Older blog entries for Mulad (starting at number 295)

Thought I'd post a note (mostly for the search engines out there) that the FujiFilm FinePix A303 camera works with Linux (as a USB storage device, at least). The camera can be configured in a "PC Camera" mode, but that doesn't work with Linux yet (the manual says that only works with Windows (XP?), and won't work with MacOS either). I was somewhat worried, as this camera uses xD-Picture Card media, rather than CompactFlash or SmartMedia.

Anyway, I guess my computer was set up for USB already, so I just had to mount the camera, which was a simple ``mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /camera'' I decided to add a line to my /etc/fstab so I can just ``mount /camera'' to make it easier to copy images onto my laptop.

I've been thinking that I should try to find a way to automatically mount and unmount the camera when it is plugged in and unplugged, but I suspect someone has done that already. I had the thought that most of these filesystems have pseudorandom serial numbers on them (well, unless you get preformatted media, which often all have the same thing, which can lead to data corruption in certain situations). Anyway, you could make it so different serial numbers get mounted in different places. Any of the cards for your camera show up on /camera, while your MP3 player shows up on /boombox or something.

I just want something that does it automatically, because I always forget to unmount before unplugging the camera...

Went out to Audio King and tried to get a Tivoli Audio/Henry Kloss Model Two, but ended up having to order it. I had to live closest to the one Audio King in Minnesota that didn't have it in stock. Anyway.. This morning, I was looking for a nice car stereo, but ended up hunting around for something to use in my room.

The box is supposed to have a great tuner, though the demo box didn't seem to pull in stations as well as I'd hoped. Of course, there are any number of things that can mess up reception even on the best of receivers. It still sounded very good compared to the boxes sitting next to it which cost much more.

At any rate, it should arrive in a few days. I didn't order the subwoofer, but I might get one later. I don't really have the space at the moment, and I felt like a pretty big dork as it was ;-)

At work, we're running around trying to find space in the server room. We got a very large air conditioning unit to go in there. Fortunately it's on wheels, but if it had been taller and wheel-less, we wouldn't have to deal with it taking up so much floor area. We've also got a rack or two of FibreChannel equipment coming in. My boss is frantically looking for a rackmount console for at least one of our Sun systems, and we're running into trouble with our Cyclades TS800 crashing. It seems to not like our Sun Netra X1.

I'm finishing up classes. Took a final for my database course on Wednesday, and I've been helping to put together our presentation for my Financial Information Systems course. Hmm.. I suppose I'll have to dress up a bit tomorrow.

Well, my car is finally back where it belongs. It ended up costing quite a bit less than I expected to get it fixed. Sounded like a computer component went nuts.

Anywho, I took a detour on my ride home to go get some 8 pound weights at Target. I probably shouldn't have been that ambitious (the trouble I had getting it out of the rack should have given me a clue ;-) I'd read that guys should start out with 10-15 pound weights, though I knew that (until recently at least) my arms were skinnier than most women's.. At some point, I did something that put too much stress on my left shoulder somewhere. None of the muscles on top hurt or anything, it's buried underneath, so I figure it must be a tendon or something related to tendons/muscle connections.

I'm going to have to avoid upper-arm exercises for a few days, but that gives me a chance to do some leg work. I've avoided my legs since they've always seemed fairly strong (at least to me), and since I walk quite a bit already (the University of Minnesota is a huge campus, and I have to walk all the way across to get from home to work).

For the past week, I've mostly just done a lot of aerobic-type exercises. I don't like high-impact or high-stress stuff, so doing a lot (2 hours, though usually not in just one go) of silly stuff (waving my arms around like a lunatic) seems to be something that's good for me. I've got enough time this summer to do it, and for once I have the motivation to do it. I've been doing it every day, since I'm certain that if I don't work out every single day, I'll keep pushing it off day by day until I completely forget.

There have been a few moments where I've felt absolutely great during or after exercise, and it makes me wonder why I hated gym class so much when I was in school. Probably the competitive atmosphere, and the fact that most activites were geared toward people who were already in good shape.

Anyway, I'm happy to see the image in the mirror is slowly becoming closer to the image of myself I have in my head -- looking like that is my real goal. I just have to make sure that the image in my head stays realistic ;-)

Presidents are no fun.

