Day: July 11, 2005

The social weekend in review…

D'Arque Bishop

Okay, so, I’ve already talked about the geeky things I did this weekend in trying to get Linux fully operational on Samus. That’s not all I did, of course… I did go out and be social. That said…

Once I got off work on Friday, I made my way over to Louie’s apartment. From there, he and I decided to hit the Cheesecake Factory in the Galleria for dinner. As usual, it was excellent; I had the double BBQ burger without the middle bun (though the waiter accidentally misheard me and thought I meant no bun whatsoever), and Louie tentatively decided to try a steak which it turned out was REALLY good. From there, we made our way over to the entertainment complex over at I-10 West and Silber to spend the evening at Drink Houston. The idea was that we had heard there would be salsa dancing in the Rain video room, and Louie was wanting to check it out. It turned out that the salsa there was nonexistent. :-/ On the other hand, we did get to check out Center Stage, which was their new karaoke room. I ended up going on stage and singing “Turn the Page” by Bob Seger. While singing, I happened to look down and see a couple of guys in referee costumes (the Party Patrol) holding up lit cigarette lighters. Then, after I got finished and people were applauding, I came down and Louie went up to sing “After the Lovin'” by Englenert Humperdink. The Party Patrol guys came up to me then and gave me a free drink coupon. They said it was for being a good sport; I hope that meant I was a good singer and not that I really and truly sucked. Heh. Anyhow… once Louie came down (and he did much better than me), we hung out in the karaoke room and 8.0 Retro for a bit, and then hit the road back home.

Saturday afternoon was the big day. I went down to Louie’s apartment to meet him and Dave… and I brought the DVD of the movie Dave and I had made out of the footage we had taken at Louie’s PE party. We sat down as he put it in the DVD player… and then he sat down and hit Play on the remote.

I guess I had halfway expected him to kill us for some of the stuff we did. Instead, there were several times he was dying laughing at what he saw. Apparently he really enjoyed it; I just have to create a new master copy of the DVD when I get Nova back to see if I can do anything about a couple of the audio pauses that had gotten into the final movie.

From there, we decided to go eat at Fox Sports Bar & Grill in the Galleria. When we got there, we were being shown to our tables, when the weirdest event of the evening happened. A waiter passed by me and said, “Hey man, that was a great job singing last night.” I guess he had been at Drink Houston the night before and saw me sing. I was too shocked to do anything but say “Uh, thanks…” as I headed to the table. Once we got done eating, we went outside… and were stuck. We had no idea what to do.

Finally, Louie came up with the idea of going to the SkyBar again to see Scott Gertner and his band perform. So, off we went… and it turned out to be a hell of a show. We watched a full set and a half… but by the time the second set was underway it was just too damn crowded and we were starting to feel a bit claustrophobic. So, we left and headed back home.

The final verdict on both were that they were definitely events we would do again. It really depends on Louie’s schedule, so I guess I’ll have to wait to hear from him and see what he says. Maybe one of the next few times we go I’ll actually take the time to ask a girl to dance with me. Oh, well… we’ll see.

In any event, that’s it on the weekend front… heh. And now, I have a couple of items to do that just arrived. Fun fun…

The technical weekend in review…

D'Arque Bishop

Bleh. This weekend was rather eventful, both in the technical and the social side of things. Not that it was bad, mind you… I just had a long weekend is all, and now I’m sitting at work and wishing I could have gotten a bit more time in bed. In any event, I’ll start with the technical. I’ll get up to speed on the social one in the next post.

My big project this weekend was to get wireless networking operational on Samus (my Presario running Linux; I name my machines after female video game characters). This turned out to be MUCH easier said than done. Now, don’t get me wrong… I love Linux. However, with Linux, hardware support is either feast or famine. In other words, the hardware is either immediately supported with no issues whatsoever, or it’s a complete and utter pain in the ass to get operational (if it’s even possible). I have a Linksys WPC54GS card that I use for wireless networking in Samus. However, there were no Linux drivers available for it. I ended up needing to download and install a program called ndiswrapper. ndiswrapper acts as, well, a wrapper to allow Windows wireless networking drivers to operate under Linux. In addition, my home wireless network and my AirPort Express’s default “travel” configuration use WPA for their encryption and authentication, and apparently the distro of Linux I’m using (Fedora Core 4) doesn’t natively support WPA. So, I had to download a second program called wpa_supplicant in order to get WPA encryption working. Bleh. The end shot of all this is that unless I want to do some serious screwing around with some of the scripts on here, I have to activate wireless networking manually. Of course, that’s not really an issue, considering I only need the wireless network support when I insert the Linksys card into the PCMCIA slot manually…

At least wireless networking isn’t as much as a pain in the ass as power management. Apparently Linux doesn’t like the version of ACPI that’s on this laptop, even when I try to force it to use it. Power management was a big reason why I gave up using Samus as my primary work PC two years ago and switched to Nova (my Powerbook). I was running Red Hat Linux 9 at the time, and was watching the MK movie on a flight to E3… and the battery died after 45 minutes. Needless to say I wasn’t a happy camper at the time. What I wanted was a top of the line laptop running a UNIX variant that had decent power management, and Linux wasn’t cutting it. So, I switched to Mac OS X, and have been extremely happy with it. At least everything WORKS with it.

My next project on Samus will be trying to get IceWM working on it. As much as I like GNOME and KDE as desktop environments, they tend to be a strain on this machine. (Samus only has 128 MB of RAM, and I’ve never felt the need to spend money on a memory upgrade for it.) At least IceWM runs lighter than either of those two environments. The main challenge will be to make it where IceWM is a choice on the list of desktops one can load when you log into the machine. That so far is what’s frustrating me the most; most of the information I’ve been finding as to how to do that relates to Fedora Core 1 or 2, and it’s changed as of 3 or 4. *grumble*

Oh, well… I might keep Samus around after Nova gets back from the shop just so I have a second laptop I can use for different tasks, like checking network ports or doing security audits. We’ll see. The sooner I get Nova back the happier I’ll be… especially seeing as I have a fresh copy of iLife 05 ready to load on it. (iLife 05 = iMovie HD, iDVD 05, GarageBand 05, and iPhoto 05.) There’s some stuff I need to work on as well regarding the movie project Dave and I have been doing, so that’ll be needed. Oh, well…

In any event, that’s enough tech rambling from me. I’ll post later with my social experiences this weekend.