volume tiene: mar 1999ad
dates in hex unless otherwise stated...times are in decimal UTC/GMT
I am in fact sitting here drinking a Citra. It seems odd to most that I would be drinking a Citra because I hate the stuff and it in fact often makes my body do some unfortunate things (ie, vomitting). It even tastes terrible (and even worse on the way up, I must add). So, I would suggest just not asking about why I drink Citra....
Now that you are graphically initialized, I will get into the more boring aspects. For instance, the fact that it was yet another boring day. (I really should stop saying that.)
But I did get way too much sleep. And that was nice. I'm into a really bad schedule right now (ie, sleeping all afternoon and early evening and then not sleeping before school -- not good). It's getting a bit scary. So in short, I slept til around 1930 again. And yet again, I awoke to find no one here. That is getting to be disturbing as well.
I learned what this log looks like with AOL's integrated browser today. That was scary. The colors are for some reason limited. Maybe I was just being overcritical. Or maybe its the wind. The wind seems to be doing a lot of things tonight. Like blowing everything around my room (if you've seen my room you probably recognize the peril in having things attack from the air as well as from the ground). In any case, I have an AOL account now. For no reason! I was growing tired of running over that AOL4.0 CD with my chair (its been there for several months, and in fact I had mostly forgotten about it). So now I have a month to cancel it. Please, don't let me forget. (Although that bring-your-own-access thing is nice idea, though I still think $10/mnth is a bit high -- there's nothing that spectacular about AOL that makes it worth that much -- I might my $6 or 7, but most likely not $10.)
After frightening enough people, I signed off. And then tried to get back on. Of course, it said I was already logged on. And of course you can't be logged in twice at the same time. I think it had something to do with the proxy I was using (for some reason I was doing it completely over wireless -- not terribly fast, but, well, I don't know why I was doing that -- I was sitting less than a metre from the transmitter too).
I need to do APUSH homework. I kind of forgot about that. Good night.
Gurge. I hate school. I'm not just being stereotypical here. I mean I really do hate the thing...
So I am going to delay talking about it. And mention a few things from last week. Firstly, Ken finally proposed to Amy (my sister) while back in the lovely useless state of Rhode Island. Wedding is planned for Summer of 2000 (going to be a busy summer indeed).
And completely irrelevent to that, I got word on Fri that libfaim supports yet another platform, but this one a bit more esoteric: MacOS X Server. The author will be sending me changes and also releasing a complete client for that platform under an open license. Nifty, eh?
The media has shown its complete idiocy yet again. I am refering to Monday. When the DJIA hit the utterly useless 10000 mark. My favorite CNN quote went something like "The President is refusing comment because he is currently preoccupied with that war thing in the Balkins."
I'm finding the Red Dwarf references in User Friendly quite amusing. Very rarely are there such connections with British comedy...
I think thats about all the useless trivia I can come up with for now. So I guess I'll have to switch back to that other dreadful thing...
I must say that it was fairly uneventful. I really should be working on those two papers I have due in a week (especially since I will have one less day than I'd planned -- aparently not only is Sunday some wacko religious holiday of some varied sort, it's also the day I have to go "celebrate" my birthday with my grandparents in Prescott -- puke).
Heh, I managed to pull a 92% on the multiple choice section of that APUSG exam from a friday or two ago. But that's with a big curve; a curve that in fact brought me up an entire ten points. I would hate to have a B in such a class as APUSH.
I came home and slept, of course. Though a bit unusually, as I didnt' awake until nearly 2000. I recovered. Barely. I then managed to do absolutly nothing. Well, okay, I did play Super Mario Bros 3 a while. But my excuse for that was seeing how well Nestra actually does that runtime-recompilation. I'm not real sure why you'd need such fancy features for code emulation that runs on terribly slow 8bit chips, but its an interesting hackish feature anyway. And it does run incredibly fast. Too fast. Way way too fast. That led to very unsuccessful playage. Actually, even more frustrating than the speed was my lack of transposable coordination: the A button on the NES pad is on the right hand, where the space bar that Nestra uses is on the left. I don't do well with opposites. Especially when there are washed-out, badly colored, and all around look as though they taste like floor-wax, mushrooms coming at me with such speed as those.....
Yes, indeed I got nothing done today. Oh, I also learned that I can't observe anyone at Honeywell because all of their Phoenix facilities are "secure". Such an annoyance.
I'm off to bed now. Or at least, that is the plan. Last night I actually did go to bed but really never went to sleep. That was probably bad. Such an annoyance. (Since I am repeating myself, it is probably best to stop writing no matter what the bed situation comes out like...)
Yeah, I bet you thought you'd come here today and find everything filled in nice and tidy. But it's not. Hah. You overestimate me. You should fix that.
A farily yucky day, if I do say so. Just sickening. Band brought some different and bit saddening news, but I'm not going to talk about that. Because I only talk about things that I can someway mutilate into sounding incredibly stupid. And that I cannot, so I won't even try. Sat around talking about the differences between 'professional assasins' and 'amateur assasins' with Stacy in English (ie, the "improbability factor" that you gain by using amateurs). I can't think of much else that was exciting. I fell asleep several times. But that's not really anything new.
Came home. Slept. Got up. Ate. Slept. So basically I've spent nearly the entirety of the day sleeping. Except for the past few hours. And after I had that largish bowl of ice cream, I decided I probably shouldn't have bothered trying to do anything else but sleep today. Oh well...
Looks like I won't have much trouble finding people to observe. I've decided to just switch to EE because I can't find any CE's. Not that big of deal. And finding these people to observe lets me write a lot about my refrigerator door, a very neglected piece of multi-function plated insulation.