10 Jul 2002 (updated 10 Jul 2002 at 21:11 UTC) »

Not much has happened to me in the last month, at least nothing I really want to talk about. Suffice it to say that I've finally started on an exercise binge that I'm going to continue for at least 5 weeks, mostly out of spite. Not one of the best reasons, but I'm more motivated that I ever was before.. Anyway, I don't plan on doing anything terribly dramatic/traumatic -- heck, I don't even have any weights to use, so I'm just making a fool of myself jumping around in my room early in the morning (I do plan to get some weights soon, once my car gets checked out and is running normally again).

At any rate, I'm getting up now at 6:00 (or so), with the TV set to turn on to PBS so I can watch (well, listen to) the BBC news. I don't wake at 6:00 easily, so it takes ten or fifteen minutes of listening to droning reporters to get me up..

I'm mostly just trying to get my arms to look less like pogo sticks and more like something that belongs on the human body, but I hope to do something to cut down on my gut too. But basically, I just want it to be noticeable to my friends that I did some work.

Moving sucks.

I managed to find myself some good roommates for the past two years, but they all decided to wander on to other places (where they don't need to share bedrooms anymore -- very understandable). Anyway, I'm moving into a very dorm-ish frat for the summer. I think I'm going to start looking for places for the fall very soon..

Unfortunately, the building manager at my new place has not shown himself to be very reliable. In the past few days, the place seems to look more and more like a dump, too.. I suppose that could be my mood, too.

This move is really bothering me, even though I'm only moving a few blocks. Mostly, I think I won't be able to see Sarah much anymore. On the other hand, she works three days a week at the building next to mine, so maybe we'll go out to lunch every once in a while. Oh well, I'm probably just overreacting..

I need to get back home for a little while, take a break from Minneapolis..

Got my cell phone on Thursday. I got service through VoiceStream since their rates seemed pretty low, and I only had to sign my life away for a minimum of one year. AT&T and others wanted me to contract for two years. Their coverage is probably lowest of the big carriers, though I think they have the biggest GSM service in the US (Deutsche Telekom bought them a year or so ago).

Coverage isn't really a problem for me. I'm planning to use this phone instead of a land line, at least for the summer, so if it works outside of the local area, I'll just consider it a bonus. I found out it doesn't work at my office, but that's a windowless room in the middle of the building, behind at least two layers of concrete... Signal is good at my current apartment, though the meter blips off occasionally -- I'm curious why that happens..

Anyway, I just got the free phone they had, the Motorola T193. It's tiny, slightly smaller than Sarah's Nokia, at least (I think she has a 3360, but I'm not sure -- it has the same form factor, whatever it is).

I think VoiceStream had sent me a text message when I first got the phone, informing me of the phone number, but I think I accidentally deleted it. I'd gotten another text message, telling me I had a voicemail, but that was someone leaving a message for a girl named Brooke, IIRC. Anyway, I deleted the text message informing me of that, and then I think I deleted another one, which was probably the phone number. In the end, I used the phone's text messaging facility to send myself an e-mail, and the number was on the From: line ;-)

I was pretty surprised when I started looking into various phone services. For some reason, I expected companies to be upfront about the various services they offer -- what's included in which plan, etc. I suppose I might have gotten a clearer picture if I'd gone into one of the cell phone shops to get it, but I didn't want to get railroaded into a plan I didn't like. The information on the web was just awful, though.

I still don't know exactly what services I get, though. I realized after a while that the Internet service that had been promised wasn't working. After searching high and low to try and find some information, I called customer service. I was informed that I'd been put on a plan different than what they advertised on the web.. The code for the plan was apparently just one character off, so the guy switched to what I thought I ordered.

I've seen people complain about the customer service department, but I haven't had trouble yet. I suppose I'm just lucky. However, I have a suspicion that my Linux user habit of trying to find the solution myself by searching and trying various things probably makes me more prepared when I call them.. We'll see what happens in the future.

I've found VoiceStream's websites to be very inconsistent. They contract out various services to different organizations, which probably contributes to the mess. It's not hugely inconsistent -- that'd probably be better! I've found myself browsing around, having buttons suddenly disappear on the next page, etc. They also have some very short session timeouts. I've had to re-login many times.

