Older blog entries for bma (starting at number 26)

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Tuesday
Long day. Mostly spent in classes. English from 9:30-11:35, then go to work for about 3-4 hours, then come back for a 6 hour block of Astronomy. Astronomy is going to be a fun course, I've always been interested in space stuff. We got out of lab early since the lab was a review of simple math like scientific notation. Since it is a 100 level course we have a lot of freshmen in the class.

Wednesday
English in the morning. Had a rough draft of a paper due, summarizing a biology article on bacteria in the stomach. It's English for the natural sciences (required for my BS degree) but 90% of the book gives examples of Biology and the other 10% of astronomy and physics. Hello, I'm a CS major, none of that possibly applies to me :)

Finished hooking up the netbench array at work. Installed distributed-net on all of them, boosting my keyrate by about 4MKey/s :)

Wednesday night my fiancee and I went to Verizon (formerly Bell Atlantic Mobile) and got some new cellphones and service contracts. Before I was using Splint, but I hated the service I got (both customer and signal-wise). Crystal clear, indeed. Piece of junk, that's what it was. Verizon didn't have many phones that I was interested in, though...ended up paying for the (very expensive) digital StarTAC 7868, but after a few days of using it I really like it. The battery life is good, despite the horror stories I've heard. It's also a lot more comfortable and clearer reception than my old phone (Qualcomm QCP-2760). So I'm happy. The service plan is good as well, 200 minutes for $29.99/mo (with Splint it was 300 for the same amount), and free nights and weekends, which is when I will be using it the most anyways.

Thursday
Very long day. Nothing exciting happened.

Friday
We had a huge meeting, out at this really swank hotel (Westfield Marriott). Decent continental breakfast, then sat and listened (read: played with Palm V, like everyone else in our group) to management for a bit. We've been running into some real problems with the Palms lately. It's the exact same problem for everyone, too. You'll turn it on, and get a Fatal exception error, with a restart button...which doesn't react to when you tap. So you soft reset the Palm, which then sends it into this infinite loop of flicking the Palm logo and a black horizontal bar. The only way to fix it is to hard reset the Palm. It happened to me on Thursday, then Frank's did it again later that day, then Geoff's did it all day Friday during the meeting (poor fellow. :) So I think I'm going to try to track down more information on this problem... I'm backing my palm up every day now (full backups, not just a hotsync). At lunch most of us left for home, since all that was left was about 20-30 minutes of 'Final words' and after that work was closed. Went home and cleaned my room, feel much better now. Also defrosted the fridge and the 3" block of ice my freezer had become. Whee.

Went out to a local bar and grill with some friends around 9pm, turns out there were bands playing there. It was cool seeing all our friends from high school, first time we've all been together in about 4 years. I was DD, so didn't drink any, but man, everyone else got smashed in celebration of my fiancee's graduation a few weeks ago. I'm glad I wasn't the one holding the tab. One thing I didn't really enjoy was all the smoke, you could see it hanging in the air anyways, good thing I was wearing my glasses, would have had a rough time with contacts. I was sitting at a bar table with my fiancee and our friends when this girl who had been dancing on the floor came over, laid her head down on the railing (it was about her height) and asked me if I wanted to dance. Ha! I politely (I hope) declined, so she went and asked the other guy at our table, with similar results. At first glance she appeared young, but I took a closer look and she was easily mid 30's-40's (I'm 21). She could have been my mother! Anyways, maybe you just had to be there, but I found that highly amusing. First time in a long while (at least 5 years) that I've been hit on. Perhaps the funniest thing is that my fiancee was right there next to me getting a real kick out of the whole scene.

Today
Slept in until about 10:40, which was nice. Went back to the Verizon store to exchange my fiancee's cigarette charger for her phone. Then swung over to Best Buy to get some stuff for her parents. We were going to go to a movie, but I guess not, since she's now sleeping on my futon (thus giving me time to write this very long diary entry, I've been slacking). Finally, I can just relax for a day or two...I love holiday weekends.

