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badm0j0, delitescence, dementia, draugr, foxbaby, jddreamjournal, jenndolari, missyanthrope, pandorah, ree779, rivetspoon, scotters83, shifter_, shinnokxz
Well, it’s been a semi-long and semi-interesting week as far as stuff I’ve been working on technology-wise. If you’re not interested in that kind of thing, I’d advise you skip this post. :-)
Anyway, I got my Powerbook back on Wednesday evening. I was hoping that they didn’t wipe the hard drive and just replaced a couple of fans, because while most of the stuff on there was disposable, I had forgotten to save this one program I bought called Slick Vol. 3 & 4. The Slick volumes are add-ons to iMovie; in particular I use Matte-tastic in volume 4 for watermarking videos for MK Online. I was handed the Powerbook back, and looked at the paperwork. Unfortunately, the one part they did replace was the hard drive. *sigh* So, while I was there, I figured “to hell with it” and also bought a copy of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). I took the machine home, and was pleasantly surprised to see that they had put the factory default install of Mac OS X 10.2 on. So, the first thing I did was install Mac OS X 10.4. I ended up spending the next few days installing all of the software I use regularly on the Powerbook, including iLife 05, MS Remote Desktop Connection, rdesktop, fink, Fire, Xcode, ImageMagick (through fink), minicom (also through fink), and Slick. (The people at GeeThree were nice enough to send me a link so I could redownload the software.) After a lot of reconfiguring and setting up, I was ready for anything.
… or so I thought. It ended up Friday that I should have reinstalled Virtual PC and put a Windows XP guest OS on it. I had to make a day trip out to Corpus Christi to troubleshoot a printer and a phone issue out at our location there. Unfortunately, the phone switch had reset itself to factory defaults… and while it was on our network, one of the settings lost was the default gateway. So, only computers on the local network could reach the switch, and I had the only actual computer at the location. To make matters worse, the software to reconfigure the switch is Windows-only. Our phone system vendor’s going to have to send someone out Monday because we weren’t able to get into the switch. In the meantime, I spent last night reinstalling Virtual PC on the Powerbook, and will install Windows XP with the phone switch management software Monday. I am NOT going to get caught unprepared like that again.
Tonight had me doing some hardware changes in the network that ended up being for the better. We had a Brother HL-645 laser printer that had served us faithfully since 1993. However, it’s gotten to the point where it needed a new drum, and that would have cost something like $150. So, we went to Office Depot, and found they were out of the drums anyway. Instead, Dad picked up a new Brother laser printer that ended up costing less than the drum for the old printer. In addition, I picked up a D-Link print server with two parallel ports and one USB port. Up until now I had the laser printer hooked up to Tyrande (my main server) and served it out to the client machines via Samba. Frankly, that was a pain in the ass, and I wanted to do something different.
Anyway, when we got home, Dad and I spent about thirty minutes or so getting everything hooked up and configured. Dad had two inkjet printers hooked up to his laptop, so we removed those and moved them over to the shelving next to the servers. So, now there’s a decent laser printer, a cheap inkjet printer, and a decent photo printer hooked up to the print server. I’ve already reconfigured both my PC and Dad’s laptop to use the new printers, so all is good. (Mom has her own just-about-as-cheap inkjet printer, and she didn’t want to go ahead and get the network printers installed on her laptop.) So far, I guess I can say I’m happy with the new print server.
Anyway, that’s about it on the tech front… heh. Now I’m just going to go downstairs and have myself a beer…
I used “D’Arque Bishop” as the basis for this one… heh.
My japanese name is 石丸 Ishimaru (round stone) 雄大 Masahiro (big hero).
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Well, it’s official. David Tennant has been revealed in costume as the Tenth Doctor. Now, I only have this to say…
Is it me, or is ACJ the Tenth Doctor?
… you have to admit their dress styles are similar. ;-)
Hey Scott… something you might want to throw at the friend of yours who’s getting married:
*wicked grin*
(Then again, he’s the best man and is arranging the bachelor party. This oughta be amusing later down the road… :-) )
What if World War II had been an online real-time strategy game…?
http://www.strategypage.com/humor/articles/military_jokes_20057151.asp
:-)
Bleh. I would really like to have Nova back by now. I just checked the Apple website to see what the status of its repair was, and the status is the exact same as it was a week ago: “Hold – Awaiting Part”. I might be tempted to step into the Apple Store tomorrow and see if they have any more information than that. I’m getting to the point right now where I’m beginning to get a bit impatient. Samus is working great for me right now, don’t get me wrong… the problem is that I still have Louie’s iMovie project that needs to be burned to a new DVD, and I don’t have a video editing program on Samus at all, much less one that would support iMovie files. Furthermore, I don’t even have a DVD burner, and I have 6 GB of files I transferred off a server that needs to be burned to DVD. I have a DVD burner on my home PC, true… it’s just that life would be a lot easier if I had a DVD burner on my actual laptop. Oh, well… like I said, I’ll contact Apple in the next day or two to find out what the holdup is.
