked up a nice new watch band for $5. It's much better than the one that came with my watch originally, it's all black nylon instead of bulky and plasticy like the other one. We're off to b&n now, then at 5:15 were going to go see step brothers.

Yay for free wifi!

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.

things!

Haven't blogged in a few days, I guess that sorta ruins my "Whee, let's blog every day!" idea. Regardless of what I haven't said on here, several things have happened that are worth mentioning. I helped Landon move into ECU a couple days ago, and he gave me his Optiplex GX1 and a nice Logitech 6.1 system. The Optiplex is rather nice, decked out with an incredibly fast SCSI card and a 15k 36GB eServer drive, as well as a 7.2k (if I remember right) 9GB IBM drive. The 6.1 system is also very nice. Right now I have it set up as a 2.1 system because I don't have good placement for the rear speakers.

I also got my Cisco books for this semester, which starts today at 6:30pm with my NET225-50 class. The books we had to get are a little weird, so I'm not sure what's going to happen with that, but I'm not really concerned.

My room is finally 90% clean too, including the closet. I now have an empty closet which I may organize things into, what fun! While cleaning it out I came across my old electric typewriter. I got it a few years ago but when trying to clean it I was unable to get the top hood back onto it, so I just closeted it. This time around however I just decided to yank out the hood and use it with an open top. Working with it like this is a lot of fun, you get to see all the action. Plus setting pages is much easier. I'm getting closer to moving the server downstairs, as I don't really need full gig-e on it and it's starting to take too much space.

Another stack of computers in the same place.

[Random need to blag more pictures]



The only change is that the SE was replaced with the topless ultra5, which I'm not installing Solaris 10 on.

NetBSD & Server!

So thanks to Tyler, I'm like all into NetBSD now. I've got 4.0 on my GX1 and SparcStation 5, and right now they're both compiling software at the speed of fun.



That's my SparcStation 4, Centris 650, and Mac SE. The GX1 is off to the side and I didn't feel like taking a picture.

Also! I've decided to turn my dell poweredge SC420 into a full on server. Samba, NFS, SFTP, apache2, php, mysql, all that crap. The base page right now is aeroraptor.homeip.net:88. But there are alot of other weirdo pages hidden all over, mostly IRC stats pages.

Having to use a nonstandard port really bugs me though. Oh well, can't have everything.

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.

More computers on that desk!

It would appear as though the theme for this week is "How many computers can we have set up and running, then swap out for more computers on that desk" or something like that. Previously I had the GX1, then the Sun Ultra5, then the SGI Indigo2, and now my Centris 650. Later I predict the Quadra 700 and maybe a sparcstation or two.



Would be the Centris 650 hanging out, with my Multiscan 15 attached. This thing is considerably better set up than I had thought; nice big 2GB seagate hard drive, decked out with 7.6.1 and a ton of apps, 112MB RAM, and a balzing 25MHz full 040. I also have a NuBus 10BaseT & AUI card in it, made by Asante if I remember correctly.

Unfortunately though, my Multiscan 15 seems to be dying again, it's doing the thing where it applies a strong pink tint over everything. This happened a while back, but went away, hopefully that happens again. Interestingly enough, this is the very same monitor we got with our Power Mac 6115CD back in 1994. I still have the manuals, install floppy, and box; though the box is filled with Christmas lights!

xbox finally on the net

A while back I got a modded xbox from a friend of mine, which is awesome. One of the apps from the mod, xbox media center, has loads of nice little abilities like playing music or videos off samba servers, or copying games over via FTP and so on. However, my xbox is nowhere near an ethernet cable when it's downstairs, and I have no TV or RCA input devices up in my room (yet!) So, what we've had to do is take either mine or dad's laptop into the living room, run a long enet cable, and do net sharing, which sort of sucks and is a pain to get working properly, esp. if you want other devices on the LAN to see it, or for it to see the internet.

But today, that all changed...

While cleaning, I came across my Linksys WGA11B. This thing is more or less an over glorified wifi-b to 10baseT ethernet bridge. I got it many years ago (read: wifi-b era) from a friend of mine who thought it was broken, but in reality had just lost the power supply. In attempt to "fix" it, he removed the case, which left me with a board and antenna, which was just enough. However, I never had a powersupply for it. Today however when cleaning when I found it, I had the thought to try it because I actually had a machine for it, the xbox. After a bit of digging I found a generic 12v AC adapter, and hooked it up. The lights lit right up and I had no idea what to do.

A short trip to the linksys support website later, I was downloading the setup application and reading manual PDFs. Basically, you plug this thing directly to you computer via ethernet, you run the application, you enter in your settings, and hit save. As long as you don't press the reset button, you're fine. The main disadvantage to this is that I had to move the wifi-net to WEP from WPA2, so that's been a little bumpy. Other than that it works great and I can now access the xbox whenever, without having to do weird computer crap.

