ragesoss

School started on Wednesday, and it looks like it will be an enjoyable year… even though it’s hard to say what the final composition of my classes will be people-wise, the ones I’ve been to and the people I’ve met so far seem great.

Unfortunately, I think I might not get into the class I was most looking forward to (Narrative, and Other, Histories) because I forgot to email the professor as soon as I was supposed to, to confirm my interest in it. I thought I had until Saturday, but my memory is kind of hazy on that, and someone today told me they already got an email saying they didn’t make the cut. I still haven’t gotten an email back about it.
[Edit]: I’m in the class… Yahoo’s spam filter decided I didn’t really need that message.

And of course, I’m still fairly depressed about the Horned Frogs debacle, but my second favorite team, Florida State, helped ease the pain a little bit with the long-overdue win over Miami. Any game where Miami gets sacked 9 times is good in my book.

We went to the Congregational church at the corner of the UConn campus on Sunday… won’t be going back. There were maybe 6 college-age people there, and the sermon was one of the most generic I’ve heard in a long time.

Meanwhile, the cats are doing well, and our new neighbors are some really nice UConn undergrads.

I may have solved the computer problems, finally. I took it down to one stick of RAM, and there were no problems, then added another and another, and still no problems. Even now with all the RAM back, I haven’t had any random memory access violations that close my programs. I think maybe having the smaller modules in the first slots was part of the problem, or maybe the removing and adding just cleaned some dust out of the contacts or somethings.

Even more good news, I found that one of the old hard drives actually does still work. So I did my first ever installation of Linux, which earned me lots of Computer skill points. First I tried doing the minimal installation of Debian, where you use a CD just big enough to set up network protocols so the rest can be downloaded. But the downloads were taking forever and occasionally having timeout issues, and the Gentoo CD was downloading at over 300 kB/s (and they have a slicker website), so I abandoned that and started over with Gentoo. As it turns out, Gentoo is for the slightly more advanced techie, and I just wasn’t up to the task. So I got the regular Debian CD, and finally managed to get all the way to having a GNOME desktop. As a surprise bonus, I was able to access the shared folder on my laptop through the Linux desktop, perhaps because I named the domain for that computer the same as the Windows workgroup (the the laptop happens to have the FAT file system). Of course, to switch between Linux and Windows I have to physically switch hard drives, and I couldn’t even figure out how to do something as simple as install Firefox in Linux, but all in good time.

I also installed the TI software and put the newest OS on my TI-89. I think my flash had become corrupted before, but now everything is in working order. As I was going through the programs to find the a periodic table, which I always like to keep handy on my calculator, even though I never really use it anymore, I found that there were a whole lot of different ones that had been released since the last time I was downloading calculator programs. So I gave most of the new ones a try in turn, but they were all downright awful compared to the one program I used to use, this one. So I installed it and was taking a look at the readme file, which indicated that the programmer was (at least as of the last update 5 years ago) still interested in adding to it, should the need arise. I sent him an email about how much I’ve enjoyed the program and suggested that he add elements 110 and 111, which have acquired permanent names and two-letter abbreviations since he wrote the program. And general physical information about the elements is much more available than it was then, so I pointed him to a website with some extra info that might be nice to have in his periodic table. It would be really awesome if he actually responds and updates that program, otherwise people will keep making crappy ones and no one new will discover his program.

Also, a few days ago I added a Flickr badge to the ragesoss and ragesossgeneral pages. Quite nice.

I thought I had all my computer problems solved, but on the new desktop, programs kept random crashing. iTunes and Firefox both would just shut down and bring up the error report dialogue at random moments. I think maybe the network problems I was having (before I upgraded the firmware on the router) may have corrupted some of the XP updates when I re-installed everything. So I formatted it again. We’ll see how this goes. For some reason I can’t get any of the 3 floppy drives I have to work. And I haven’t had any weird crashes yet, but each time I try to download Acrobat Reader, it says there is a checksum error and the download is corrupted.

Other than that, I should be pretty much up to speed by morning, and I have it all networked and print-shared and good to go.

I’ve had this new Acer laptop for about a week now, and I’m quite happy with it. I’ve streamlined the startup programs and eliminated as many extraneous features as possible, and now it starts up fully in about 20 seconds and shuts down in about 8 seconds… pretty good for a low-end laptop (at least compared to most of the computers I’ve owned in the past). Some of the software I found on this guide to freeware, particularly this startup program and this optimization program helped enormously.

Even better, our new desktop is formatting as I type. Faith’s dad sent us his second-best computer, but when it arrived a few days ago it wouldn’t start. I opened it up and monkeyed around with the connections, screwed in a free-flying video card and hard drive, disconnected and reconnected everything I could see, skimmed the motherboard manual, and checked out computer building tutorial. After all that, it still wouldn’t start. But today we went back for nearly the last load of stuff from the old apartment, including the broken computer (which I fortunately convinced Faith not to throw away). One switched out power supply and the addition of the RAM from the dead computer (and a fan, too), and our 160 GB storing, DVD burning, 1 Gig of RAM having, free computer is up and running.