I think I will go to bed now...
Well now... this is quite an interesting predicament now ain't it. (Yes, in the last week I have added to my vocabulary the word 'aint'.)
So now that you're fearful, I shall continue. But not for much. You see, in the past week I have seen what 12 hours a sleep a day looks like. And I liked it (except for that day when it was over 100degF in this room because my window magically closed itself at the most inopprotune time (ie, any time of the day or night) and caused the said room to heat up like a tomato furnace. Yes, that was a pretty sickening day. But I've managed to keep it from recurring so far by using large metal sticks to keep the said window from once again closing itself and dooming me to that dreadful heat.). Oh, and like I said, I plan on going to bed soon. Real soon. As in 'I've already said I'm going to bed five times or more' soon (I usually start writing a log after the first or second 'i'm going to bed now', then actually do suceed in going to bed at around the ninth or tenth.).
In case you've run out of things to wonder about... yes, this past week was "spring break" for me. And yes, it was fun. And yes, I wrote no logs. If I decide to, I may fill them in later (yes, you read that right -- I said "may" twice in a nested sort of way, meaning its quite unlikely). A few hilights in case I never get around to it... USWest has really begun to muck with our minds these days. I did indeed get them out here the next day (Tue) and not the scheduled day (Wed). I've been out with Amanda, Tara, and sometimes Brock, David, and Karisma, everynight that week (Mon thru Sat) til at least 0200, which mostly explains the lack of logs. The only exception to that was I think Wed night (maybe Tue -- yes, this is why its best to write immediatly before I go to bed: so I can achieve the ultimate in terrible memory and the maximum in temporary, (hopefully) short-term senility). That exception was that I was actually home. However, I was not free. I happened to be a wonderfully odd conversation with Tara and Brock via Amanda's telephone line. That, and I was taking apart an 8bit Nintendo for no aparent reason (this following a few short games at Super Mario Bros to remember just how terrible that game is and how even more terribly I can play it). That conversation lasted till just before 0400, at which time I decided I needed to go to bed. Less than 12 hours thereafter, our voice line went dead. And is in fact still dead. So yes, USWest is being mean again. They say the guy they send out tomorrow may actually fix it. I'm guessing thats not true, however, considering that the last three guys have been incompetent enough to avoid actually fixing anything. Anyway... back to today...
I got up. Ate breakfast (my grandparents were here, of course we had to appear to be a "normal" family). Finished So Long and Thanks for All the Fish. Took a shower. Managed to fashion a wonderfully inaccurate visage of an extremely thin miniature shoe-horn out of a very heavily spent bar of soap (well I had to do something with it...what else is there to do with a used bar of soap other than making incredibly inaccurate miniatures with it?!). I got out of the shower. Sat around for a while. Moved tables (if I had filled in the imaginary entry for last Thursday, you'd know what I meant by that). Watched Simpsons and the premier of Futurama. (I think it shows promise. Not much of an episode. But it was a premier, which are usually useless anyway. We'll see.) I got it into my head that i should do some more FAIM work. I managed to figure out a nifty way of organizing and writing Makefiles so that they are just as complex as automake/conf ones, yet avoiding actually using automake/conf. I was proud. I then learned how to link and link against shared dynamic libraries. Surprisingly, I'd never done that before. Now I have. faimtest is 11kb when linked against a shared libfaim.so. Fun, eh?
I then decided to go to bed. I even got as far as shutting off my laptop and getting into bed. I should've known better. I then started freaking out about the two largish things I have due in English next week (a 'carrer project' and a Gatsby paper). Heh. Then I decided to calm down and write a log. Well, not really. But David convinced me to. Well, not really. But that's the easiest explanation for why I'm up this late on the night before the first day of school after spring break. It's usually easier to blame things on David (or Tara) than on myself. I think I really will go to bed now.
(Actually, I knew the cursed word 'aint' before I started. I just figured I'd say it in order to add to the who-the-hell-am-i-and-why-do-i-write-here-so-every-wacko-can-read-nothing-about-me moment. I like those moments. Because they're really scary if done correctly. Of course, you may not know that feeling, because this is certainly not the point in space/time to be finding something done correctly. No, I do things correctly for money. In my spare time is when I do things incorrectly for the pure amusement of doing them incorrectly. Oh wait. All my time is spare. Damn. That means I'm broke and never doing anything right. Hey. Look. Logic led me to an inaccurate conclusion. Ahhhh! My whole values system is crumbling!! Ack! Ack! Aaaaaeeeeeeeekkkkkkk..... [Silent echos of a long-since dead brain sputter along the continuum...].)
Oh, and I have no idea what a tomato furnace is.
Well, today has been interesting, I guess. Odd. Different. And maybe interesting.
Got up around 0930. I think. That was a long time ago. Wandered around for a bit. Somehow ended up in the shower at noontime. Made some minor headway on deepthought. Then noticed that 1) all my routes to the inet were gone and 2) the phone line had no dial tone (and in fact still does not).
That maddened me to no end (and still does). After running around and screaming like (well, not like... more like as) a madman, I decided to deal with it and get something done. And get something done I did.
As of this moment, ihpled is gone...deepthought is in (telnet to it if you don't believe me -- I really want to put a nifty issue on it sometime). Not being able to have stable inet access gave me the needed downtime I needed to both get it all working and get some general cleanup of that system done (I mean cleanup literally -- too much dust!).
That's all I can remember about it right now. I'm thinking that's all I've done. The todo list is majorly small now. There's still some small problems. And some things I never competely fixed (think "termcap"). But it will all work out. It is, however, ready for use. Go ahead...use it....