SGI

So I dug out my good old Indigo2 just now, as well as the massive monitor. I think I got this from landon a few months ago, It's an R4400 250MHz, IMPACT MG10 graphics, 192MB RAM, 4ish GB HDD, and a CD drive. Has Irix 6.5 now, which I may reinstall.



Pretty simple setup, works nicely though.

Oh mah god, it lives!

So apparently before declaring it dead and being all bummed out, I should have checked the right speaker's connection to the actually machine. I moved the cable to the front headphone jack and I get good stereo now, but I do wonder if that bad jack is bad or something. I'll have to do more poking around.

R. I. P. Left Speaker

I just now noticed that when playing music on my speakers, the audio seemed to be primarily coming from the right speaker, which is the control, meaning it has the amp and inputs and that stuff, as well as the jack for the left speaker to connect to. Now, this has happened a few times before, but usually the cable just fell out of the jack or something. This was not the case, it was well seated in there. I tried wiggling the cable, I tried checking the audio driver software, I tried playing tons of different songs as well as tones that warble from speaker to speaker.

Guess this means I'll be shopping for a new set of speakers now.

Hrmmm.

Redoing XP on the Athlon

So basically after I got xubuntu all installed on the athlon, I decided to boot back to XP and do something, but unfortunately the install of XP got canned. I don't feel like going into the details because it's so depressing but basically I had to end up doing a COMPLETE reinstall, loosing datas. Most of them were mirrored on the thinkpad so it was ok.

Rain!

Suiting. The second I publish that post, the GX1's updates finish. Tsk tsk tsk.

In other news, it has started to RAIN! Which means the fan in my front window is pulling in deliciously cool air. Mmmmm it's nice. Also, starting to install on the athlon.

Woot! (and rambles)

I just came back upstairs, and the xubuntu install is finished!

[presses enter to reboot]

[waits]

You know, the main disadvantage to having 320MB RAM in an old system like this is waiting so long for it to be tested, I think last time I timed it it took about 40 seconds, and that was with 256MB.

[waits more]

Woot, GRUB :D

Woot again, Xubuntu booting/loading bar! I'm just now noticing this, but the HDD activity LED on the front of the GX1 doesn't appear the be blinking. Odd...

Yay, at the login prompt now! It's funny when your OS starts faster than your RAM tests. I remember when I ran BeOS on this (still do, actually) it took about a minute to boot to the usable desktop, and only the last eight seconds or so was actual BeOS.

[logs in to xubuntu]

Xubuntu 8.04 looks really nice, now that I'm on my home LAN and I have crap deleted off the athlon (I had like 30GB of dupes, lol) I might go for dual boot.

Ok, logged in w/ loaded desktop. Grrr. I can't get more than 800x600@32 on this. I know this video chip & vram can do 1024x768@32. Alas, XFCE4 at 800x600 looks pretty nice honestly. Time to check for updates! ... Woo, updates installing!

Okay while those install I'm going to ramble for a moment. First off I've decided that I need to start tagging my blog posts. Not to make them easier to find or categorize, but because all the cool kids are doing it these days. Weather or not I'm going to go back to all my previous posts and tag them is unclear, but certainly all my future posts will be tagged.

That was enough rambles for one paragraph, and my updates just finished downloading, so while they actually install I'm going to move the my music library off the thinkpad onto the Athlon, because I like having synced libraries. Augh, crap. The thinkpad did the thing again where when I RDP into it from the athlon, it turns off it's internal screen and won't turn it back on unless I force reboot it... *Grumble*

I am, however, becoming incredibly intrigued by the idea of putting Xubuntu on the athlon now though. The last time I tried was when I was in Richmond, and if I remember right the main reason I was turned off by it was because there is only mediocre support for my wifi card in linux. But here at home I'm connected to the straight up gig-e switch, so things are different. I still won't have amazingtastic video drivers or whatever, but all my games are in windows anyways so who cares.

Blarg these updates are taking forever. I think what I'm just going to do is finish this post now, and then slap xubuntu on the athlon. Yeah.

Later Gators.

still going...

So it's been about 45 minutes, and Xubuntu is /still/ installing. I gave up on FreeDOS in QEMU (for now?) but would like to see this work. It's probably going so slow because of the HDD I put in it, a random 6.5GB IBM something-or-other.

Will write more as things happens...

So, blah.

Apparently today is Sunday and yesterday was Saturday, meaning that today is still Sunday and the library isn't open on Sunday so I can't do what I was planning on doing today, which was go to the library and pay my thee cent fine, and then either read, or bask in the air conditioning and play with my iPod Touch, or Thinkpad, depending if I brought the thinkpad. But again as I said, neither of my local libraries are open Sundays, the one that's like, twenty miles away might be, but I don't want to ride my rikety old bike on hw264.

So, instead of that I'm sitting here at home, blagging on the athlon, installing FreeDOS in QEMU and Xubuntu 8.04 on the Optiplex. After I do that maybe I'll get some lunch/breakfest, or find something else to do. I'd ride my bike around but it's way too hot to go on a just for fun bikeride. Mom and I will probably take a walk down by the waterfront later though, that's always nice.

