The Daily Diversion Archive For February, 2003

Saturday February 1, 2003

Disaster has struck our space program yet again. At about 9 AM this morning, Space Shuttle Columbia, the oldest shuttle in the fleet and the first one to fly, broke up on re-entry over Texas. There were no survivors.

This is so terribly sad.

I found out about this when we went out for breakfast. Needless to say this wasn't a very enjoyable meal.

My heart goes out to the families and friends of the Columbia's crew. I'm also terribly sorry for the ground crews, mission control staff and everyone else involved with putting the most complex machine ever created by man into orbit around the earth. As the man said: "We'll find out what happened, we'll fix it, and we'll move on."

For the time being, we'll mourn our loss.

Please remember that nothing worth doing is without risk. This includes the Space Program. Please do not turn your back and your support from the Space Program.

Wednesday February 5, 2002

Yugoslavia is no longer a country.

Good.

So, if you're looking to put an ATI Radeon 7000 card in a computer with an ABIT VP6 motherboard, think again. ABIT, long one of my favorite brands of motherboard, has seen fit to put one of those wire and donut thingies on this motherboard directly in between the AGP slot and the edge of the motherboard. This particular video card has an S-Video out jack nearly at motherboard level which got in the way of the donut thingy.

Not a good design.

Wednesday February 12, 2003

The big highlight of the last week is that we went on a mini-vacation to South Dakota. Yes, South Dakota.

The place we went was a friend's parents' cabin in the Northwest corner of the state. It was a goodly drive and when we got there, we found a 5-bedroom house that was deluxe in every way. Very nice. The ride out was nice until the blowing snow started drifting over the highways out in the very western part of Minnesota. It got worse once we crossed the border. Although the roads had been plowed, they were still very slippery. And it was very cold.

We unpacked, and sat around. Everyone who was along was responsible for a meal and our friends and my wife really out-did their selves. I've never been to a party with SO MUCH good food. There was also good beer courtesy of a keg we transported out there.

We'd all taken Friday off of work to get out there during the day and that was cool. On the one time I did go out for a spin to go look for someone else who was coming up later, we got stuck. This is the first time in a long while I've gotten stuck in the snow. Fortunately, we were only about 100 yards from the cabin and the temperatures had gone up rapidly during the evening. I'd bet it was close to 30F when we got stuck. Thanks to a bunch of people helping out, the car was unstuck and we proceeded back in to chill out and warm up.

On Saturday, the guys there went out shooting. I'd brought my .22s and there were a few guns at the cabin already. We ended up laying waste to about a dozen cans with something close to 1,000 rounds. That was big fun. I also now remember why I don't shoot a 12 gauge shotgun very often. They kick like a motherfucker. Here's Tim shooting off a 12 gauge double-barrel one barrel at a time:

BOOM

Ugh. Fuck.

BOOM

Uuugh. Fuckinhell. That's it for me, fellas.

It's not that I'm a wimp, it's just that due to the amount of clothes we had on it was impossible to get the stock of the gun up against my shoulder tight enough to keep it from getting a running start at my shoulder. Each time I pulled the trigger, it felt like someone was kicking me in the shoulder. Since my shoulders aren't exactly robust, it was rather a shock and rather painful. I stuck to the .22s.

Neither .22 did especially well. The old .22 pump my dad had me fix up before he died fired well and felt pretty good to shoot. The problem was that about once per magazine-load of rounds it wouldn't fire. I'd have to shuck the unused cartridge out and then figure out what to do with it. That got to be a pain. I put it away for a while, but brought it back out when my semi-automatic was too dirty to fire right. I guess we never did clean it the last time we used it. That would have been about 15 years ago. When we were done, I took the thing apart to clean it. It had TONS of junk in it. I removed as much as was possible without a wire brush and then had the devil's own time getting it back together. I FINALLY, after working on it for a good three hours, got it back together correctly. We didn't take it out after that, but it's good to know that I can now get it back together correctly and that it's cleaner than when we started with it.