I've noticed that the various websites seem to use different technologies to power them.. VoiceStream's main websites appear to be powered by ColdFusion, the iStream pages (iStream is the name for their data service) appear to be running Microsoft's Active Server Pages, and my billing info is brought to me by servlets. Very weird, IMHO..

The phone I got has similar inconsistencies. I think it has at least four different font sizes, but I can only pick two in the phone settings. Composing text messages uses the smallest font, browsing the web uses the next smallest. The default interface font is the second-largest, and there's a huge font that is the other option. Going between big and huge is not my idea of configurability.

Even the instructions for activating my phone weren't very good. I knew about SIM cards and whatever beforehand, but someone who didn't know about that would probably be really confused. There were at least two sets of instructions, but I think they started with "turn on your phone," neglecting the "insert your SIM card" part.. One set of instructions said I had to call someone with my IMEI number (apparently the handset serial number) and a number printed on my service agreement. Well, I didn't have a service agreement in the box I got, so I was glad that the phone seemed to work right out of the box, once I figured out exactly how the SIM card was supposed to be put in it's place..

It'll be a while before I can say whether I like the service or not. With all of the weird things I've seen already, I could never give it a strong thumbs up, but it's relatively cheap and I can text Sarah whenever I want ;-) I'm paying $30/month for 200 daytime minutes, unlimited weekend minutes, toll-free long distance, 300 text messages, and 1MB of data. I paid an extra dollar this month so I could have a "Smooth Criminal" ring tone, too, but nobody's called me yet.. *sigh*

Ah, the joys of turning into Big Brother.

We put a 3c905B-FX card into our Netsaint server the other day and connected it up to the building gateway today. The idea was to "mirror" incoming/outgoing traffic onto that interface, and log packets.

It's getting us in trouble already.

Ordered a cell phone on Sunday, should show up in the next few days.

Moving in a week.. Did some packing/cleaning already. Bare walls in the apartment make me feel pretty sad actually.. :-(

I was halfway looking at cell phones the other day, and then my parents suggested today that I get one, since I'll probably be moving twice in the next few months, and don't necessarily want to pay for activation over and over. Of course, if I do get a cell phone, it'd probably be an expensive one that totally ruins the purpose of getting it ;-)

Well, maybe not. I guess I don't even know what features are good.

VoiceStream seems to be a popular carrier with the people I know. They appear to have decent coverage around here and decent prices (IMHO, not that I've looked much), but some ratings the company gets are pretty poor. They're deploying GPRS, some sort of networking technology that's apparently decent speed (I guess theoretically up to about 114kbit/s)

Hmm.. The data prices are steep, though. Ooh! I can pay $60/month for 20MBytes. Uh, yeah.

I suppose that just means I won't use it for what I want to use it. I think some of the voice plans allow for a little bit of data per month anyway.

Well, I'll probably head to a store tomorrow and get more info..

Every so often, I come back to thinking about Microsoft's finances. Their accounting techniques have been widely used, most prominently at Enron (or so I hear). Couple that with the new licensing schemes they're coming out with, and I think they've found a recipe for their own demise.

There's this Bill Parish guy that has said that MS is actually losing money these days. I'm not sure I believe him, though -- his grammar and spelling is too poor to be very credible ;-) He also has some ideas that stretch the imagination, such as a Microsoft pyramid scheme that caused a global downturn in the economy. However, if it's true that MS is losing money, that could be one of the reasons why they're changing licensing methods.

From the reading I've done, it sounds like MS pays people with stock too much. Apparently, the SEC doesn't require a company to deduct payment in stock from their profit numbers. If you take that out, Parish says that the company is in the red.

Microsoft has a lot of money in the bank, but it might be to cover their ass when employees start cashing in. The company has been criticized by people like Ralph Nader for not paying dividends to their stockholders (of course, I guess Nader is mostly just annoyed because MS isn't paying very much in taxes).

Personally, I figure Microsoft will probably stick it out for quite a while. They might go down in five or ten years, probably after Bill Gates has made a graceful exit from the company.

In the wake of Enron, I bet the accountants at MS are busily working to find a way to hide financial issues that doesn't look like they're hiding something..

Or maybe I'm just paranoid..

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