No luck.

Well unfortunately I can't get any of the floppy based drivers to work with either the pcmcia CD drive or ethernet card, so I'm going to go back to playing with the optiplex. Interestingly enough the the 3rd RAM slot in that thing seems to be working, or at least partly, so I'm going to play around with getting three 128s going in it.

Plus when lando moves into ECU in a weekish or so, he's giving me his old GX1, it's basically the same as mine except it has a fancy adaptec SCSI card and two ueberfast SCSI drives, and I think it's a newer mobo revision.

That's all for now, but expect at least three or more blog posts today. I'm really enjoying doing this multiple times a day.

More debian and toshiba

Well my little pcmcia nic didn't seem to be recognized, so I busted out my trusty and never really used IBM pcmcia CD drive. I tested it with an audio CD first and it works fine. Now to see if debian will like it. Only time will tell!

Debian & Toshiba

So after cleaning my room, I've had all this extra space to do stuff, which has been great. Most recently I've been playing with my GX1, but I think that's on the brink of death, and there's only so much amazing stuff you can do with BeOS. So, I dug out my fancypants 486 toshiba laptop. It's one of the sweet gray ones, with 16MB RAM and a 500MB HDD. This one is a little bit beat up, but I decided to try and get debian on it. Obviously it doesn't have a CD drive, so I dug out three high density floppies, my pcmcia 10baseT card, and fired it up. As I type this I've just finished loading the drivers floppy, so we now to get to see if it likes my ethernet card or not.

Here's proof it works:



I'll update more as I work with it.

Cleaning & School

I've always found that I'm most productive in a clean and relatively tidy environent, so I decided that before the school semester started, I'd give my room a throuogh cleaning over. I got rid of a ton of old broken hardware as well as three trash bags worth of old papers and smaller junk. I also moved a lot of my older and less used equipment into my sister's old room, things like monitors and a spare desk. I also used the opprotunity of a clean and open floor to rearrange some furniture. The most noticeable thing I did was move one of my desks to be at a 90deg angle directly next to my main desk, so now when I'm I'm my fancy new swivle chair I can easily move from one to the next, so I can work ok two computers more easily or whatever. Right now I have my dell gx1 set up there running BeOS, very cool. All I have left to clean now is the closet, and it's not that bad.

Also my futon is still out of service due to crappy frame construction, which is lame. Alternatively however, it allows me to experience something very new- sleeping with the futon directly on the floor! It's very hard to get used to at first, but it is a lot nicer than that frame. Most notably because it's more stable, obviously. One lame thing is that it's a little too low for my fan to be pointed at directly, but that's not a huge problem because I recentlybgot a new box fan pulling air in from my front window so it's a lot cooler in here. I also just bought my world civ and English books off abe, got some great deals- saved about $90 combined! Hopefully they get here before the semester starts, whee.

And wow, this whole post was tapped out on my iPod Touch, incredibly intense!

happenings

So since my last blahg post, a lot has happened. To start, Landon gave me his athlon tower, which is now my main machine with an AMD 4600+ (2x 2.4ghz), 2gb ram, a pcie radeon x300, and a few big hdds. I also turned 17, and bought a new laptop bookbag and iPod touch. I'm also staying at my grandparent's house for a while, going home soon. Unfortunately though, right before I left home a major beam in my futon snapped, so my room is more or less totally ripped apart. I also registered for classes at the comm co, taking intro to world civ, argument based research (with the best teacher ever), and ccna3. I'm also gonna get back into blogging, so now I just need a good way to promote it.

computing issues and such

As of recent I've been having a few weird problems with windows. The main one I can think of at the moment is probably the most important, and it's to do with net speed. Normally my speed is really fast. 1.2mB/s down and such, but sometimes it will just drop to half, then less, then less, then to the point where even the router's homepage times out, on wifi and ethernet. At first I thought I had a bad enet cable, but since wifi does it too that's not possible. When I boot to ubuntu, the problems go away. Since it's not hardware or the router, ir has to be drivers or windows. I wouldn't put it past drivers, seeing as I recently ran lenovo system update and that actually killed the ability for me to open the power manager or the presentatoin settings. So yeah, I think soon I'm going to do a standard full backup and then wipe it and reinstall, it's about time to do that /anyways/ ...

So in the mean time, I'm rebooting to ubuntu 8.04, which is working pretty well, except the ff3rc1 integration is -terrible-. Flash crashes alot and the fonts are never right. Lets see if it gets fixed any time soon. Until then I can use opera.

finished some stuff

I noticed I finished some of the things on my to-do list.

I got a new BIOS on the decTOP, thus possibly killing it or rendering it fairly useless.

I finished with CCNA2, and am studing for the INTRO which is turning out to be a lot harder than I could have imagined it would be.

The two about the optiplex have been completed, I got a new server with gig-e, and then a few weeks ago got a 500GB HDD for it.

The thing about the valtec is invalid cause I think the mobo is dead.

The bike engine-izing is still under consideration.

