Thoughts and Ramblings

Good grief… Has it really been two months since I wrote in here? Wow, I guess that means I should be paying more attention to the thing.

My G5 has been behaving well. I have to watch myself on it so that I don’t spend all my time playing games. I have already beaten Halo, but that game is just too much fun to play. Strange that it can play so well only having 512MB of Ram. I still need to go order more. The laptop has actually become a portable computer now. It is nice to use it as such.

Wow, has it really been that long since I made a post here? Nearly a month. Well, the G5 has preformed well over the past several weeks. I have been making good use of it on many occasions. I have drug it to Breakaway twice so far, and each time I have had to open it up to show the guts to people there. It is fun. I had predicted 2 weeks for the iPod, well, it is still not here. In calling about the status, I am told that it will be one week from now. As a result of them being so slow, I am going to get a $50 item free from the Apple Store. I decided on Halo. It is a fun game, and I have a computer that can handle it. I figured why not. I would not buy it on my own, but I didn’t see anything else there that I really wanted.

Well, the entire order is finally here. The problem: the iPod has failed. I took it out, downloaded music to it, and let it charge until it said it was done. Then I took the thing jogging. After playing one song, the thing froze, so, I reset it. Play another song, freeze, reset. After about 5 resets, it only started showing a folder icon with an exclamation point on it. I took that to mean that it was a broken file system. I tried doing a reset on the thing, only to notice that I can hear things rattling around inside. I think the HD arm is broken. Going through the return procedure on the web site was no help because it said that the serial number is invalid. I had to wait the next day to call them to let me try to return the thing. What a pain. I predict at least 2 weeks before I get one back.

Well, yesterday I had my first presentation to my advisor and his other students. It was strange because I was not presenting research, but instead a tool that I had to use on the way. I got to talk about VMWare, which is basically a virtual machine. To my surprise, the others there thought that it might be useful tool for their research. Then afterward, I was talking with one of the students about how the network filtering works in the 2.4 linux kernels, and she suggested that I should present on that some time too, since most of them end up modifying the linux kernel to do their work.