ragesoss

I was at a conference in Minneapolis last weekend, which was tons of fun. I showed up without anywhere to stay, and luckily some fellow Yalies (Julia Irwin and Shae Trewin; thanks!) took me in for the first two nights.

It was nice getting to just hang out with people for long periods of time; that’s something there isn’t usually much time for in grad school.

It’s also been cool staying with people in New Haven when I have late class. I’ve stayed with Julia and Steve, Lloyd Ackert and his wife and daughter, and now with another grad student in my program, Todd Olszewski. I think sleepovers should be part of the normal social order; it’s a chance to get to know people that you might see all the time in another context but never know much about casually.

The dishes are piling up in the apartment. Faith and I are betting 2 weeks of dish duty on the outcome of OU/Texas, and neither of us wants to do any dishes before then. I have the moral high ground, but Faith has Las Vegas on her side by 2 touchdowns.

Faith gave blood today for the first time (and me for the 12th, I think). She was having second thoughts about being a doctor, being surrounded by all that blood. But once the needle was out, she felt much better. The first time I gave blood, I was pale and shaking and feeling faint… and that was before they stuck me.

Tesla managed to climb from our balcony to the plant-covered (seriously, totally covered) balcony two doors down. The neighbors in between helped get her, and we found out that they have a new kitten, too. After seeing Steve and Julia’s kittens and now our neighbor’s, it looks pretty likely that we’ll get a new animal soon (probably a kitten, possibly a puppy).

On Wednesday I left for Yale around noon. 5 minutes later, I spotted a stack of computer equipment by a tree near the road, in front of someone’s house. To make a medium story short, I got 3 broken computers and a scanner/printer. But wait, it gets better.

One of the computers had graphics card (in fine condition) that is significantly better than the one in our desktop; now I have a 256MB GeForce FX 5200, which costs around $70. I think this was new in 2003, and it has a DVI out.

As for the rest of the stuff, I mixed and matched parts from these 3 computers and the broken one I already had, and it looks like I have 2 working computers to show for it: Pentium III’s (900 MHz and 1.0 GHz) with 768MB RAM each, with 33 and 40 gig HDDs. Not that I have any use for them, aside from playing with Linux.

About two weeks ago I found a sweet site, Game Trading Zone. Basically, you list the video games, movies and CD’s that you want to get rid of, as well as ones you’d like to have, and then you can arrange trades with other users. It’s a pretty good system; in addition to automatically finding matches with other traders, you can browse through what you might be able to get for your stuff, or what you might need to trade for something you want.

I completed my first trade this week, and got a nearly mint condition copy of Darklands, with both the original 5 1/4″ floppies and a CD as well as all the documentation. Incidently, I was also given an authorized reproduction of the somewhat hard to find Clue Book for that game along with another CD of it, courtesy one of the people on the Yahoo Darklands group; someone else had bought it a while ago but never followed up, so the guy sent it to me for free. So now I have three legitimate copies of Darklands, when I had been running a downloaded version for so long. But out of respect for the awesomeness of the game, I had been trying to get ahold of a legit copy for a while (mostly on eBay). All of a sudden, 3 copies for the cost of mailing a DVD (and trading a DVD I was going to give away anyway).

I’ve been outbid at the last second on eBay a large number of times. Sometimes, I got into bidding wars in the last minutes with other people, where we would each decide the item was worth a little more to us when we saw how much the other person wanted it. In fact, that’s worked to my advantage on several of the things I’ve sold on eBay; we dumped off our Harry Potter 5 audiobook set for more than we paid for it.

But more often, when I got outbid, it was someone who waited till the very last seconds, when it was too late for me to manually bid more. Most likely, it was sniping programs that did me in… programs that place a bid automatically in the last seconds of an auction. I found a quite good free sniper program, JBidWatcher, and I won my first auction with a snipe tonight while I was watching TV. For you eBay addicts, I highly recommended using the sniping method. Even if people think they put in their max bid, they often change their minds at the last second when they’re outbid; I know I do. So when you have a sniping program that bids automatically for you with 10 seconds left, you can save a lot of money from bid wars.