Updates and whatever

Turns out I haven't blogged in a while, I guess I forgot about having a blog to begin with. Lets see.. what's happened since I last blogged. For starters I got rid of vista and bumped down to XPp again, then installed the SP3 update. That's been going well pretty well so far. I'm mostly using Ubuntu 8.04 on the R61i though, and that's been going really really well compared to other ubuntu user sessions and whatnot. Been getting really good at handling it. The hardware 3D support is nice too.

Also, I got a 500GB seagate HDD for the server, too. Cost $70 from zipzoomfly.com, good deal I thinks. This means the server now has about 920GB usable storage, 500, 80, 80, 40, and an external USB 300. Putting all sorts of downloads and backups and everything on it. Hannah is also here for a few days, which is oodles of fun. We downloaded leopard and put it on my old imac (hers now) which is a 1.9 G5, leopard runs great on it. Matthew was here for a few days, and he helped me set up the drives in the server.

Also, brown library added two desk, next to power outlets. FINALLY. So I can have a desk+power+wifi instead of random combonations of them. Very awesome.

sweeeet

so after me being just totally fed up with my toe's situation, I soaked it in *hot* water & epsom salts for about 30 minutes, then started trying to figure out how to remove it. It was pretty gruesome, but I got it out, thank god.

the question is though wether or not it will come back... wait a month and see

so uhm, dang.

Unfortunately the ingrown toenail I had on my right big toe is recurring, and I'm 70% sure that I'm going to have to go to the doctor again and have it removed. However, I wonder, if again four months later it will come back? I'd rather not have big toenails because of this, despite the whole "toe protection" factor.

Money isn't a problem for the doctors thing, it's covered under insurance. The problem is that I have to get THREE shots totaling thirty cubit centimeters of numbing fluid in there. It's not fun and makes you really really queasy, I'd rather just get gassed and wake up when it's done. Much faster.

One nice thing, though, is that unlike the first time, it doesn't hurt constantly. No, this time it's fine, UNLESS it gets hit/pushed on, then it hurts like wow. There's also a bit of puss drainage, and when I try and open it (with tweezers) it hurts too much to let it drain more. Ungh.

updates!

Woo, I got debian fully installed and servering on my network. Instead of moving the poweredge downstairs to the dining room, I thought it would benefit more being up here because it can be on the gig-e switch with the R61i, and it's much easier for me to access, so I can keep it maintained much better.

It has 4 HDDs in it, like I said earlier, three 80s and a 40, and one of the 80s is apparently on its way out, so I need to get a replacement on that soon. They're all shared over samba and are fully accessible over the network. I can also get to my home partition via netatalk.

This also opens the GX1 up to new horizions, which I'm working on now.

new toys

On the way back from Hannah & Maffew's yesterday we stopped by lando's house and picked up some goodides: a dell poweredge SC420 serverbox and a Sun Ultra5 with kb/mouse. I also got to take the D50 from hannah until she comes back in may, which is awesome.

The Dell is a pretty standard low end dell server, it has a 2.53GHz celeron which I guess is either equilivent to the lower end of a PIV or an early Core Duo, not really sure. It has 768MB RAM in three ECC DDR2 DIMMs (it can apparently take non-ECC too, so I can put lotsa cheap RAM in it) but is only supposed to have 512MB, an interesting story here: sometime when Lando had it one stick started spewing ECC errors, so he called up dell and within a matter of moments they overnighted him a new stick. When he put the new one in he reseated the old one, and boom, that fixed the problem.

It has 80 and 40GB sata HDDs, which makes it my first non-R61i to have sata onboard. I was told by Lando several times that the 80GB, which is a maxtor, the 40 is a seagate, was totally dead and that it was the last maxtor he had to die on him (as in all his maxtors are dead now) though... when I got it home last night and installed debian on it, the 80 formatted right up and I've been dumping several GBs of data on it crazily as of recent... and it's holding up fine. S.M.A.R.T. status also checks out fine, so I dunno.

This, btw, is replacing my current Dell server which is a GX1 with two 80GB HDDs in it. The GX1 is getting old and slow (500MHz PIII) and the fan in the power supply is starting to rattle, making it annoying. Hopefully I can put both 80GB IDE drives in the poweredge for 80+80+80+40 type storage. Won't be able to use the CD drive, though, as it only has one IDE bus. Eventually I'll get a 500GB sata when the prices go under $60, which seems to be soon.

The sun ultra5 is just something lando was getting rid of, and I offered to take off his hands. It's got a 400MHz ultrasparc processor, 768MB RAM (huge RAM, so huge the floppy drive doesn't fit in it) a 60GB IDE hard drive, and a generic IDE CD drive. Not sure what I'm going to do with it, but I have a keyboard and mouse so I can potentially use it as a full on workstation, probably with netbsd or sol.