The rest of the weekend was spent drinking beer, reading, listening to tunes and diddling on my laptop with a project that I only take out when there's nothing else to do. I made good headway on it and I had a blast the rest of the time we spent there.

Many thanks to Steph and Barry. You guys rock.

The way home was just as fun as the way out due to our company in the car. Jenifer and Jake are a ton of fun to talk with. It made the somewhat less than exiting trip back home extremely pleasant.

This week has been very busy at work. We're back in the MOVE EVERYTHING mode again. I've spent most of this week so far moving PCs and re-routing phones. It's not my favorite thing to do.

So are we gonna war it up with Iraq or what? Start this damn thing so we can get on with our lives. I'm tired of this build-up crap. I'm tired of the UNSC, the UN, NATO and all that other junk. If they don't want to play with us, fine. We'll just do it alone. If they want in after the shooting stops, that's just tough shit.

I personally think that Germany and France have something to hide. I've read tons of stuff out on the internerd about this and I'm starting to wonder why Germany and France would alienate the US like this over what seems to be just the "Principal" of peace. This is especially odd given that France is already involved in a shooting conflict in Ivory Coast. Nice double-standard, France.

It chills the spine to think of what it could be they're trying to hide if they indeed are trying to keep the US from finding out something. Once the shooting stops, the cat will be well and truly out of the bag and I guess we'll see. For these two countries to even go as far as proposing that they put their own troops on the ground in Iraq with the UN instead of us taking care of the business when we're already there seems to be a very suspicious contrivance. Why? It almost seems as if they desperately want us to not find out about something.

It's gonna be big if this is the reason they've torpedoed their current relation with the US. Their opposition to our kicking Iraq's ass around a bit has pretty much rendered the UNSC useless. We'd like their approval, but it's pretty clear that even if there's a vote, France and perhaps Russia will use their veto. Russia has big interests in Iraq and they stand to lose a ton of Rubles if Saddam's government is tossed. France has no such justification.

France and Germany have also pretty near destroyed NATO as a reliable defense force. That Turkey is a member and that they've asked NATO for help in defending themselves once a shooting war starts was an honest reaction to what they perceive is a grave threat to their nation. That NATO pooh-poohed them may very well give pause to the current members and the aspiring members about trusting NATO to be there when they need them.

All this over what, I wonder?

I guess we'll find out. I hope it's soon.

Friday February 14, 2003

Happy Anniversary, Sarah!

It's been six of the best years of my life.

I love you.

Saddam Hussein is funny.

He's recently issued a proclamation that weapons of mass destruction (WMD) are now illegal in Iraq. That's just about the funniest thing I've heard all week.

Here's a guy who I wouldn't trust to say the sun was shining on a bright, sunny day saying that WMDs, things he's devoted tons of money and research on, are now illegal in Iraq. Like that's going to change everything. This is sort of a wink and nod thing that nobody, but nobody will take seriously.

I know he was being pressured by the UNSC to do exactly this, but I don't think they considered the source and the humor that would result.

Some news agencies are starting to say that there are Special Forces troops on the ground inside Iraq--and not just in the Kurdish controlled north. We definitely have a war on our hands. It's just a matter of when we say we're really at war. I figure that after the weapons inspectors meeting at the UN today, we'll get a response from our government and that may very well be the green light.

My wife got her new Mac yesterday. It's the new, aluminum 12" G4 laptop. It's cool. I didn't get a whole lot of chances to play with it, but I did verify that it has shell access, terminal services for Windows server works on it and that the whole OS X desktop is far cooler than anything before it. All that sliding and scrolling makes for a desktop that seems almost alive. I'd bet it's hugely processor intensive, but with an NVidia GForce4 chipset, it should do these things without too much struggle.

The setup went without a hitch. This is good.

Wednesday February 19, 2003

Tom's Hardware has a cool article on benchmarking processors from the Pentium 100 to the Pentium 4 3GHz. I guess if anything, this gives a graphic representation of just how fast computers really are these days. That'd be stinkin' fast, by the way.