On Thursday I worked from home while my truck was getting nerf bars put on. Got a Dodge Ram 1500 as a loaner, glad I didn't buy one of those. It drove alright, but I felt it was an uncomfortable cabin. Picked up the truck around 6 only to find that they had put solid black nerf bars on, instead of the chrome ones I had ordered. D'oh.

Friday I called up the dealership and of course they were apologetic and embarrassed. They're ordering some new nerf bars for me, so maybe they'll be in sometime this week. Friday was kind of a slow day, half our work was still out at Austin, TX (or on their way back). Discovered I get to go to some wonderful meeting this coming Friday (school didn't get me out this time, no friday classes, drat). Got my final grades for the spring semester on Friday. Very depressing. Out of four classes, I failed 3. So I signed up to take them again next semester. I did get a B+ in my CS class. I think it was just a matter of not spending enough time on classes...too much time was spent visiting my fiancee over the weekends, which is basically my only real freetime. Now that she has graduated I won't be making 300mi+ round trips. These are the first courses I've ever failed in my life...before this, the lowest grade I'd ever gotten was a C. So I guess if this is the worst that happens to me, I'm doing alright =)

Long weekend. Went out and basically bought myself a new wardrobe so I don't always have to wear a T-shirt and jeans (there are days when I don't ... jeans are so uncomfy when it's humid out). Went around looking at different cellphone plans. I currently have Sprint, maybe it's just my phone (Qualcomm QCP-2760) but it's total crap. I just got the phone replaced on saturday though, before people couldn't hear me even with a full signal and I could hear them perfectly. Oh well. Right now me and my fiancee are looking at Vorizon and Cell1...not sure. Vorizon doesn't have a family plan, but I've been hearing rumours about Cell1's customer service sucking and phones being cloned...dunno. Also finally got to read some this weekend... I just finished Peter F. Hamilton's 'Emergence', which is the first book in the Night's Dawn series. Good book. Now I need to go buy the next one.

So I was reading the diaries this morning when I came across this post that was pure gun-nut...thinking, "oh god, /.'rs have found advogato", then I look at the name...*grin* Hi Benson...ever get your Debian box working again?

Summer school starts today. Astronomy should be fun, I am not looking forward to English (but it is my last english class I have to take! Yay!)

apgarcia:
I mention where I go to school in my personal info...namely, George Mason University

lilo:
Erm, I've lived on the east coast my entire life, and we change our clocks just like everyone else...spring forward, fall back...so I'm not sure what you mean by us not following Daylight savings.

joey:
I think San Mehat put it best with 'I hate port 80' :-)

The network has been flaky since yesterday. It keeps randomly dieing. I'll be lucky if this posts. I may end up going home where at least I can establish a reliable network connection.

I hate status reports.

Got half of my grades in. B+ in CS 3 (which is basically third-semester C++), and failed my Matrix Algebra class. Waiting to hear the news on Physics and Calculus 3...may be retaking those too. Bleck. At least school should go more smoothly now that I won't be managing a long distance relationship and driving down to my fiancee's college every weekend, since she just graduated on Saturday.

egad:
There are probably no good crypto interfaces from PGP to Perl because PGP isn't really a well-designed UNIX program, it's originally a DOS program...as far as needing RSA compatibility, you can do that with GPG. All you need to do are install the IDEA and RSA (RSAREF if you're in the US) modules, check them out ftp://ftp.net.lut.ac.uk/pub/gcrypt/contrib/ and http://non-us.debian.org/~jgg/ - I can read/sign/encrypt with RSA keys just fine.

Exams are done. Thank God. My first summer class starts next Monday, though - yeck. Grades have not been posted to the system yet, Grrr.

Saturday we had quite the storm go through. Had power blink out a few times for a second at first, the firewall kept on chugging due to the UPS but the modem in it apparently got fried. So I've been without much net access since saturday evening...time to play catchup today.

Traffic was horrible on the way into work. It took me about an hour and fifteen minutes to get in...usually it takes about 30 to 45. Oh well. At least the weather is so perfect outside this week (mid-70s, it was about 50 outside this morning, mmm, cold weather, I love it) so I got to enjoy that along some tunes.

Most of the people in the office are heading out to Austin, TX this week to go to some IBM thing. On Thursday I'm bringing the truck in to get the nerf bars installed and get the undercarriage coated (or something). I wonder what kind of loaner car I'll get.