Right now I'm installing OS9 on my powerbook pismo that I liberated from hannah and pondering food. The poweredge looks like it's almost done copying the first flood of data. Sweet.

oh!

oh, and I got a 95% on said exam, turns out I didn't forget everything! :-D

Finally took ACL exam

so after like... four classes of only going over the INTRO exam we decided that before we forgot everything there was to know about access control lists we might as well go ahead and take the freaking exam, it is the last one of the bunch, so now we just have to focus on the final(s) and reviewing for the INTRO.

I also learned something interesting about that: If I get an 80% or higher on the final, and then take and pass the voucher exam (more or less another final) I get $25 off the exam price ($100.) Also, if I pass the exam, the community college will give me $50 just for doing it, because they're so hard pressed to get some CCNA graduates. So $25 is pretty reasonable, eh?

Sleepy Saturday Morning

Well I just now got up, very tired and kinda cold, pondering going back to sleep. I was hoping today I might be able to go to the fleamarket and get that little old monitor that guy had for sale; I'm almost certain that it's cga monitors aren't that small. Oh well, maybe I can go when mom gets up around 9/10.

yeah... going back to sleep definitely sounds good....

No internet, and a bit of history.

At least Ian tried to make me an att account so that I could get free wifi at b/n; at least he tried. Unfortunately I'm experiencing the same problem he is, when you go to log in it rejects your login even thought it's distinctly not supposed to, which is unfortunate.

I had planned on coming in here and spending the whole time talking to peoples in aim and IRC, and maybe doing some forum browsing but all of those need working innernets connection, which I ain't got.

So instead of these things, I suppose I can write about something else.... something else like... my current vintage computer situation. Sure, lets do that.

Ok so right now I have two main vintage computers I'm working on, a Quadra 700 from 1991, which is probably my favorite computer ever, and an SE from 1987, which is the same as my first computer ever. Lets start with the 700.

I got it about, I dunno, maybe five or six months ago, from Daniel F on the 68kmla, and quite nicely he gave it to me for free, with an ethernet card in it! Problem was, it only had the stock four megabytes of RAM in it, so it's uses were incredibly limited, as well as the operating systems it could run. Because of this, it spent a long time sitting on my desk, unplugged, waiting, while I tried to source RAM for it. I had several good, non-ebay, sources for it for a while, but unfortunately most of the people didn't reply to me after a while or never followed through with payment type instructions. Eventually Ian and I were talking about his quadra 950 (insanely huge tower) which used the same sort of RAM as the 700 does, it apparently had loads of spare RAM in it, so he offered to give me four matched 16MB sticks for it. Now, for those of you who aren't aware, four 16MB sticks in the mid/early 90s cost roughly $200 a stick, possibly even more considering this is matched kingston stuff; very high quality. I accepted his offer of $0 and soon enough he had them shipped and they were installed in the 700.

Needless to say this made the system about a million times more usable, it now had 64MB in those sticks, and the 4MB onboard that I was using, making even Mac OS 7.6.1 fly, which was more or less fantastic. The problem I was having, well, not really problem as much as concern, was that the hard drive in it was a 3.5" full height drive. Also Known As something that gets freaking insanely hot, so much that after an hour of running if you touch it you can burn your finger. The bay it's in fits it just fine, though it is very close, and there is almost no air movement at all around it, which makes me nervous. Running big things like that with no cooling potentially leads to big problems.

So, to get around this, I looked around my room for potential replacements, and I found three: a 2GB 7200 half height and a 4GB and 9.1GB of the same sort. Problem was, none of these drives were from macs, so using them wasn't exactly a piece of cake. The weekend I was working on them, my friend Landon from over in Raleigh came over, so we worked on it together. We left the huge drive that already had the system and my applications in the quadra, and then connected a case to the external SCSI port for the other HDD that we were preparing. Unfortunately none of the apple utilities were working at first, so I looked around online and found an application called silverlining that is good at this sort of things. We lowleveled the first drive, 2GB, which took around an hour to complete. After that it showed up just fine. I also lowleveled the 4GB, and gave the 9GB a new partition map because it was already in the right block structure. After that I put the drives in the the quadra where the huge one had been, and connected my external CD drive to install 7.6.1 onto. The installs for each of the drives went fine, but oddly enough when I disconnected the CD drive it wouldn't be able to find a startup disk when booting. Turns out the CD drive had an auto terminator, and the HDDs termination wasn't set. I haven't exactly resolved it yet, but I know what to do.

On to the other old computer, the SE. Now, back in the mid 90s, we got our computer, a power mac 6115CD, and very quickly I got less interested in the silly little games, and much more interested in what made it work, as that's in my nature. Soon enough I was digging through the system folder looking at files that made it work, and wondering what would happen if I shifted things around. My Dad was getting a bit worried about this, as he didn't exactly want me to break the brand new computer. Instead of telling me no, he did some research on state surplus auctions, and got three compact macs from a state surplus auction; an SE FDHD, an SE 800k, and an SE/30. I remember sitting in the car and instantly claiming the SE/30 for the soul reason that it had an awesome little tiny keyboard attached (Apple ADB Keyboard I.) Mind you, I was about 6 at the time, so I had no idea about the differences between the SE and the SE/30, so it didn't matter. My sister got the SE FDHD, and we kept the SE 800k for parts, it had some sort of problem, I don't really remember what it was.