I have been generally pleased with myself. It's been a while since I've been that productive. And actually completed a major project. In less than a week. I'm amazed. Anyway...
An AVEC InterCapture came in the mail today. It's a Bt848-based board compete with tuner and TEA6320 audio processor. I hope this to be the last video board I ever see. But this one should replace my TV. It can do all 125 channels of CATV.
I think this has been enough of a day. I think I'll end it. USWest says they can't get out here til Wed. That means you'll see very little of me online. That is, unless the call they get from me in the morning convinces them to get out here then. Or maybe the work order I just sent in from their web site...that seemed to be a very effecient way of yelling last time I had trouble... a tech was out the next day... oh well. Ta ta...
I am hoping I can compose this before this half-a-metre-wide moth devours my flesh....
Got up at 1030 or something. Worked on nothing for a few hours. Then took a shower. Worked on deepthought for quite a while longer thereafter.
Cat has just entered the scene...hopefully she has come to save me from the wretched beast.
Shortly after 1600, I went with Amanda down to Gammage to see Victor/Victoria. That was an interesting experience indeed. That is a show only for the sexually secure, I must say. Interesting redefinition of the word 'pookie' as well. I'm just not so sure that a show about women-who-want-to-be-men-who-want-to-be-women is really necessay. Of course, who am I to say. Maybe there was a void there that no one noticed. I suppose its also good if you really like stupid sex humor. I think I'll just leave it at that.
Turns out that all Cat really wanted was to sit on my face and be terribly annoying...
Got home at 2200 or thereabouts. Been doing nothing since.
Okay, so maybe is was a half-a-centimetre... but it still moved too fast for my liking... and it had a crazy look in its eyes...
A decidly more productive day indeed...
Woke up around 1130. Struggled with PAM for a few hours. Several more hours of general web browsing and doing nothing after that. Went to Big Heng for dinner. Superb Chinese food. Came back and struggled with PAM some more....
But I was much more successful on this attempt. With the occasional suggestions from Orb, I got it compiling. And running. Even working. There's still some issues (like finding a /bin/login that acutally uses PAM, etc). Getting that working really put me in a good mood. And was therefore quite productive. Got over a dozen more apps installed. Everything is coming together quite well now. I'm to the point where I can make a todo list. That's a critical point. Because its usually close to the end.
I do not expect to have a fully complete system when I install the disks sometime this week (turning ihpled into deepthought). I merely hope to be complete enough to where I can sustain the basic system functions. Anything else can be added later. But, even a head-start on that is nice. Required stuff looks about like this: httpd, ftpd, sendmail, pine, procmail, naim, etc. Everything thats needed for my daily work, and to maintain the 24x7 operations that ihpled currently does. (Building a server-only dist is much simpler than building a workstation dist since there's no need for all that graphical rubbish -- just the basics. It's been fun working on the bare console this much -- something I haven't done in quite some time.)
If I am this productive for a few more days, I should be ready for a transition on Tue or Wed, maybe even Mon evening.
[I'm laughing at a certain teacher who aparently just got inet access...and is still on at nearly 0300. Noooo, she's not getting addicted or anything....] Oh well. Time for sleep.
Yawn... Not as productive as hoped...but still mildly existent...
Woke up on time. Yay. School was terrible. Lunch was spent going somewhat insane over the impending APUSH test. APUSH was spent taking said test. Way too big. Essay was horrible..eek... Came home and slept in the knowing that I don't have to go back there for over a week.
A good chunk of the evening was spent working on deepthought. Major major pains. It's not exactly a compile-and-install effort anymore. The packages are getting bigger. And the glibc 2.0 to 2.1 differences are getting clearer and clearer. The most annoying difference so far is that strdup() and strstr() are now macros, so anything that uses a prototype for those is now broken. The most major breakage seems to be RPC and NIS. I still haven't figured out what's up with those yet. These problems have been keeping me from compiling PAM, which means most things that involve logging in don't quite work to my liking yet. (I got telnet to work, but only on a temporary basis -- I really really need PAM to compile!)
So I'm going to calm down now... and go to bed. Maybe I'll work on it tomorrow...maybe I'll take a day off from the frustration. I have definitly learned something from this so far: Never Ever Under Any Circumstances get it into your head that you are skilled enough to roll your own GNU/Linux system, because you're not. Don't even bother trying.
Okay, that's enough pessimism for one entry... g'night.
Ho hum... I'm not going to write much... there's really not great point in me inflicting upon you a total recollection of the nothingness that I accomplished today....
I think I did good for myself this morning: I got a new alarm. And this one works (or at least is pretending to). [I can hear the cackle of the old alarm mocking me for once again putting faith in such bits of analog stupidity. Blasted alarms. They're just always out to get you. Just their very existence is insulting to us as humans.] So, although I did not get up on time, it was not due to an alarm that has forgotten its role in Reality. (It was, in fact, due to my half-sleeping senility that I did not rise on the proper time. It didn't really affect me, however; I did still end up at school, dreadful as that may be.) Now that I have spent an entire paragraph on the first hour of the day, we can summarize the following eleven hours into a single, albeit long and, in fact, multiple sentences that have been mishappenly concatenated into a single bit of prose, sentence....
All of school was fairly boring and basically not worth mentioning past its general existence, which leads to the rest of the said time period, which was spent sleeping.
Okay. At 1830 or shortly thereafter, I went down to the school to see Midsummer Night's Dream (a day earlier than planned, in fact, at Amanda's request). Humorous indeed.