I think I've seen Die Hard 2 about 4 times in the past week. Gotta love HBO :)

Ryan:
Yes, Kinder Eggs do rule. My fiancee loves them. I recently ordered about 20 from Australia (damn USA does not carry them, grrr) - only to find out that yes, Canada does have them. Oh well, they were not outrageously priced. A friend of mine from the UK is supposed to be mailing me some 'Big Kinder Egg' they had during Easter...and in return I'll mail him a couple of the many Linux-related tshirts that I've acquired.

Bryce:
I had a Ford Taurus until a few weeks ago when I bought my F150...there weren't that many buttons to push/pull/whatever...I never had to look in the manual while driving :) Then again, though, this was a 1997 model, and not a very high-end one -- so the one you had may have been vastly different.

Tooks some pictures of my new truck today. I know that probably no one cares, but I'm not forcing you to read this =)

Off to take exam number 3 now, Matrix Algebra...goody. I thought it was at 4:30, showed up, turned out it was 7:30...so I went to Best Buy and bought the new Bosstones CD and then went back home.
Well, I get there at 7:30pm only to find no one there...so I recheck the syllabus, it says "7:30-10:15", I go and check the online exam schedule, the damn exam was at 7:30am this morning...so right now I hold the title for dumbest fucking person alive :P

My finacee graduates college tomorrow with a BA in English from Longwood College. Yay. Will be fun getting up at 4:30am to get ready and drive down so I can be there at 8am.

I see shaleh has found his way onto advogato. Most excellent :)

I just took my Calculus 3 exam...I may have failed it, but I failed it with grace, dammit! :-)

Just killing time before my CS exam (which I am not worried about in the least, imagine that.)

CipherSaber
Did a CipherSaber yesterday. As everyone else has already said, recommended. :)

Key: advogato

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Laptop
Turns out the helpdesk tried reaching me last week, couldn't (I was probably in class) and didn't even bother to leave me a message. Called them back monday and they sent a guy out, swapped the hard drive into a new laptop, and was set. Yay.

Meeting
Me and Brad were accused yesterday at a staff meeting of hosting SAC stations in our cubes. Just becuase we each have at least 4 machines and 4 monitors in our cubes....:)

Exams
Exams are finally upon me. Have 2 on Thursday, one on Friday, and one on Monday (at 7:30am, blech). I'm hoping that summer school will not be as demanding on my time. Else someone will get on my case again about being late with my LPIC review topic (I swear, I'm working on it!)

Reading
I'm currently reading the first book in Peter Hamilton's The Reality Dysfunction, Emergence. So far, a very good book...if only I had more time to just sit down and read.

Well, suckah has been bugging me to do a diary entry, so I guess I will.

Today has been going by fairly quickly. Unfortunately have gotten little done. I have IP addresses for the netbench array now, I just have to go set it up and do it. I think that will be a "next week" project, since monday is the last day of classes and I will have some breathing space for a day or two before exams. My last exam is the 15th. First summer session starts the 22nd. Not much of a break...

I'm ashamed to say that I'm selfish most of the time. I do try to make a conscience effort to not ignore situations like that, though.

I am really enjoying the truck. I am getting used to parking it. Showed it to richard, who seemed to like it. One of these days I'll get some photos of it.

My laptop is currently broken. The helpdesk has a ticket open on it, they came, looked at it, verified it was broken, said they were going to try to find a similar one to swap out the hard drive with. Haven't heard anything since yesterday. I guess I'll call tomorrow if I haven't heard anything else.

I think I'll leave a little early today and get some sleep. One can only run on caffeine so long.

New vehicle
So on Saturday I went out and got a '97 F150 Lariat - Black, two-tone, V8 4.6L, extended cab, 6-cd changer, mmmmm. I've been wanting a truck for some time now, and there was one on clearance at Sheehy. Cost me about half of what I was willing to pay for a new one in about a year. Yay.

Camera
Got my coworker Frank's Phillips USB camera working. It's a binary module, which I'm not thrilled over, but it's better than no driver at all. A randomly updated image of it is here.

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