When we got them home, Dad installed 7.5.5, word, excel, and a few games on both of them, and then ordered a new keyboard for the SE FDHD because it didn't come with one, so until it did my sister and I shared the SE/30. And man, I can't even begin to explain how amazing that was; having my very own little computer way back then. I did so much on that thing, and I learned how to move files around, and then how to boot off the rescue floppy and move them back; had I not owned this computer back in the 90s I would not be as attached to them as I am today.

Unfortunately, several years later they both died of something, that, had I kept them, I could have fixed them both. Instead they were just taking up space, so we had to get rid of them. I kept the keyboard, though. Since then I've had ten or so various old computers, but no little compacts like the SEs. Fast forward to about three weeks ago. I was browsing the 68kmla forums (dedicated to old macs and such) and came across a post made by a guy who was selling most of his macs because he was moving or something. I noticed he was selling an SE 800k for $8, good condition, with a little bit of paint on it and an untested hard drive in it. The total price came out to about $25, including shipping.

About a week later I got it, packed in a large box with balled up tractor feed paper instead of normal bubble wrap or whatever, which works fine. Upon first unboxing I noticed that, unfortunately, there was a rather large chip out of the bottom front, which bugged me, but had he told me about it I would have bought it anyway. The real problem, though, was that when I got it all set up and ready to run, it wasn't booting off any of my floppies I had made. I opened the case and reseated cables, and blew out the drive, and it worked fine, which was good. Then came another problem, of it not working. It was weird, I got the HDD to work (just needed some jumpering) and I got System 6 installed on it, but when I was using it I started to have weird problems. Bus Errors on bootup, or it would hard crash right when it loaded the mouse, or it would just display an empty box within infinite more empty boxes inside it. The thing is, for the first thirty seconds or so of working, it would be perfect, no problems, after that it was entirely hit or miss, probably a 70% chance of crashing.

My first thought was wash the logic board. Most people think computers + water = very bad but that's pretty irrational. As long as you fully remove the PRAM (the CMOS of macs) battery it'll be fine. I filled a little plastic tub with hot water and dish detergent and let the board soak for a few minutes. The advantage of this is that it can get rid of oxidation and crud on the board that causes all kinds of sorts of problems and whatever, that are generally bad. After the soaking I rinsed it with standard cold tap water (by the way this was the same weekend that landon was here, so we were working on it together) and we hung it out to dry out in the sun, and about four hours later it was nice and try. We popped out the chips to make sure there was no water under them, and thankfully there was none. We put it back in the case and booted it up, started it off the floppy and almost instantly... BUS ERROR! dun dun dun.... Oh well. We now have a nice pretty board, at least. No dust or crud, on to more troubleshooting.

I did some reading about the SE, and apparently it was sold in a variety of configurations, usually four 256k sticks for 1MB, four 512k sticks for 2MB, or if you really had money (several hundred dollars) you could push the limit and get four 1MB sticks to max it out at 4MB. Turns out the sticks it has in it are four 2MB sticks, which would show up as 8MB if there wasn't a limit, but there is, so I'm thinking that maybe, just maybe, the extra addresses are causing problems or something, so right now I'm trying to find four 1MB or 256k sticks to try in it. I don't think the guy that sold me the SE knowingly sold me a junked machine, I think he just changed the RAM and forgot about it. If putting in four 1MB sticks doesn't fix anything, then I guess I'll just accept my $25 waste. I already gave the ethernet card that I got (since I didn't need it) away to a guy on the 68kmla, so that's something.

So to wrap it up, that's just about everything. This is probably the longest and most dedicated post I have so far, hope you didn't get bored to death.

Windows Live Writer

This post doesn't really have a point, I just installed WLW and I wanted to try it out to see how well it would work. The interface it has is even better in vista than it is in XP (cause it works with the aero so well.)

Mom should be here to pick me up from bojangles within twenty minutes or so, so that's cool.

Anyways.... Woo cake! (the artist, not the overused meme)

Holy crap, public unsecured internets!

This morning at around 12:30pm Dad came into my room to wake me up, asking if I wanted to go to Greenville with Mom, which she's been doing a lot recently to deliver drapes/pillows/bed dressings/etc to a house they're making them for, so I decided to tag along. The different thing about this time, though, is that she has to actually go to the house (multi million dollar mini-mansion) and sew some stuff onto pillows because they didn't provided them beforehand.

Instead of sitting around there for an hour or more, she asked if I'd like to hang out at Bojangles for a while while she did that. Bojangles has wifi so I figured, "what the heck, eh?" so where I am, on bojangles wifi, with a room full of people talking and having lunch. At least I had $5 so I was able to afford a chicken biscuit and some fries/tea. Mmmmmm.

Hrmmmmm....

The more I hear about personalized ads, and the more I see things like this, I begin to wonder.

A new day!

It's a new day and there's lots of stuff to do, or at least contemplate doing.