If everything goes as planned and I don't mysteriously jump into some even more wretched parallel (or maybe serial -- time travel might be fun for a change) universe, I will be departing at this point and going to study APUSH (somewhat largish exam morrow), followed by (hopefully) many hours of sleep.
As of the last paragraph, I have said "in fact" a total of three times in this entry. As a note of useless statistics, that is 1.8 more than my average usage of that phrase.
Somewhat maddening day...which is a bit odd, since it was quite productive.
Alarm yet again did not wake me up on time. It's really starting to piss me off now. I think it deserves to be thrown somewhere. Or maybe just grotesquely mutilated. Or maybe badly mutilated and then thrown somwhere. Hey wait, I know...give it to good will! Yes, thats it. Let it drive someone crazy who has nothing better to do! Okay, so thats mean. The somewhat more sad part is that by the time I finally did awaken, I just decided I really really didn't feel like going to school. Ha. So I didn't. It was quite nice to have a day off.
So I slept for quite a long time...mmm...sleep. Read various things. Nothing really exciting. But that was on purpose.
I really spent the rest of the day working on deepthought's system and eating popcorn. I'm really not very happy with it (the system, that is -- the popcorn is great). Bootup is terrible. I did, however figure out how to boot off of a RAID (so I can have a single 'partition' cover everything -- root and /usr). [A note about that for my future reference: when it says 'chunk factor' they really do mean PAGE_SIZE << n (I assumed that that couldn't possibly be right and wrote it in kb instead -- I was wrong of course). So for 8kb stripes, n=1 (PAGE_SIZE << 1 = 4096<<1 = 8192).]
I finally just gave up on getting init to cooperate for now. With the help of mediocris' root fs and chroot, I've been able to start compilig packages. And that's the tricky part: where do you start. Since I had a fair amount of the system I could use (off mediocris' root), I went ahead and built glibc 2.1 under a chroot'ed fs (compiling off mediocris (/mnt), installing to root (/)). That method seems to be working quite nicely. I must compliment the egcs people on their fantastic improvements to gcc. egcs was in fact far easier to configure and compile than glibc and especially the old gcc 2.7. Incredibly. Literally just a matter of 'configure ; make ; make install'.
I plan to continue what I'm doing until I have a usable system. Should be quite soon. Booting is -still- going to be -the- most difficult thing about it, however. Tweaking all the startup scripts just right. Ugh. The rest seems like its going to be quite fun though.
So as soon as I get binutils compiled, I think I will be going to bed.
An envy-inducing quote of the day from df....
Filesystem | 1024-blocks | Used | Available | Capacity | Mounted on |
/dev/md0 | 15850179 | 13 | 15025232 | 0% | /mnt |
That's courtesy of mediocris, who is containing what will eventually (ie, soon) be the new main storage volume of ihpled. And yes, that IS 16gig's of striped RAID0. I will be slowly building a custom dist for it...and then move it into ihpled. Planned deployment is somewhere towards the end of next week. Should be amusing....
It's actually been a fairly good day. Nothing spectacular, of course. Just nothing particularly bad happened.
First hour brought nothing interesting. Nor did second. In fact, none of the school day did. Well, okay, calculus was interesting. I had the most interesting conversation with Stacy concerning the Simpsons. (Yes, of course, the Simpsons.) Very funny. (I especially like the relation of Homer to a classical Greek tragic hero, with a flaw containing irony pointing to a supernatural conflict with stupidity. I do believe that the name itself (Homer) is meant to be a signature of this character analyses -- though I by no means insult literature on the order of Illiad!) Okay, so that was probably the most interesting thing at school.
Came home and slept, of course. UPS woke me up. Had a switch for me. Yay! I highly recommend the NetGear SW510 to anyone looking for a sub-$300 ether switch. It's really quite nice. A great improvement from the Asante FS3208 that was in that position before. Ihpled is connected to one of the 100mb ports; the old switch (which is now in my room) is connected to the other. And fantastically enough, it would seem as though the other 100mb port on the Asante is not bad after all. So now mediocris is on a 100mb line as well. Average frame latency from mediocris to ihpled is 0.4ms (64b data, passing through two switches, connected all the way via full-duplex 100baseTX). So that's neat. The Asante still does have one or two bad 10mb ports. And it has lost the ability to learn. But it is otherwise good. It's just acting as a really fast hub right now (its actually somewhere between a hub and a switch...it bridges, but it can't learn...but its still segmenting and is multiplexing and buffering between 10 and 100mb). So now I have 10mb switched ether in my room. Now I have yet another reason to update my topology diagram, since it is now quite different.
I sat around for a while after getting all that up to my liking. Compiled a new kernel for mediocris in preparation for using it to build the new ihpled volume (ie, needs md drivers for RAID -- also, it was still running a 2.2.0pre1ac -- too old for my liking at this point). It's now running 2.2.3ac2 (Alan released it just mere hours before I compiled). Also, really too late, I took apart mediocris physically to install the new drives. That took a while. I then booted it up unionized hdb and hdc into a single md0 and formatted it (see QOTD above). It's big. Reeeaaal big. I will probably do that several more times before I like it. I also need to read about how well I can boot off of the RAID. I don't really like having the split / and /usr like I have on ihpled now....but at the time, it was that or use an initrc (which I consider unreliable, though I'm sure they work just fine -- I just dont like them). Speed is not really an issue for splitting them up, since this is dual-drive striped RAID0, you're going to have doubled the read times anyway. Maybe I should look into using reiserfs or one of the other new filesystems...
