Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

Semester coming to a close

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.


Order Here

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.


Screen here

Well, my new 20" Cinema display arrived. As you can see from the image, it is much bigger than my 15" powerbook screen. The first part of my new computer is here. Getting this picture lead to some fun. It turns out, the batteries in my camera were dead, so I had to try to charge them. I tried my keyboard’s in the mean time (wireless), and they didn’t work. I was starting to wonder if the camera was broken. I found some batteries, and they worked fine, so I guess I will have to replace the batteries in the keyboard sometime soon. Not too bad considering that I have not changed them for 15 months.

New_Screen_Behind_Powerbook.jpg
New_Screen_Behind_Powerbook.jpg


Busy, Busy, Busy

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.


End of another day

Well, it is the end of another day. I am sitting here listening to cmradio after having just finished the homework for CPSC 629. It is a great time to relax and talk with friends on IM. Last night was a great time at Breakaway. We had a record number of people on the stream. That is the most important because that is the part that I run. Anyway, it was lots of fun to set up three cameras again. We just need to get the static cam in a better position or more zoom. We will figure it out eventually. The evening was topped off by seeing Jason fall over the chairs for the second time that night.