Sorry for the sparseness

Unfortunately I haven't been keeping up with this thing very well as of late. I would like to blame it on being too busy with all the stuff related to the new apartment or work or something like that, but it really comes down to the fact that we don't have internet at the apartment yet. This makes it so that my only reliable source of internet is work and I'm not really comfortable blogging at work, especially when I've only been working a week. That said, I'm doing exactly that right now because today was FttP's (holy crap I didn't even realize that one of his nicknames could be acronymed into an internet protocol) first day at IBM and he carpools with me so I also got to start work at 7:30 today and the average start time for my team is about 9:45. Combine that with the fact that I know I won't be out of here until probably 5:30-6:00 anyway, and I can spare a few minutes for this.

So, beyond all that, what else is new? Well, we've gotten past all the big spending for the apartment with the addition of a 6,500 BTU/hr air conditioner ($130) and a new vacuum ($100). We decided to get the airco so we could survive the summer and the vacuum because Sears had a decent sale and we looked at our spending thus far (weighed against how many things we got for free) and decided we could afford a vacuum instead of getting a 3rd-generation handmedown from Josh and Moriah. If we didn't have all the carpet I would have been fine with an old vacuum but about 85% of our floor is carpet and with my allergies $100 bugs for a 12-amp upright with brand new HEPA filter technology seemed like a wise investment.

The two best things about the vacuum (other than that it does in fact do a very good job on carpet) are its color and the fact that it uses one of those clear tornado canisters instead of a bag. The color is basically iPod white; when I pointed this out and called it an iVacuum, Mike immediately corrected me and called it an iSuck. The canister is cool because you can see your progress (at which point the "hi-score" concept) vastly improves cleaning proficiency and because the tornado action acts like a centrifuge and you get this basically sand at the bottom with a layer of fluffy whipped dust on top. Okay so it's actually kind of gross but I find it fascinating.

Boy that's a lot of text about a vacuum. Okay last thing and then it's work time (I have a mere hours until everyone else shows up). Nina and I don't own any game systems other than my Gameboy SP, but yesterday went a long way towards fixing that. First, we pre-ordered DS Lites yesterday. When I asked if I could reserve a specific color, the guy said, "Sure. Do you want white or white?" Apparently Sony took a cue from Henry Ford; the US only has one color option at launch and for a while afterwards. Next, FttP suggested that we get a Playstation and beat Final Fantasy VII this summer. He's trying to get his parents to find his PS2 and ship it up, but for the time being we borrowed a cable-less one from Porkchop and got Kershaw's PS1 cables that he's not using and utilized the only known instance of Sony maintaining backwards compatibility with connectors to create a working PS2. Add Kershaw's PS1 memory card and we're in business. Only one more problem; we couldn't find his FFVII. We did find his FFIX though, which is probably the second-best in the franchise (definitely if you only count the ones we can play on a PS2). Good stuff.

Out of school and back to work

It's been a very busy past few days. Graduation wasn't as painful as I thought it was going to be, mainly because we sat behind the Math and CS professors and just screwed around the entire time. Also, as I hoped Dr. Murray recognized me when he handed my diploma and we talked briefly. That was nice; after all those meetings for the his project it would have been a real bummer if he just blanked on me.

The party afterwards was also nice too; the family behaved themselves and I did my best to stay sociable. The only drag on it was having to rush home right after graduation to have it.

Leaving the next day so I could start work was kind of rough as well, but so far work looks like it's going to be really cool. I can't really say much about what I'll be doing (and you guys wouldn't be interested in hearing it anyway), but it's a pretty sweet project. Needless to say I'm much more interested in it than I was in my z/OS stuff last year. Plus we've got all but one team member on site now and we are all getting along very well. We've haven't been able to get into much technical stuff yet, so I can't really evaluate how well we will do in that area, but it looks like we should at least be a good team, which is a very good start.

Let's get it over with already

Don't get me wrong, I've really been enjoying Senior Week without Dan. We've played about a thousand games of MVP (I've won maybe four), listened to a lot of baseball, done a reasonable amount of drinking, and went to a really good barbecue. It's been nice being able to just relax and have fun and not worry about what we're supposed to be doing or who might be feeling grumpy today.

But now Dan's back and we're hitting the part of the week where we need to pack, pick up things at offices between this and this time and all that jazz, so now I'm just looking forward to the end of the ceremony. I'm not much for the whole pomp and circumstance thing, and I'm not very sentimental, so I'm about done here.

You've got to be kidding me.

