The Time Sink

Geek update: I spent more time than I thought last week under Linux. ...as a matter of fact, much more of the home computing time until the weekend was done on Tux than one of the Windows boxes. ...I say "until the weekend" because some of my dink around time on my extended holiday was on Wolfenstein (nee Wolf). Life got interesting and sidetracked off the game plan when I couldn't get any third party video drivers to load, but I finally got that resolved. ...and only messed up the SCSI chain in the process<g>. ...and I packed that project in early last night so I could actually try to keep up with my 'early to bed' scheme. Dunno, maybe that's a Good Thing.

But back on the Linux front... Friday, I realized I hadn't fired Athena, the Win95 box, back up after the rain; I only figured it out when I went to shut her down to replace the battery in the UPS. ...and when I went to fire her back up, I realized I hadn't fired up the file server either.

Hmmm... Granted, I hadn't done any budget work; but I'd page flipped and even posted to the alternate site (a Halloween story; and darn, I forgot to link to the Halloween joke!) So... Time to get moving on the other software available on this machine.

So why the NT box? Play time... I like to have one solid Windows box up with the software suites I use at both jobs available. ...and there are several programs I'm familiar with on that platform that I just haven't learned the equivalent of in Linux yet. Heck, I don't even have all my Linux/Windows connectivity issues addressed yet. ...but that's the story of The Time Sink<g>...

Too much fun... I spent way too much time last night playing with various configurations on the NT box. News Flash: Iomega's new drivers suck dead bunnies; I'll have to locate the older ones as they were certainly Good Enough.

...and I threw Bryce on there just for the fun of it. Man, talk about a learning curve; I think I'll need those tutorials. Lot's of power though. No, I'm not sure why; it just seemed like a good idea at the time<g>.

I do need to get my hardware and base software settled in on that system. Then I can play around with the other stuff. If I continue playing the add/subtract game, I'll never get those covers back on!

"Step away from the computer. ...and slowly and carefully power it down." Yep, that was me to myself last night... No, no problem; I figure as long as I don't argue with myself too much, it's okay (...and as long as I don't lose too many of those arguments). I'd just had a longish day at work; and, when I went to unwind, I had a little too much success with the NT box. ...to the point I found myself putting a Mandrake 8.1 CD in the cupholder way too late at night to allow a good outcome. Nope, that's definitely time to back off...

I must be getting mellow; in days past, the lack of sleep, the trashed MBR and the extra facial hair and howling wouldn't have even crossed my mind until way early in the morning. ...or I'm not as willing to trash a system as I used to be. Nah...

...and in news from the great northwest, as passed along by the illustrious Mr. Beland (no new post; no link<g>): The Gord is back! ...and with a spiffy site makeover and several new stories (heck, I thought he was still doing the motocross gig over in Asia). Shelley really didn't want to believe the one about the lady who dropped her kids off to play games while she went to work. Me? After my street time, I believe anything...

What happened to Wednesday? Man, I lost Tuesday completely, but I didn't expect Wednesday to follow that pattern. ...especially when the staff meeting was canceled; that usually lets me untrack and really roll on the day. I suspect if's time to get an iron or two out of the fire and let things cool off. Ah, well; there's only two more days until the weekend.

Hey, Shelley got a sub job for today! That means I head downtown later, after I drop the boys off at school. If the planned schedule holds, it looks like I'll be back on my winter 0700->1500 workday on Monday, Wednesday and Friday; and I'll be doing the 0900->1700 dance Tuesday and Thursday. The nice thing about the winter schedule is that I can usually blade four days a week, barring rain, heavy fog (real heavy), acts of God and General Managers (including Shelley), and unscheduled kid happenings. Hmmm... So far this week has worked out well.

Interesting... After Shelley got spammed yesterday, I thought I'd check out the current 'abuse@yourplacenotmine.com' status. So I picked seven bits of trash out of the bit bucket and sent them on to 'abuse@wherevertheheadersaid' to see what would happen... Things have changed a bit in the last few months: I received four automated responses and one unsubscribe (under threat of death from one of the automated responses) within a few minutes. The responses varied from "That isn't allowed and we'll look into it" to an excellent explanation of how spammers hijack an address. One came in both Spanish and English; and the one that triggered the automated unsubscribe actually seemed to work.

Interesting, perhaps; but I think the next few days will be more so: all the ones I sent off were from my Frequent Fliers list, repeat mailers who I recognize by the return addresses. I'll let you know if I pick up more or less traffic.

...and this just in: another ISP responds with an actual human-originated e-mail (well, he or she added to the boilerplate). Maybe, just maybe...

...and the rebuild of Wolfenstein continues. I think I'm done with hardware playing; and I think I'm done with my base installs. That means I can either bare metal the system and do another clean install, just keep going and install my suites, or maybe just walk along the edge and throw a Linux distro on the back portion of the main drive... Oh, me neither; I'll let you know how bad I hose the box<g>.

Speaking of things to help one deal with Windows installations and operations, if you need a utility suite, you could do worse than Fix-It Utilities from Ontrack (used to be Mijenix); their suite not only has one of the better registry tools around, but their defragger works fine under NT (and the newer OSs). Oh, and while I'm shilling for them: buy their ZipMagic utility and throw it on your file server or any machine you share files from; zipped files appear as folders to remote machines. I'll leave the implications of that as an exercise for the student...

Okay... It's finally settling in that I'm not teaching this semester. How do I know? Last night I would have been wound up like a top trying to get kids to bed and fix the whatsis and find the other thing and get the grades ready and prep for the lab
a  n  d    a  l  l    I     r  e  a  l  l  y   h  a  d    t  o    d  o    w  a  s   
s    l    o   w      w  a  y     d   o    w     n     .     .    .

So I did. I looked up some stuff on the web. ...and I wrote notes to a few people. ...and I finally chilled down from the week around 2230. This after almost falling asleep in the recliner after dinner.

Today, I have the mandatory soccer game to start the day; then, there are one or two things I need to deal with 'cause there's some rain on the way. Mostly, I need to deal with the fallout from the computer rebuild earlier this week; that pile of boxes from the 'over the shoulder' system makes getting to the workstations a bit of a challenge. ..and there's another project in the queue behind this one!