This seems to have turned out quite long again. Non-technical readers are probably quite bored by this point (if you don't know if you're a technical reader or not: if you understood the above, then you may be....if you really understood the above, you may be insane). I must be writing this much to prepare for writing that Gatsby paper.....
Hum. I thought it was xE today. I have no idea why. I've been writing the wrong datecode on all my papers. Oh well. No one understands them but me anyway... I will just have to make note in my logs that at 3xE/F, the datecode functions are not continuous.... but they're asymptotic anyway, as all dates are, so noting their uncontinuous nature is a bit repetitious...
Stupid alarm didn't wake me up this morning. Didn't wake up til after 0630. Grr... I really wonder why that thing only works sometimes. Really needs to get fixed. Probably should just get a new one. Or get mediocris to beep really really loudly at 0600. Maybe I should just not go to bed. In any case, I made it to school. Sat around in band...well, that's really not what we should of been doing. But being the terrible section leader I am, I was unable to coax my section into actually having the prescribed sectional. Oh well. [Mmmm...smells like rain.] Spent all of englisc taking a test over Gatsby. I got an 86%. As I've said...I hate modern lit. [The best unit I've had so far was Scarlet Letter....which oddly enough was where everone elses' worst scores came from. Both the modern pieces we've done, I've done terrible on (Gatsby (early 20th C) and Crucible (mid-20th)). Oh well.] Ended the class with an interesting character analysis conversation with the teacher concerning inate antisocial behaviors sprung at birth in the context of Shelley's Frankenstein (a book of which I have never directly read, but aparently I helped my sister with enough homework on it last year to somehow come out with an analyses of the book...go figure). Somewhat boring lunch. APUSH was so-so. Exam pushed to Fri. That means three exams on Fri. Ugh.
Came home and slept. Only to be awoken by part of my window missing and Brock and David's head staring at me. They have been joking about how they are going to come rob me of all my oddities, and I believed that to be in jest. However, their persistent trials of actually entering this dwelling without the assistance of me is making me rethink that somewhat. This was sometime around 1600 or 1700. I'm not real sure. I was more concerned about getting them out of my window than looking at a partially accurate clock. They left about 2310. Yes. That was a very long time. And in that time, we managed to be quite unproductive in what they had actually come to accomplish, and that was fixing his $36 computer. Though, I think we did fix it anyway (in that way that constitutes the improbabily of reality). I think it involved fdisk. [MMmmmm...fdisk...Always like that destruction thing...and 'plasma fires'...] I do believe it was a standard case of mismatched geometries. And a keyboard connector hole in a steel case that was too small (note 'was' -- at what I thought was the last minute, it was decided that the said hole should be bigger to promote more proper connection of a keyboard (ie, that didn't involve tape or banging anything wit a hammer)...and the dremel and files were brought out). They ended up staying far later than that anyway.
And I suppose we should get back to the (percieved) unproductivity. This was caused by 1) pizza and 2) Amanda & Tara. And mostly simultaneously too. I finally got to see the video of Sara's ultrasound (aparently it takes strangers to want to see it for me to actually get to as well). And Twilight Zone...with a script that just didn't understand barter economies (okay, so it was a bit more transcendental than your average economy...but trading body parts and 4th-dimension-acquisitions is still a barter economy! just with a bit more eternal meaning...). That was worthy of the percieved unproductivity, no?
I need to pick a profession and do a paper, an interview, and an observation with someone under that profession. Any suggestions? I think my dad wants me to do something hardware... but I'm not real sure. I think I'm going to have to agree. Know any computer engineers in the northwest phoenix/glendale/peooria area?
Brock says he wants CUMULUS back up. I suppose I will have to oblige. I think those things are still out there. They may have gotten taken back. I really don't remember what he said he was going to do. I suppose I should ask.
I'm taking names for The Partially Rejuvinated Ihpled (ie, a complete reinstall...this time onto a 16gb RAID0 instead of the current 4gb RAID0 (or maybe I should do an 8gb RAID1? I'm not sure... do I want the space or the reliability....but since I've had no problems with this type of drive, I really have regained some of my faith in spinning metallic frisbees...but I'm still going to call them that). I'm thinking deepthought. I think it should definitly be something Douglas Adams. Maybe prefect? (It could work either as a mispelled 'perfect' or as the whimsical Ford vehicle.) Again, ideas welcome.
Sheesh...this turned out to be quite wordy. Certainly the longest entry in quite some time (ie, at least a week). Oh well. Ta ta...
Oh and you expected something to happen that's worth noting? Oh come on!
Woke up around 0930 (I think...it was a long time ago). Well, you know... I kind of don't remember... hmmm... I remember finishing Life, the Universe, and Everything (finally...for some reason I stopped reading it for two months right in the middle of it...go figure). Did some APUSH homework too. Ya, I remember doing that. I guess I did nothing for a while after that.
Compiled WINE. Played a game of Solitaire in it. Then was terribly surprised to find that Word97 and Excel97 function in an adequate way under it. Impressive. But explorer still doesn't work. I don't understand that...its far simpler than Office97. Oh well. Cleaned up my laptop's Linux partition a bit. Base Stampede leaves it a bit messy. I still don't understand how I filled up that 1.3gb already...
I guess I've been doing nothing since then. Oh well. Oh, and I put part of my room in a large bag. This was of course to hide it from me so I don't have to think about how I should clean it up.
So even though I am in fact not typing on a Dvorak layout, I am doing something a bit different. I am being quite relaxed by a certain vibrating chair...that speaks in an odd tonge...very very humorously...
