Older blog entries for NoWhereMan (starting at number 4)

Looked at my last entry and it is hard to believe so much time has passed. Debian is now lead by Martin Michlmayr. I was fortunate enough to have him spend the night at my house last year when he was in our area. I think he has the potential to be a great DPL. That last entry was in a semester which almost burned me out. I started to back off after that and my Fall 2003 semester was the best yet. I hope this semester turns out as good. I have my doubts though. I have an Electromagnetics instructor who seems to be using our class as his guinea pigs for a book he is writing. I hope my impression is wrong, because I do not feel like spending a semester proof reading for a non-native english instructor.

A little quicker update this time. The fall semester has begun and and I think I nailed the last quiz in my Statics class. My brain seems to be coming back online. I got an invitation to join the Golden Key Honour Society at CSUN and they look legit. I went to a dinner meeting last night with Debian developers to strengthen the web-of-trust. We met because the DPL (Bdale Garbee) was in town. He seems to be a very interesting guy. I was impressed and thoroughly enjoyed the evening. I need to get out for more social events like this. I saw that the LA Slashdot MEETUP was also held last night. I still have not attended one of them. Dan Kegel sat one seat away from me and I never knew who he was. I was the last one to show up so I missed all the introductions and early conversations. I would have loved to tell Dan how useful his web site was when I was doing my ISDN research. I also met Michael Elkins who developed mutt. He mentioned the Scripting Languages article here which explains my visit today. I have lots of homework to do today so I better finish this key signing tangent and crack the books.

Well, here is another snapshot. I think I got passing grades in all my classes last semester. The Linear Systems class was the toughest. It was over a decade ago when I took Differential Equations and the old brain has gone soft in the meantime. I simplified things by selling the rental so I have a little more spare time. I joined the GIMPS project to make uses of my spare cpu cycles. It has captivated my interest and my wife would probably say I have wasted a lot of time on it. I burned up the power supply on my AMD K6-III 450 box so that caused some adjustments. I was surprised when Malice gave me permission to build a new system. I bought a Tyan Tiger MP S2460 motherboard from NewEgg and slapped two 1.2 GHz Athlons in it. It really screams! I thought my ECS D6VAA project last year would be more than adequate with the two Pentium III 1.0 GHz Coppermine cpus. This new Athlon kicks butt on the GIMPS algorithm. It is 2-3 times faster than those 1.0 GHz Pentium chips. It has been an eternity since I added anything to my homepage, but I am tempted to add a log of this rebuild project.

Time is flying by this year. I found some job opportunities this week and hopefully I will hear an encouraging response. I read the Samba thread today and it looks like a number of people in the OSS community are feeling the pain. The 4_1_99_5 tag of XFree86 compiled without a hitch yesterday. I need to get some painting done on my rental today, so it will probably be the weekend before I get some debugging time on my MediaGX box.

Wow, 2002 already. A lot of changes are coming with this new year. I need to find a new job before all the money runs out. I finally have the time to work on those projects I have been neglecting. I still have some gpg keys that I intended to sign. I have not used Advogato before but this seems like a good time to try it out.