The Daily Diversion Archive For January, 2004

Friday January 9, 2004

August update: He's smiling and laughing now. Boy is that fun. It seems that overnight he became capable of doing things other than crying and looking around. He's pretty happy when he doesn't have the knives of gas. He really likes his mobile over his crib and, naturally, he only has eyes for Mommy. That's to be expected, though. I'm a pale substitute for Mommy. Mommy's got it all. I got a scratchy beard. It's no contest, really.

I've been trying to put FreeBSD on a laptop for work. We're trying to rig a wireless network detector on the cheap. I think it might not be in the cards to use my favorite OS. I just can't seem to get X to work correctly. Golly, that's a big surprise, eh? If I had one thing to say to the Unix/Linux faithful out there it would be this: If you want the desktop, either make X a thing of the past or make it's config absolutely invisible. It's just that simple. I have thrown away literally hours trying to get X and the desktop working on various machines. To date, the only success I had was a long time ago with Red Hat 7. Even then, the refresh rate was a headache-inducing 60Hz. Not good.

I woke up today with an ingrown toenail. Fun. It woke me up this morning about an hour before my alarm was set to go off. It hurts like the dickens, but it's a good excuse to wear sandals to work. Yes, I'm wearing socks. Yes, I know that's a fashion faus pas. Sue me. It's comfy and it's the only way I could figure out how to get to work today. My toe is way too sore to go into my regular shoes and since I really don't want to display my nice, red toe to the world at large, some socks were just the ticket.

Wednesday January 21, 2003

So I decided to start the new year off with a new operating system on my laptop. Out goes my buddy Win2k and in comes XP. Overall, there's not much of a change. It seems the processor fan runs a bit more when the laptop's plugged in, some of the Function+F keys started doing the special stuff they were supposed to (except the screen brightness key, drat the luck...) and Outlook XP seems to run a lot more slowly. I'm going to have to see if there are processing running in the background that I don't want. The language bar comes to mind as a pretty effective process-waster.

The only hiccup so far is that XP didn't have drivers for my wireless ethernet adapter. It's an older D-Link DWL-650. I downloaded the drivers from their site and it works pretty well. It will sometimes lose my network coming out of either of the two sleep modes, but it seems to be working better most of the time. That's cool.

I still have a bunch of stuff I'd like to install, but I think I'm just going to stand pat for a while. I may disable all the eyecandy in XP as my laptop is only a PIII 650MHz with an 8Mb AGP video card. All that pan and scan and swoosh stuff is a pretty tall order for my humble lightweight.

In case you were wondering, it's a Toshiba Portege 7220CTe.

Tuesday January 27, 2004

We're entering organized crime week on tivo. We've captured a bunch of organized crime shows off The History Channel. We only got through one last night due to a very cranky Gus, but it was a good show. It was about the Russian mob. Nice. I'll pass.

I've shoveled snow for the last three days and I'm getting mighty sick of it. This last snowstorm was a fun one. It snowed gently for the better part of three days. Total accumulation at our house was about 6-7". Not a whole lot, but a real pain when you're shoveling 3" of it at a time. I know. Gripe, gripe, gripe.

The snow on the streets had that slippery, greasy consistancy that makes auto body shops rich. On the side streets all I had to do to make the back end of my car step out was to lift my foot off the accellerator. In snow like this, the Grand Marquis is better because you know it's going to be point and shoot. Front wheel drive is tricky in snow like this because once you get the tires spinning, you lose directional control. The Maxima isn't as good as one would think on the snow because of this. It's a medium sized car with a lot of power and wide tires. The result of this is that the tires tend to float over the snow rather than dig into it.

A last note for the day. There's a new email virus going around. People, please, please, PLEASE don't open email attachments unless you know what's there. PLEASE! I've been spoofed by this latest one as have a couple of people here at work. What that means is that someone who has my email address in their contacts list has opened an infected email and the virus program chose my email address at random to use as the FROM: field on it's virus propogating emails. Thanks, asshole.

As a bit of whimsey, the virus also is doing a DDOS attack on SCO. I'm not going to say it's a good thing that they chose to do this, but I can see the reasons why someone would want to DDOS SCO.