Yesterday was quite a bit of fun… when I finally got home, I decided to spend the evening in the kitchen so as to keep Chase calmed down. I set up Samus in the kitchen, got logged into the wireless network, and was good to go… or so I thought until I checked my email. Turned out there was a new GameSpot video concerning MK Shaolin Monks posted, and I needed to do a news story on it. So, I needed to find a way to take screenshots of videos, seeing as normally video players use an overlay on the screen which prevent normal screenshots from working. Fortunately, I had installed mplayer on Samus, and I was able to find out in its FAQ how to make it run with no overlay. So, I ran it, paused it at the requisite places… and then used the Gimp to acquire a screenshot of the window, crop out the non-video parts, and export it to PNG. In a way, it actually turned out easier than my procedure in Windows does (which is virtually the same, except that I use VLC). So, all’s good there for now…
I’m also waiting on my new monitor to arrive.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16824163129
It should take up less room, consume less power, and put out less heat than my current CRT. The only downside is that I very likely will have to get a longer DVI cable for it so that it will reach my PC, which is a bit of a reach from the monitor. As soon as I have it up, I’ll take a pic. :-)
Anyway, time for me to check back on this other laptop I’m working on (in between coming to and from this post). Fun fun…
Well, another weekend has come and gone, and Friday night and Sunday were more or less uneventful. Saturday, on the other hand, was eventful enough for an entire weekend, more or less.
One of my coworkers has a semi-annual Texas hold em tournament he holds at his house. Well, yesterday was the fourth such tournament, and I was obliged to attend as I’m one of the regulars of the somewhat-biweekly poker game. This time, though, I brought Worff (who some of you might remember from EFNet #Vampire) along with me. After a lunch at Hooters (which was right by his apartment) and getting beer from Kroger’s, we made our way to the tournament. There were 25 people there, and we each put $100 in; all in all, $2500 in prize money, to be divided up as follows: 50% to first place, 25% to second place, 15% to third place, and 10% to fourth place. The tournament started at 3:30 PM. It was a long and hard fight, but in the end… I was knocked out at around 8:30 PM or so in fourth place. Worff ended up winning third place. I’m actually kinda happy… I did better than any of the regular poker game attendees, and I also outlasted all of the T3 employees. I’ll probably hear all about it when I get to work in the morning. After the game, Worff and I headed back up to the north side of town; we stopped in IHOP for dinner, and then I dropped him back at his apartment.
Today’s been more or less uneventful, other than doing a little MK Online related work in preparation for tomorrow’s downtime. (We have some changes to the moderation system that need to be implemented.) I also played some Counter-Strike: Source for the first time against bots. I’ll do some more practice before I bother playing online. I also spent some time downstairs in the kitchen so that Chase could get more used to having me around. I should have spent it cleaning my bedroom up (especially the computer desk and area in front of my closet), but I can always do that next weekend. In any case, like I said, I just did nothing worth noting today.
Anyway, it’s time I headed off to bed, as I have a long day of work ahead of me tomorrow. Fun fun…
Well, Samus (again, my Compaq Presario laptop running Linux) is at a state where it’s pretty stable and running smoothly. It took a couple of days, but it’s at a point now where it’s usable and not slow as hell like it was before. I had mentioned putting IceWM on it before, but once I finally got it installed, I realized it was TOO minimalistic for my tastes. So having given that one up, I decided to do some research to find a different, more appropriate desktop environment. I finally found that a desktop environment called Xfce was available as part of Fedora Core 4, but the reason I had missed it when installing it was because it had been moved to the “extras” part of the distribution. So, I installed it, tried it… configured it to my tastes, and now I’m good to go. Granted, it took a little searching to find how to get one thing set up correctly (namely, switching my default terminal from xterm to something like gnome-terminal), but otherwise, it’s been far less painful than I would have expected. It definitely runs a lot lighter than GNOME did, and frankly, I’m happy now.
If you want to see what it looks like for me now, well, see below…
I’ve also done a bit of checking to find out the status of Nova (my Powerbook). Apparently there must have been something wrong with the hardware as I suspected, as the current status shows it at the repair depot waiting on a part. Oh, well… the main thing I’m concerned about is whether it’ll come back with the hard drive wiped or not. If it does, it’s not that big of a concern… as I’ve said before, it provides me with an excuse to upgrade it up to Tiger. I also hope to have it back soon as I’m going to need access to iMovie soon for a project that I’ll need to work on.
Finally, I’m pondering acquiring a 19″ LCD monitor my friend Shinnokxz pointed out to me on Newegg. I’m seriously tempted, as he got one and says it’s “ORGASMIC”. At $300, it’s a hefty chunk out of my wallet, but considering the current 19″ CRT monitor I have is a serious power drain, it might be worth it. Besides which, Dad will probably take the old monitor if I ask him. We’ll see.
Anyway, back to the grind here. Fun fun….
http://www.artlebedev.com/portfolio/optimus/
I want. :-)