I've stalled enough... Got up about 0930. Took a shower. Practiced a little while (attempted that zippy little thing in Far and Away). Then decided it had been too long sense I'd gone wireless. I from there forward spent the rest of the day trying to get Win95 to behave sanely (although this is an unhuman feat (and I have in fact never accomplished it), I have come close. And coming 'close' always entails reinstalling it after using the 'del' command with a 'tree' suffix, further appended with a '\windows'. And that really did take most of the day. (Much to my dislike. I was actually hoping to be productive today. Grr..)
While I was doing that, my inet connection was working on getting me the Episode I trailer (Star Wars, of course). It eventually did. On the second try. The first try was cut short by ihpled crashing. That was not fun. I'm still not very sure on what happened. But hopefully it will not happen again. I quickly rebooted and started the download again. After I got the wireless stuff working, I went back to that. Compiled a kernel on my laptop. 2.2.3ac1SMP. Then made the official switchover to it. It's now running happily. And my hard drives get assigned /dev/hdX letters in the right order. Finally. No more stupid must-have-human-to-reboot-because-lilo-wont-install problems.
About 2330 (very approximatly), David and Brock showed up outside my window. With David's new old 486. Mucked around with strange hard drive problems. I think the consensus was to give up. They eventually left close to 0200.
After that, all I've basically done is pick up my laptop and come out here to the living room to sit on this chair and write this log in peace. And it seems I have. I suppose that means I should go to bed now. Since its very quickly approaching 0300... there's even more reason why I should go to bed. So let's go to bed...
Nothing eventful at school; at least I dont remember anything as such, so I will assume that my memory is good and go with it. Nothing eventful happened. Got home around 1120. Took a long nap.
Woke up to find no parents, no sister, and no palm tree. I'm not sure where they were. Oh did I say palm tree? Well, its gone now. They cut it down. Well, I suppose the tap root is still there. Oh well. I guess my parents came back. But they didn't have a tree with them. A new ethernet switch got ordered, however... The insurance company gave us enough for that...but not enough to do anything about the tree itself... [I think we should have waited until the tree fell down and pummelled a car or two...we have too many of those anyway... then we could have gotten car insurance money and be rid of a car or two and more money than their trade-in value... that would have been more useful than having to pay for cutting the tree down... ]
Spent the early evening burning EPROMs and driving myself insane. Burned a ROM that was the same as the 8227 ROM except for the first 16k, which I replaced with an Etherboot BOOTP TCP/IP boot rom. That causes something interesting. When I put that in the 8227, it gets to the point (in time, remember that there is no way to actually see whats going on other than the lights and the network activity) where the boot prom loads, the light on the hub flickers, and then goes off. Simultaneously, all the lights on the 8227 go on and then all of them go off. And thats it. No network activity or anything. I burned a 3c509 boot prom (8k -- that was a trick) for mthree (the sound mammatus node) and then moved as far away from the EEPROM burners and UV lights as possible....
Spent the latter half of the evening learning the Dvorak keyboard layout and driving myself insane (notice a pattern?). I spent two hours with it (off and on -- I was getting way too frustrated to do it all in one shot). I know the home row fairly well (the only thing that really annoys me so far is that I have to type 'ls' (something I do oh so often) all on one hand...and that doesnt seem all that effecient to me -- I have two hands, I should use them for things that get typed that ofen!). And I can say basic things like 'yes' and 'no' and 'i dunno'. And that's about all talking to Tara requires. I was doing fairly well for a while. But I'm tired and I need to go to bed. My goal is to type tomorrow's log using the dvorak layout. That is, if I haven't broken every keyboard in the house into various smaller pieces in violent fits of rage against reality.... Oh no, that never happens... uh huh... yeah....
See normally I'd say it was a 'disappointing day', but since I didn't really expect anything from it, I can not justify being disappointed. But it was fruitful none the less.
I can recall nothing worthy of mention at school. Mostly just sat around. Got up every once in a while (they call this 'changing classes', except for that somewhat longer period they call 'lunch'). Came home and slept for a while. Then finished Gatsby. (Good story, though I still dislike modern writing styles.) Then sat here the rest of the evening, thinking only about how I should be doing something other than sitting here thinking I should be doing something more than sitting here thinking I should be doing somethi...
I forgot to mention yesterday that I put up a worthless screenshot from pileus (my laptop) that shows off my hidiously ugly gtk themes and gnome and E (actually, I took it to show off that I convinced naim into being transparent -- see upper left corner Eterm -- disregard the NPR advertisment I was giving in the conversation -- also notice that my battery was at exactly 42%, a pure coincidence that I did not notice until just now).
So I think I'll go to bed now... should be home early tomorrow...but I'll probably use the time to do some more unproductive things...like sleep...
Short school day...but that just makes the rest of it all the longer.
Nothing eventful all morning. Got home around noon. Did nothing for a while. Slept for a while. As darkness came upon, it was quite apparent that I had no artificial lighting. All three of the lights in my room seem to have burnt out. Its a trifle dark. And I am not about to try and change light bulbs in the dark (especially in the death-trap known as my room). Besides, we don't have any spare bulbs, if you can believe it -- in all the literal tons of junk we store in this house, we have no spare light bulbs.
I made a one-line patch to naim so that transparency mostly works in Eterm's. That was easy. The hard part was having the guts to give up on making it work completely. The background of the text is still opaque. So there's black squares around all the text. Oh well.
Sat in the dark for an hour or so. Talked to Tara for the rest of the evening. I think I'll go to bed now.
Yet another average day in the life of me....
