Older blog entries for timg (starting at number 7)

Wow, been a while since my last post here.

• Been doing lots of database work for the MINOS Project at UMN and elsewhere. Using Perl and MySQL. Good tools.
• I want to build a 25' climbing wall in the back yard! Shame decent green-treated lumber is so expensive.
• Taking voice lessons. All I've learned so far is that I don't know how to sing. :)
• Found out that Mp3.com actually has some pretty cool stuff. Haven't really delved into much of the music there, but 303 Infinity is pretty decent 1/4th-note-bass-drum technoish stuff. There's also a lot of good classical stuff on there. An amazing electronic rendition of Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet can be found at Arthur Sulit's page.
• Well, that's about it for tonight.

Been really busy lately, or so it seems. I slept too much during spring break, but I learned UnrealScript, the fun scripting language for Unreal Tournament. Been building weapons all over.

I'm also in the school play Grease. Silly college productions give us no time to work on them. We have 2 weeks left to practice, but we've only had about 4 practices so far. Getting costumes tonight. Oh, I'm Doody, if anyone remembers the movie.

I never knew I liked acting so much until I tried it.

Would have liked to have gone to GUADEC, but time and money prevented it.

Well, about suppertime.

Well, I've just had a perfectly ordinary day turned surreal. I won't bore anyone with details, but a friend dropped a bombshell. Oof.

Checked out gnome-libs 2.0 today to look at the doc status. Still trying to get it compiled...I'm debating whether or not to break my existing GNOME setup, or check out 2.0's compat features, or just install the basics in /usr/gnome or something. Sounds like a job for this long weekend. Sleep now.

Had a lot of choir practice today. We had three practices before our first performance this semester. I somehow got myself volunteered to sing in a male quintet. That was fun.

Did a little bit of hacking on Tcd's configure checks. Silly me committed some changes that broke compiliation on 2.0.xx kernels. Gah. Clock skew is messing up my cvs.

Now my modem is flashing like something possessed. Better go now.

Finally got the V770 working properly. Had to do a clean install of Windows 98, then install the AGP drivers, then install the video card drivers. Ugh.

The Athlon is excellent. Even at "just" 500mhz, it screams past my Celeron 366 and K6 233. No compatibilty problems so far, hardware or software.

Classes started today. I should have a much better selection of courses this semester than last. Didn't get as much Gnome hacking done over the holidays as I would have liked, but I'll make up for it in the few pre-assignment days. No classes Tue/Thur, either! Yay! Currently cleaning up CVS gnome-media, making it releasable. Not many new features, but a few bug fixes.

I want to go document more of gnome-libs soon.

Had a mostly good Christmas. I got the nifty new MS mouse which seems to be working fine with 2.2.12, backported USB drivers, and X. I love not having to use a mousepad! Also got some random books, CDs, and Writing Solid Code by MS Press. Only on raph's recommendation did I add that to my wishlist. :)

Brother got a Diamond V770 TNT2 graphics card. Stupid thing kept locking hard during any 3d operations. Found that we needed the AGP miniport drivers and some IRQ thing to fix that. Did that, and it solved the crashing for most things. But now half of the games he wants to play won't work for various odd reasons. Really must reinstall that computer. It has problems. Stupid games never return any error message either. They just drop back to Explorer without a dying cough.

So, I'm getting tired of my old K6 233. Today I ordered an Athlon 500, FIC SD11 motherboard, a new case, and some ram. Should arrive sometime this week. I can't wait. :)

Good night.

One more day of classes. Tomorrow I turn in the pig paper. Can I rant a bit about stupid assignment criteria?

First real snow today, and a good deal of it. Up here in northern Minnesota, we were worried about having a brown Christmas. No worries now. Driving has become an extreme sport.

Finally coming up to the last few days of classes. Good old final projects. I'm currently writing a paper on hog farms in Minnesota. Anyone want to know about pfiesteria?

Got my NOMAD from Creative. As soon as I get my developer access I'll start coding. Apparently I have to sign an NDA for now, but sooner or later they'll open let us open the code. The person I'm working with is implementing a nifty-sounding kernel module for the Nomad. Mount -t nomadfs /dev/lp1 or similar.

Speaking of the player, it beats the Rio PMP300 solid. The 64M version comes with 32M internal ram, and a 32M Smart Media card, a docking station, and the requisite headphones and batteries. File transfer seems no faster than the Rio--only about 150kBps through the parallel port. Waiting for a USB version. The Nomad is even smaller than the Rio, and looks a lot spiffier. Haven't entirely figured out the Windows software, though, it's no more intuitive than Diamond's. Ugh.

Well, back to hog farms.