I've been somewhat surprised lately at how cheap PIII processors have been getting. I just picked up a PIII800 on ebay for $74.00. It's for work, and that's a TON of bang for the buck. If a person wanted to put together a no-frills Socket 370 PC, it could probably be scrounged up for less than $400.00 if one was willing to use ebay and recycle some parts.

All this processor talk comes from what I'm doing at work. I'm decommissioning an old 486/2 75MHz laptop. It's funny because it does run and runs pretty quickly on Windows 95. This is a relative thing, of course. It runs about the same way XP runs on an 233MMX processor. It gets the job done, but it's a bit choppy about how the mouse works and how fast the system responds.

Just for giggles, I hit the ebay thing again for a relative price on something like this. I have bad news for all of you folks out there who are thinking they can turn their old 486 laptop in to some cash: Unless you charge a boatload for shipping and "handling," yer gettin' nothin'. There are some listings, but even for $20.00, no-one's biting.

That makes sense, really. Pentium Classic laptops are going for about a hundred or so and most of those have a decent sized screen. There's really no reason to have a 486 laptop anymore unless you absolutely need a computer that you don't care if it gets destroyed. Then, fine.

Oh, yeah. These things can do stuff still. We still have one of these laptops operating a bar-code printer. My buddy has one operating his lathe, and in theory, you should be able to use one of these machines for a firewall on a DSL link. Given a pair of 10Mb network cards, Linux or whatever and a 486, you should be able to saturate a DSL link. Perhaps. I've heard a lot of people doing it, but I myself haven't seen it.

Sunday February 23, 2003

The first try at installing FreeBSD 5.0 on my dual Pentium Pro server downstairs was a bust. All went fairly well until it came time to configure X. I was fiddling with the mouse settings when the computer crashed hard and kept rebooting. Not good. Since I was doing a couple of other things at the same time, I didn't debug or anything. I just turned it off. This is not surprising. I thing I tried 5 times the first time I tried to install Linux and I think the first BSD install I did took 3 times just to get it right. Take two will be some time this week.

Friday February 28, 2003

I've been looking on ebay for another laptop. Do I not have enough? No. Well, yes. But....

I've wanted to have a dedicated mp3 player for the good stereo in the living room. Yes, I know mp3s aren't really audiophile quality. The problem is that I have tons of old vinyl that I'm not listening to that I might be if I had the time. The idea is to put a select few of these gems on mp3, ditch the whole collection, free up a ton of space and then be able to listen to my old record collection with a few clicks of the mouse.

Where does the new laptop come in? Well, I've come to find that my old one, when it's plugged in makes a ton of noise. It has an on-board power brick. This makes it handy for taking places as all you have to do is bring the little power cord thing that plugs into the wall and the back of the laptop. The problem is that power supplies create a lot of heat when they're supplying power. When this device is inside the cramped confines of a laptop with a heat generating processor it becomes necessary to run a fan the whole time the thing is plugged in. Fans make noise. This particular fan makes a ton of noise. I could replace the fan, but these little fans are mighty pricey.

I have had this particular laptop hooked up to the stereo and although it sounds OK, I have to run Winamp 2.0 so it won't skip. The new versions of Winamp, WMP and Music Match all cause it to skip due to their processor requirements.

Since I want to run something other than Winamp 2.0 and I want a more quiet box, I've decided to start casually looking for a Pentium II class laptop. I don't want to spend a ton of cash, and I'm thinking of selling off the old laptop and all of its accessories to fund the new one.

Yes, its excessive, but I'm not really using the old guy anymore. The last time I used it was to ghost the old HDD on my new laptop so that I could put the image on the new HDD. I've used it a couple of times to serve tunes to the stereo, but I didn't use it for long.

Finally, I would like a device that serves my vast collection of mp3 files to my stereo, but devices like the Turtle Beach Audio Tron Digital Music Player are in the $300.00 range. I'm thinking for a little over half that I can get a decent PII laptop off ebay.

So there it is: What I want, why I want it and how much it will cost. Please note that I most certainly do not NEED this, it would just be kinda cool.