As an added bonus, on the way back from the Super Walmart (the first one we’ve seen in CT, and it’s relatively close: sweet!) we stopped by a delightful Salvation Army store where, in addition to a stunning pearl-snap shirt, I got an IBM Model M keyboard (1391401). I had just read briefly about how some people like the old heavy-duty clicky keyboards, so I thought at $3.50 it was worth a shot. It totally was, and now that the desktop is running, I’ve verified that in addition to sounding great and feeling great, it works. And it’s only three years younger than me.

With all the free time before classes start, I’ve discovered a few other things on the web that I’ve gotten something out of. First del.icio.us, which led me to the above freeware site from its “popular” page. Second Flickr, which would have been much more helpful before the first computer crash that cost us all our digital photos. And finally, Amazon’s A9 search engine, which is roughly equivalent to a combination of Google, Google Search History, and a blog search engine… the real upside is that you get a 1.57% (pi/2) discount at Amazon if you use it regularly for a while, and it automatically uses your Amazon info so there’s no registration involved. I’m just using it a little each day (not actually switching to it as my default search page), but it uses Google results and has some other decent features without being too ad-heavy, so it’s seems worth it for the discount. The only real downside is that it’s fairly slow.

And with all this practice on half-broken hardware and new and interesting software, I’ve totally leveled-up my Computers skill.

We’re mostly moved in to the new apartment now… the TV and the speakers and hooked up, and most of my books are back on the bookshelves. We even moved the piano into the apartment by ourselves; I just backed the truck right up our grassy hill to the front door and sent the ramp into the living room.

We had to move the cats in a dog cage that had presumably been used by dogs (my friend Lloyd found it in his basement and gave it to us), and they were hissing and meowing for the entirety of the trip. When we arrived, I let them out for a bit, and they seemed OK… they went exploring the new apartment. But I had to put them back into the cage for about 20 minutes until we had the litter box set up, and they really resented that, especially Curie. She found this spot in a dark closet and didn’t leave voluntarily for about 24 hours. But now both of them are back to normal.

Even though this apartment is a little smaller, it is laid out much better and seems bigger. And, we have a garage of basically equal size to the apartment, plus a huge balcony. And there is a Super Walmart nearby, unlike New Haven, where all the nearby Walmarts closed at like 9 and had no food.

Here is Tesla just before the move, hopped up on catnip.

Reading: nothing

Watching: 24 Season 4, Kung Fu Hustle, Sin City

Listening: Weakerthans, Cake, 3 Doors Down

Well, the repaired computer didn’t last very long. Last night it froze, and hasn’t been able to get past the bios screen since. And since Faith had to return her laptop to the Physics Department today, we moved our computer buying schedule forward a bit… I have a new laptop.

I think the main problem with the other computer was the video card, which crashed increasingly often before the big death yesterday (though the computer would still run with software rendering). I’m going to try eventually to use what’s left and buy cheap parts to build a Linux computer.

We’ve started packing, and we checked out our new apartment today. It’s not the tree-shaded one we hoped, but it looks pretty good… they were working on it, so we didn’t go in. The drive seemed shorter now that I’ve done it a few times and don’t have to think about it as much. Meanwhile, we’ve been entertaining ourselves with the first 4 episodes of 24, season 4. Unfortunately, no more have downloaded so far.

We just finished watching Flatliners (for free on-demand), which I don’t think I had ever seen all the way through. It’s a somewhat better and much creepier movie than I thought it was. It’s not deep, but it pretends to be hard enough to make it scary and engrossing.

I’m not looking forward to changing all my registration information for the move.

Reading: The Planets, The Man Who Flattened the Earth

Watching: The Transporter, 24 Season 4, Flatliners

Listening: The Weakerthans

I’ve now added Google AdSense ads just to this page. I don’t expect to make any money from them, I just wanted to find out what they were like to use, and how the system works. They say they’ll get back to you about an application in 1-2 days, but I received my approval within a few hours. Apparently some bloggers make quite a bit of money from this kind of thing. I also hope that Google will finally index this site now that it has their ads, which are supposed to be context specific (although I only have blog ads so far).

The two different IPs from Mountain View, California looked at this site (presumably Google)… one visited for 0 seconds (possibly a bot), and another visited for 11 seconds. They took one look and loved it, apparently. Also interesting and mildly surprising, they were both using Internet Explorer.

Today was my last day working at Manuscripts and Archives (and yesterday was my last day sorting through the William Bullitt papers). It was definitely a good summer job for me… $10/hour, low stress, I got much more acquainted with how a world-class library operates, I got to see some interesting source materials (for example, gruesome photos from the Kent State shootings, and a hand-written draft of a congratulatory letter from American diplomat William Bullitt to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek right after the surrender of Japan in WWII), and I built a little bit of muscle hauling all those boxes. Plus, it never hurts for an historian to get in good with the archivists.

They threw me a miniature going-away party at Ashley’s Ice Cream… It was really nice getting all the compliments and appreciative remarks, and even though I’m glad I don’t have to work any more, it was a pleasant environment as far as work goes. Plus, my co-worker Michael offered to help with the move as I was leaving today, which I plan to take him up on.

Now it’s time to start packing for the move to Storrs. Faith is done with her organic chemistry class now, too, so we’ll have pretty much all week.