For starters, I got up at 6:30 like I do every tues/thurs and had a bowl of cereal and prepared for class. Not much to do, just make sure my assignment was packed and my books were there. I stood around waiting for Mom and Dad to get ready; Mom was getting dropped off at the community college library and Jennifer (the woman she works for, they do Upholstery work out in Terra Ciea/Pantego) was going to come pick her up there, then Dad was taking the car to get it inspected. I walked out the front door with my bookbag, fully packed with english books, cisco books, and the R, because I didn't know if I'd have to rough it out at the library for eight hours again.

I did my standard pocket check like I always do: first front left, two pens, 4 quarters, check. Next was front right, treo, check. Then back right, flash drive and few papers, check. Lastly back left, wallet, few dollars for potential lunch, check. All set, ready to go.

The drive was uneventful as it usually is, though a bit hazy. Got to class at about quarter to eight, a little later than I like but fine. Only one other person there, we chatted for a bit. The rest of class went by without anything happening, we discussed our next paper and the fact that we only had six classes left, and we got the assignment. With thirty minutes left we mostly sat and discussed the assignment, and I spent some time trying to get the emos' road map off my arm. Got out at around ten after nine, pretty typical cause that class goes fast. Walked out of class and looked for the car, not seeing it at first I head for the library, chatting with a girl in my class (Allison) who knew a good friend of mine (Jade) from Terra Ciea, apparently they work together. Close to the library I saw Dad in the car and head over. On the way back we discuessed my assignment some.

Upon arrival I noticed that the grass was really high, so I went around back and cleaned up the yard a bit to mow. I took the cover off the mower (to protect it from rain, since we don't have a shed) and primed it up. Thankfully it started right up and the back mowed with no problems, only hitting (and therby shredding) a few sticks. Tim, or neighbor, was at work so his car wasn't there, and I could easily move the mower to do the driveway and front. While doing the driveway I A) ran right into the rose bush (ow) and B) slammed the mower into the bus (thankfully no scratches.) I pulled it to the front and it kicked up a good bit of gravel, kinda regret not stopping it, and did the median. There was a dead squirell in the gutter that I should probably do something with. The mower ran out of gas about half through doing the yard, so I'll go out and get some later.

Came back inside, threw in some food, set up the R on my desk in just enough time to go back down and eat it, then came back up here. I've started reviving some of my music library from backups and building a new one using songbird, which is my new favorite music player. I opened up google earth and started panning around this area just for run, and it seems like they added some new imagry for this area, which is at least five years old, unlike the previous areas which were twenty or more. They also got some brand freaking new imagery for really rural areas, which knocked my socks off. I mean really, the areas they had were probably populated by no more than thirty people, it was almost all farms. Unfortunately they stopped with the new images about two miles from my school, and started it again about five miles after, hopefully the get that area and washington really soon, I'd like to see clear imagery of that area.

That's what I have done, here's what I have to do:

Brush up on my Cisco Access Control List stuff. We have the module exam tonight and I need to refresh my memory. Also get gas for the mower... not sure when this will happen but hopefully soon. I also need to do a little bit of cleaning up in here, and I'll prolly start my assignment. Other than that I'm pretty much free.

sweeeet

So I was just looking over the todo list thing I made, and I noticed that I've completed a few of the things. yay!

Wheee GPS

So for some reason when I was sitting here installing debian in VMware, I looked over and thought "hey, I should try and install my GPS software and see how it works in vista!" 30 seconds later I had it installed and was plugging in my GPS, only to remember that the window by my desk has a metal screen in it (thus blocking the GPS signal from the satallites) so I moved the R over to my bed where ansel was napping and put the reciver up on the window sill. Soon enough it had a signal from several sats and all was good. Eventually harly strolled in and hopped up on the bed, so I just had to take a picture.

http://i32.tinypic.com/2i6ewbr.jpg

Awww!

test post or something

Ok, I just found a neato plugin for ff3b5 called "scribefire" which more or less adds a litte text box and formatting features to the bottom of your web browser screen, though it is expandable.

It's like, super fast blogging without dealing with going to the blog page and signing in and stuff, and it supports all the same formatting features (if not a few more) than the normal web based shenanigans.

Ok, my VMware download is done, bai!

Yay, RAM!

So I finally got some more RAM, which is fun. Cost me $35 shipped from newegg, 2GB DDR2 667MHz SODIMM. I must say it has spiced up vista quite a bunch, it's actually really nice and fast to use now that it isn't swapping like something that swaps a lot.

Here's some pictures!

Ok, so when I opened the way to big newegg box, and dug through the unnecessary sea of peanuts, I found this:



I made sure to note this specifically, very handy considering the laptop I'm putting this in *is* running vista:



Here's a closer look at the front of the stick:



A removal of the battery and power cords, and four screws later, I'm pulling off the palmwrest:



And lo, it's off! My my, it even looks like there might be an open slot in there...



It is! Yay!



Press down lightly... and.... *click*



Now lets reattach the battery and all the cables, and boot vistuh!