Getting up required too much effort. Band required more effort than usual. English was the usual naptime. Pavia was getting observed in APUSH. Fun fun. Came home. Didn't sleep, though.
About 1500, we all went over to Phoenix Perinatal. Sat and watched Sara's babe roam around inside her. Not really. It mostly just sat there. Yawned a few times. That was about it. Skipped over the genital region...she wants that part to be a "surprise". Got a set of prints plus a video. Fun fun. THEN I came home and slept.
Did some homework then sat and did nothing for most of the evening. Talked to Tara and later Joanna. Watched the end of the John Tesh thing PBS. As Tara noted, some of those native americans are bit scary... I got bored of the inane 'pledge breaks' and eventually shut it off. PBS is sometimes just not worth watching.
Joanna pointed out to me a very interesting 'feature' in some C/C++ runtime libs... With the default seed of 1, rand() is most likely to give you a number that is a multiple of 42 (MSVC++ gives 42, GNU libstdc++ 2.8.1.1 gives 84). Interesting indeed.
Amusing stuff going on on linux-kernel the past few days. Richard Gooch has surpassed his own record for the stupid flamefest he's initiated. His latest is big vs little endian (deciding which to use for Linux/ia64 (aka, Linux/merced)). Everyone seems to have joined in. And its getting funny too. Linus is of the obvious little endian camp (as a nearly life-long user of x86's). DSM (David S Miller) is of the big endian side (he's the maintainer of the various SPARC ports, all of which are big endian). I think the ultimate hilarity of the day was reached when DSM called Linus a "pinhead". He later retracted his words in a short public apology. It was funny, I say.
It is growing a bit late... I should depart. I should have departed an hour or two ago. But I got bored of thinking about departing, so I never did...until now. Now I think I will.
Mediocre day. Nothing spectacular all day (sans the suprising entry of 'Fryheart' at lunch...yes, interesting indeed). Came home and slept for a due length. Got up and did nothing. Talked to people for brief moments. Read the pieces of Gatsby that I'd missed the past days. Sat staring at things.
And I tell you these things only out of the tradition doing so, for there would be nil reason in doing it otherwise. How many people do you know who could sum up an entire day of their lives in five sentences?
Zoombowi... Yet another day of nothing... And yet another weekend comes to an end.... Oh well...
Woke up terribly early (0900), but of my own will. Wandered around looking for a place to sit down. Finally decided that the TV on the chair wasn't worth moving and made the determination that taking a shower would be a better use of my energy.
Wandered 'round yet again, but this time into the gleeful dreariness of the day's weather. Truely a beautiful day. While I was out there, I noticed a large hunk of The (now very dead) Palm had slipped out of the top and now lies on the ground near. It's large. But negligible considering the size of the tree. But this just proves to me even more that a few good pulls and a big stern push could rid us of its ugly beauty whenever it was wished.
Been working on GNOME stuff all day. Got GTK themes working quite nicely. Ended up having to recompile imlib for some reason. Aparently it hadn't gotten linked with any image libraries in last night's build. The panel wasn't too spectacular looking with no images on it at all. Though it was still functional. To do all this, I had to move all my CVS trees over to mediocris' 6gb of free space. The laptop space was wearing thin. As of this writing, I have collected over 130mb of source code alone just from the GNOME CVS server. And I think I still have a few more packages to get before I'm complete. I doubt I will ever get that bored again. This moving over to mediocris required me to get the nfsd there to work right. This required installing the one I should have been running anyway (beta40 instead of beta37).
Brock mysteriously dropped in around 1730 or so. Ranting something about needing an internet-connected terminal. Made him an account on mediocris and let him go. He sat there until nearly 2000. Aside from telling me that I need to get printing setup properly, that was uneventful. Amanda also dropped in for a few minutes.
I haven't done much of anything since. Messing with various GNOME things. Compiling a few more packages. Watching my machine get slower and slower....
It's making me tired. I think I will go to bed now.
Woopty doo... Today was quite boring. I suppose its what I asked for...kind of.
Leasurly got up around 1015. Took a shower. Sat around for an hour or two. Went to lunch with my grandparents and aunt and uncle who were here because they got bored of eating lunch in Prescott. Got home about 1320.
Set up all the speakers I have. Now have a five piece (plus) system. Sounds great. A lot of sound indeed. Then was once again out of things to do.
As the boredom continued, I decided I had nothing better to do than try to compile GNOME. I had very good luck with CVS Enlightenment last week, so I figured why not CVS GNOME? And so far, it's been quite good. There were a lot of stupid problems in the code, but they were ones that I could actually fix. And of course, it requires way too much support ditties. For some reason I was in a patient mood and didn't mind fixing the stupid problems...in fact I was starting to find it fun. Anyway, the only gnome-labelled package that is fully compiled now is gnome-libs. I'm working on gnome-core right now (for the second or third time, I should add -- but its doing it cleanly this time; had path problems before).
Had a couple nice chats with Joanna. About mocking natural bodily function and people in general. And laziness. And genius.
I'm tired... I'm going to bed right after I get gnome-core compiled...
Well, David was here typing stuff. But he apearently figured how to delete it. Then he left. Coincidentally right after Brock and Joanna left. They came over to "say hi". Then they left. I hope your timescale is now as confused as mine is. Because its time for another ride...
Today was a bit more interesting than last. Had area concert festival. Left on the busses around 0745 (after the somewhat traditional screwups by at least one member of my section -- we did have music this year, however). Played at 0900. Sight reading and clinic after that. Fun fun. We got a superior.
Got back to the school. Turned in the APUSH homework I so hurridly did at midnight. Had assembly. Went home. Talked to a few people. Went to bed.