Tonight while trying to sleep I again heard a rythmic clicking noise coming from the direction of my computer, but this time a very different one. I figured it to be a fan, so I went to see if I could pin down which one was the culprit. Turns out it's actually the freakin' LED on my mouse that blinks on and off when it charges. Of all the things to start making noise, it had to be something that I am in no way able to replace without buying a whole new mouse. That thing cost way too much to replace for the LED; guess it's time to stop charging it at night and start charging it when I'm out of the room.

Stadium Arcadium

Just picked up the new Red Hot Chili Peppers album (on release day go me) and I'm pleased so far. It's a double disc album (they call the CDs Jupiter and Mars which is cool) and I got it for $11.99 at Best Buy so that's a pretty good deal for 28 songs. I then encountered some fun trying to put it on the iPod.

Turns out that the kernel I'm now using decided that writing to a journaled HFS+ filesystem is not safe and will not mount read-write without some serious complaining. (Guess which filesystem my Mac-formatted iPod uses.) It also does not warn you about this problem anywhere but dmesg. Took me awhile to figure the problem out, because they just put this "protect you from yourself" feature into the kernel very recently and I never encountered it with my old setup.

Oh, and check this warning message out: "hfs: write access to a jounaled filesystem is not supported, use the force option at your own risk, mounting read-only." Not only are they scaredy-cats, but they can't spell journaled.

Once I found out what was going on I immediately forced at my own risk and of course everything's fine. Reckless abandon for the win. :)

Back to normal plus some

Whew, looks like I finally have all the items crossed off of the "to fix/ to do" list for the computer. I'm sure it will be weeks before I am completely rid of "that's not installed?" moments, but now that I have the iPod working again (although I still can't for the life of me make the udev rule work to make it show up as /dev/ipod) I think I've got all the things I "need" back in place. I also took the opportunity to finally install and set up ntpd so now I won't sit down at my computer after lunch and have the clock tell me it's 4 AM anymore. I also did a few things the "right" way that had been done the "working" way before but none of those were very interesting.

At any rate, I'm done messing with the computer for a while, and I think the both of us are happy about that.

The greatest game ever played.

Steve and I just played a game of MVP baseball on the XBox that went into the bottom of the 19th inning. It was about the most fun I've ever had playing a video game against somebody in the last six months at least. The craziest thing is I only used two pitchers: my starter went 13 and a third. Absolutely nutso.

Explosivo

If you were wondering where I've been lately (or even if you haven't really), I've been around but haven't had access to my tower because the hard drive starting making an awfully ominous clicking noise a couple days ago. I ordered a new one from newegg (and got it less than 24 hours later!) and the past couple days I've been reinstalling Gentoo, with the hope being that I will be able to get most of my data off the old drive before it completely explodes. The system is almost done building now, would be done if I'd been able to make sure it was always working, and I think I'm at the point where I'll try to get things copied over, especially so I can try to salvage some of my more complicated config files. We'll see.

Oh, and Nina and I got the lease today. Looks like we'll be able to move in a little early, too, which would be really great because our lease starts June 1st but I start work on May 22nd.

What an asshole.

The things that happen when you put the brain of a twelve year old in the body of an college student are amazing. While I was in Vernon, the always brilliant Dan decided it was a great idea to play a good ole fashioned game of "hit the jellybean with a baseball bat in the kitchen." This quickly transitioned into a game of "figure out how to reattach the handle to the freezer." The chosen solution was apparently epoxy. Epoxy. Not contact cement, or something that will actually attach a piece of plastic to brushed fucking stainless steel, but epoxy. I realize we aren't dealing with a bunch of mechanical engineers here, but anybody that works at Home Depot (45 seconds down the road) can point at several compounds more suitable to the task, if you can swallow your fucking pride long enough to ask someone for help.

So I go to get some milk and when I open the fridge the handle falls off the freezer. After briefly wondering if I had just accidentally activated the pscycho-kinesis that has always lain dormant within me, I realized the handle had been broken and the stainless steel door had been dented. This was the first I had heard of any problems with the handle, and a couple housemates gave me part of the story. I got the rest later but what I had at that time was enough for me to go on so I left the handle on the windowsill outside his room.

Fast forward a few hours to AJ and I talking downstairs in the kitchen. Dan storms down, waves the handle around, yells at me for a while, calls me childish, and throws the handle at me. It missed by enough for him to claim he missed on purpose, but not by enough for me to believe it. I found it ironic that he could call someone childish while throwing broken parts of a refridgerator at them.

I have half a mind to make a big stink of it but to be honest it's not really worth it. I don't feel like the rest of my housemates thinking I'm overreacting, and I also don't feel like going to class and coming back to a refrigerator handle through my monitor. You would think that's the kind of thing you don't have to worry about in modern society, but I would counter that such expectations only hold when you are talking about people who can actually function in modern society.