[no picture due to the boringness of it's bootup sequence]

Ok, ~20 seconds later, I'm logged in and noticing it's much faster. Lets recalculate the WEI, shall we?

http://i28.tinypic.com/wia4k3.jpg

It's a whole .5 higher than it was! Craaaazy!

Here's some more detail:

http://i25.tinypic.com/1zppd9s.jpg

Yeah, I had to make those two external links. Too wide for the blog format apparently.

interesting...

25

I so think I could do double that, I mean seriously, split the kids into groups and the bribe them with candy. They practically fight themselves!

However, when you get to the last of them, and they realize you have no candy, be prepared to bribe with tickets to disneyland or run like hell.

bored at the library

Since Mom has started working out in Terra Ceia again, and we've only got one car, after classes on Tuesday and Thursday mornings I've had to wait at the library until she's done. Usually around 3pm is when she can come out to get me. I get out of ENG111 at 9:15am, so that means I'm at the library for about six hours or so. For the first... hour or two I can usually get most of my eng111 work done and get some lunch at the library cafeteria, but for the rest I'm just bored, listening to music every once in a while, if I remember to bring headphones. At *least* I can get wifi on the R here, in linux, so I can do stuff on my own machine.

It's 1:30 now, so only 1.5hrs left to go, hopefully.

At least hardly anyone is here later in the afternoon, so it's not too bad.

Spinny kitten of goodness

So as of recent the kittens (jane and ansel) have taken over my rather nice paddedy chair. Instead of forcing them to move (I'm so nice) I slid over the chair and put my old beat up one in it's place. One day while I was sitting waiting for something to load down, I noticed jane was sleeping rather peacefully, so I gave the chair a quick spin and she seemed to enjoy watching the world twirl around her, so I did it a bunch more and made a video of it.

Amazingly she still likes to sleep there...

Video!

Windows Server 2003 & Bike motorification

Apparently the community college that I go to signed up for the whole Microsoft Dreamspark program thing, and went as far as to set it up so that you can sign up for said program using just your SSN, and while that is a little bit creepy, I'd say it's pretty cool too so it balances out nicely.

For those of you who haven't heard of MS' Dreamspark program, it's this thing that microsoft has been doing for a few months now where if you're a college student, or have been accepted into a college that supports dreamspark, you can sign up and download anything you want from this small pool of software they offer, no charges at all, just relatively slowish download speeds. It's a pretty cool idea in my opinion, but the software list they offer isn't really much; that's not to say it's not awesome, though. Free (usually expensive) software for download? Woo! But if they offered like, Office07 or 03 & WinXP it would be pretty nice.

Then again, they software they offer is mainly geared towards "aspiring software developers" or whatever. They have: VisualStudio 2008pro, MS Expressions (2007?), MS SQL Server, VisualStudio 2005pro, xna game studio, and last but not least, MS Server 2003 standard. The first thing that really interested me was that srvr2003, so I downloaded it right away. And by right away I mean two 600MB ISOs at 230KB/s.

Once it did finish, however, I opened up VMWare and loaded it in to begin playing with it. First impression: just like windows 2000 server. Second impression: just like windows 2000 server with some new added features and fancier logos. New software is new software, though, and from playing with it in vmware I found a lot of neato little serverish things.

Playing with it in vmware, though, got boring. Running an OS like this on real hardware is oh so much more interesting. Realizing that I don't exactly have many capable PCs around here, I began to stumble on what I would run this on. I then remembered "the valtec," which is a generic whitebox PC that I got from a friend of mine for helping him move. It's not really spectacular- PIII 500, 512MB, 20GB, etc. However, that does *almost* fit into the "suggested requirements" for wndwssrvr2003stndrd, and it easily clears the minimum. After converting those ISOs into warmly burned compact disks I hooked up the valtec booted it up off the first disk. The install went like any other install, except it took an epicly long time, about an hour and a half.

From this I expected that it would run about as quickly, or as not quickly, as it installed. Much to the contrary it runs pretty fast, *nearly* wndwssrvr2000 speed, which I suppose isn't too radically crazy considering it's only three years newer, hee hee. So right now it's got remote desktop enabled, so I can hook right into it from the R61i here with no issues. I've got a web server running on it, but I'm not going to open the port until I have some data to dump there, which may take a while, if it ever happens.


Allllsooooo.... I've been making some great strides in my bike engine-ification project, both in using the engine I already have and in possibly getting a new engine off ebay for $150 shipped. The new engine is looking good because it has nice things, like a clutch and is connected to the wheel by a drive shaft, not a roller. The other option is using the engine I have now, but it needs some work and to mount it to the bike I still need some sort of mounting bracket. Making one of those would probably take longer than it would to get the money for an engine.

Getting back into blagging

So it would seem as though fall was the last time I fired up blogspot and typed anything in. I guess you could say I "eHibernated" through the winter and am just now emerging to type about random stuff once again. A lot has happened, but I'm going to break it down into multiple posts.