Lots of people I know, including Philip, have evacuated Houston. Fortunately, we live in Storrs and don’t have to worry about natural disasters, apparently. Instead, we went to the drive-in (Faith had never been to one!) and saw Just Like Heaven, which was pretty good, and The 40 Year-Old Virgin, which was mediocre.

Good luck to everyone it Rita’s path.

I watched this Katrina interview clip tonight, and it made me cry.

The new massive expansion of Google’s site index has increased my web presence even more: over 250 hits. Also, the new Google Blog Search seems quite good; much better than any of the other blog search sites out there, to most of which you have to manually submit your RSS feed. I guess having all that site index data already gives Google a big advantage.

I did a search for “Sage Ross” on the Google blogsearch, and found one very interesting result. Someone is announcing the recent birth of “Kai Sage Ross.” My brother, of course, is Kai Ross, and I used to live in Washington (state). Could there be some connection? It’s a great mystery. Could this child grow up to compete with Kai and me for name recognition? Will he (or she?) usurp our web presence by becoming far more famous?

Also, I found an incoming link from MSN search results. Incredibly, my review of Dava Sobel’s The Planets is the first result for ‘sobel planets’ and several similar queries. It beats out other reviews of The Planets on much more important sites. It’s not even in the first 100 results on Google or Yahoo. Weird. Hopefully that MSN ranking will remain until the book comes out; then I’ll get tons of hits.

Tonight I’m spending the night with my fellow historians Steve and Julia in New Haven. I normally don’t come to school on Thursday or Friday, but this week I have to both days, because of a moved class and a department luncheon. So I figured now is as good a time as any to start taking advantage of their hospitality; in the winter I might have to do it more often, and not just to save gas and driving time.

There isn’t much new to report… I’ve wanted (and had time) to write more, but haven’t had anything to say. I have been doing some more exploring in the woods in back of the apartment, and I have a new bonzai; I haven’t named it yet, but it’s another evergreen with shorter needles than Euler.

Classes are cookin’ now and I really like them. I have enough audiobooks to last the whole semester, I think. We finally have money again, too, although I think I’m still going to avoid buying the course packets for any of my classes. It’s nice that Faith is enrolled at UConn now, because I can take advantage of her library privileges. At Yale, the books I need for classes are very often either checked out or on reserve, but I can also get books from UConn, so I think I’ll be able to either check out or find online all the course packet material. We had been nearly broke for several weeks, because of the move, but last week and this week we the cash flow going again… last week we got our deposit from the old apartment, some birthday money, and over $300 from selling books online, just in the nick of time before we missed our rent payment.

I’m happy to report that Dogpile now lists a total of 51 hits for “ragesoss” on the major search engines, up from less than 10 in the not-too-distant past.

As for the desktop woes, they do indeed continue, but things are mostly OK. Apparently it’s a hardware defect in my processor (the northbridge, to be specific) that is causing my remaining memory errors. But I got some really great advice for free (and pretty quickly) from the Open Tech Support forums. Definitely a site worth checking out when you run into computer problems.

Meanwhile, I did yet another reinstallation of Linux, this time Ubuntu. Definitely the easiest install I’ve had yet, and there are some features that make actually using it quite a bit better than than basic Debian (upon which Ubuntu is based), particularly a graphical installer program that lets you select software to install from a menu. Unfortunately, the networking that worked instantly before won’t work with this installation, despite some monkeying with settings. Overall, Linux definitely has a long way to go in terms of user friendliness before it becomes an acceptable Windows replacement, but from what I can tell it’s closing the gap pretty fast.

I also found out from an IT employee that Yale has a general policy of not revealing the identities of students when copyright enforcers track file-sharing to Yale IPs. They give you a warning, but they don’t stop you from doing it again (and good luck if anyone tries to go up against Yale’s lawyers). And when you log into the Yale Virtual Private Network (which allows access to online journal subscriptions and other secured content) all your internet traffic goes through Yale first. So by using the VPN, a file-sharer can essentially become anonymous. Hypothetically.