Got woken up too early. Set up a 286 and tried reading ROM images with that. No help. Found that it would read the last 8 or 16k of the 64k ROM just fine, but anything larger was corrupt. This later turned out to be a mere coincidence. After feeling incredibly stupid, I realized that the bent pin (that IBM bent at the factory) was a ground pin and was the cause of all the troubles up to now. Grr. So now I have an accurate image. And my boot code finder works well on it. See here for an image, said code, and a very small, incomplete map of the ROM space. I'm glad it was all figured out...I just wish I didn't feel quite so stupid at the end of it all.
I've spent the remainder of the evening doing not much else. Talking to Tara. Wondering why it takes Amanda nine hours to get an oil change. Watching Nick at Night. Ponderously staring at Brock, David, and Joanna wondering around the house. Yes, the usual stuff.
I think I will go to bed now. Aparently I have to make useless chatter with relatives tomorrow. Ugh. Someone! Please help me! Save me from the mindnumbing idlous conversation! Grr... I really wanted to sleep in tomorrow too... Ahgh!
I wasn't quite in the mood to write this yesterday... I don't really remember yesterday, so this will have to do. Oh well...
Forced myself to go to school. I really didn't feel like it, yet I went anyway. Not worth it, either. Very unproductive day. All I learned was that 1) nothing happened while I was not there and 2) we weren't going to do anything today either. Came home. Took a nap. Went to Tara's house with Amanda. Brock eventually spontaneously appeared as well (a temporary union of somewhat parallel universes). The nice evening came to an end around 2315. I came home and did homework til 0130. Was in bed by 0200. I witheld the urge to write a log, for the sake of needing sleep. I think its terrible to have to know exactly when you need to get out of bed. Its probably the closest we get to knowing exactly when we'll die....
Ho hum... that nausea thing is back... gurge...
I was planning on going to school all day today. As it turned out, I should not have gone at all. Got there a bit early for four hour (I slept through the first two) because once again I forgot that my clock is nearly 22 minutes fast. I really need to fix that.
Suffered through the last two periods and was very glad to come home and sleep. I just don't seem to be getting any considerable amount better. For any amount that I am feeling better at one point, I feel even worse an hour or two later. Seems that the optimal environment for feeling better is standing outside. Imagine that. I just wonder what it is that I am allergic to (besides civilization in general).
Boring evening. Very quickly wrote some info about the 8227. Nothing new. And a very bad document. Oh well. I'll come up with something better later.
It seems tonight isn't going to get any better, so I might as well sleep. Some more. Grr...
I think I found another dead pixel on this LCD... grrr....
Create your own fantasamagical creatures. (Courtesy of Telsa Cox's diary.)
Today was quite dreadful in general. And specially, quite dreadful. Got up about 0800 and decided that I would rather die than get up and sit through school (though death would have probably been easier than the latter). Today was the first day in several years that I've missed an entire day because of illness. Oh well. Slept til noon or so. Went to the doctor a few hours later. Was told (by both the doctor and a visiting student) that I had an ear infection. Yes. Yet another ear infection. I seem to get them slightly more than semiannually. Oh well. Have to live with it, I guess. I managed to convince them that I didn't need that stupid Entex that they gave me last time. I settled for a strong Sudafed instead. (Plus Dynabec as an antibacterial.) I hate taking those medicines... its like getting drunk for a reason...
As I'd had way too much sleep, I decided after I got home to firstly switch the UPS on mediocris. It's got a working one now. And secondly, install Enlightenment on my laptop. That of course required compiling a dozen other things to make it happy. But it was worth it. I'm not using CVS Enlightenment and the AbsoluteE theme. Looks nice. Works nice too.
Brock stopped by for no apparent reason. Verified that in fact USWest RADSL is not available anywhere we care about. And that Speedchoice is being positively annoying about giving any public information on thier supposed (upcoming?) two-way microwave services. Oh well. Neither of David's lines support RADSL either (at least according to USWest's website -- I should probably call to make sure). I'm quite sure that his house is 4000ft closer to the CO than my house is (i'm 22000ft from it, he has to be within 18000ft (the RADSL max) of it -- or maybe I just don't really know where the CO is). Brock left to avoid Tara's relentless yelling for him to get over there.
I've been doing mostly nothing for the rest of the evening. Oh well... I'll probably fall asleep out of boredom here mighty soon anyway....
Grr... power just flickered and reminded me once again that the UPS that mediocris is on is faulty. It'd been up for 20 days too. How sad. Anyway...back to what I was babbling about from before...
I'm going to go with green this month. Again. Let's see how many complaints I get. Okay, so it's March. And this is volume tiene (ten) of Did you know stuff happened today while you weren't watching?. Volume Nigon: Feb 1999 is there. Have fun.
Generally an icky Monday. While I was sitting in the nice vibrating chair at 0700, I heavily contemplated staying home. I decided I should really go, however, and left. Spent most of band trying -not- to gag on the lovely fluids floating down my throat. I narrowly succeeded. Started The Great Gatsby in english. I hate modern literature. Spent the rest of the day feeling truely dreadful.
Had an optomitrist appointment after school. Somehow I always manage to be sick when I go there. Ugh. Came home and took a nap shortly thereafter. Slept as long as I could. I have managed to sit here in the dark for the past three hours doing nothing (sans a somewhat discomforting vomit experience in the lavatory [ah! Tara word!]).
Everyone else is in bed...I might as well be too. Maybe I can get to sleep before the power goes out again.... it's one of the many great things about laptops...they've got a built-in UPS...
