Archive for the 'Life' Category

I have some homework that’s due by midnight tonight. One would think that since this homework has a deadline so near and since I know it will take me about two hours worth of work to get it done that I would have picked it up first thing, right? Well, I am really good at finding things to do when there is a task I don’t want to work on. I filled out the rebate form for a product that was recently delivered and got it ready to go. I listened to a podcast while I looked up some information for another assignment that’s due in a couple of weeks that I haven’t started yet. I had some candy and I drank some water. I looked into the newest version of WordPress and the steps needed to upgrade. I noticed that there was a new version of Freevo just released and that got me thinking about DirectFB and df_xine. I looked and saw that DirectFB just released 1.0-rc2 and I downloaded that and started it compiling. I wrote a post for PayPerPost, and I decided to blog about how I’m procrastinating too much.

It’s time to start getting stuff done. I still haven’t decided exactly how I am going to implement it, whether I go paper or digital. Expect progress reports to come.

I have been doing PayPerPost for almost a month. In three days the money starts rolling in. I can’t remember where I heard about PayPerPost, to be honest. All I do remember is how excited I was when I realized that I could make enough money to do something that I would never have been able to otherwise. When the Nintendo Wii comes out on November 19th I will have enough to get the console, an extra controller, and a couple of games. Within a week after the release of the Wii I will have enough for at least two more games. After that I foresee that I will be making enough to pay the monthly rent, or at least almost all of it. That means that I start whittling away the consumer debt that we have accrued as a young married couple that likes expensive toys (and furniture). I never thought that something like this would be possible while I was still in school. But here I am in school and getting out of debt at the same time. I wish PayParPost the best of luck in their business as it has been nothing short of amazing to me and the many bloggers who have benefited from its business model.

I looked for two days for a Ninja costume. That’s what I was going to be for Halloween. I was playing video games with a bunch of guys and one of them asked what we were going to be for Halloween and three people said,

“Ninja.”
“Ninja.”
And, “Ninja.”

So I said that I had been planning on being a Ninja, but that didn’t seem so appealing anymore. I’d have to say the most popular costumes this Halloween are Ninja and Pirate. So I took a sharp left turn and went with Jailbird. The stripes just look cool, and I don’t even have to put on any makeup to give me that stubbly effect!

So I have been slowly learning how to do things the “Arch Linux Way” these past couple of days. I am really impressed with the way it is set up. I still haven’t run into a package that I want that isn’t already in the repositories, so I haven’t had occasion to compile my own software or make any packages yet under Arch. I hope that process is as smooth as everything else so far.

My brand new Nova Tech mini PCI card arrived today, and I was really excited to try it out. I got the kernel module installed and gave it a go. It couldn’t see anything. So I started doing some research. It turns out that the Dell Latitude c600 requires an additional tiny little hirose u.fl cable. You’d think a thin little 4-inch long cable would cost maybe between $3 and $5, but that’s not the case. Dell seems to have forgotten that people might actually need this part and have kindly removed any mention of it from their website. Reports I read stated that calling tech support results in stupefied silence. The item has become a wonderful specialty part that some companies are selling for as much as $40! I found one on eBay for $7.77 plus $3 for shipping. I was hoping to just pop into Fry’s and grab one, but now I have to wait another week for one to come in from Rhode Island.

Speaking of Fry’s, I wanted to check out their prices on 256MB sticks of PC100 SODIMM RAM. So I poured over their confusing grid of memory prices until an associate finally acknowledged me. I asked him what the cheapest price for the RAM I needed was. He punched i up into the computer and then called someone else. I couldn’t hear the conversation. Then he turned back around and said they didn’t have any! I thought he might tell me that all the good priced RAM was gone, but not that I couldn’t get it at all! I only have 64MB right now and I get programs dying for lack of RAM.

One last thing… I was all set to get this ultra-portable laptop ready to go today because all I needed was the proprietary Dell IDE connector that arrived in the mail today. I had to preload the OS onto the hard drive because the laptop I was installing it into has no drives but the single hard drive. I got everything set up to the point where I could connect it to the network and transfer the rest of the files onto it that way. I went to install it and it was too thick! I hadn’t even considered that that old laptop would use the slim form factored hard drives found in current systems. So all that work was for nothing. Now I’m looking for another hard drive.

I bought a 20 GB laptop hard drive off of eBay a week or so ago. I was looking for the cheapest way to get a Dell Latitude C600 back on its feet. It is a pretty snappy machine considering that I got it for free. It had no hard drive or even hard drive connectors, only one stick of 64 MB RAM, a pretty nice battery, and no wifi. So I had my work cut out for me. I ended up paying a total of twenty dollars and some cents for this hard drive. It was sold “as is” which basically can mean one of two things on eBay:

1. I am selling a lot of products and am in too much of a hurry to test them all

or

2. I am a scammer and can sell broken crap without my buyers having any recourse

Fortunately for me the laptop arrived on the same day as the proprietary dell adapter for IDE drives. When I plugged it in it was recognized by the BIOS. I booted up Slax from a CD and the NTFS filesystem still had files on it. They all looked like the usual Windows 2000 files. I repartitioned the drive and formatted it. I ran badblocks on the drive and it didn’t find anything wrong. It looks like I got lucky! Now comes the difficult decision. What distro should I put on here. It’s a 700MHz Pentium 3 CPU. I plan on buying 256MB of ram for it, but so far I don’t have more than the 64MB it came with. At the moment I am leaning toward Arch Linux because it seems customizable like Slackware, but looks like it might be updated more often. I am apprehensive to switch away from Slackware, but I figure I ought to experiment with something new. I’m afraid Ubuntu would be too slow. But that’s probably more Gnome and KDE’s fault than anything else.

I hate the telephone. I hate answering the phone. I hate calling people on the phone. I don’t like the telephone because it is rude. If a person were as inconsiderate as the telephone is they would get a punch in the mouth. No matter what you are doing it just rings when someone enters the magic numerical incantation. When it was first invented it would just keep ringing until the person on the other end of the line gave up. That’s why answering machines were invented and why they are so popular. They make the phone shut up when you are in the middle of doing something. Most of the time when people call me they are requesting information or asking if I can do something in the distant future. When people call for these reasons it really aggravates me.

For the longest time I have been against putting any sort of personally identifying information on the answering machine. I worked for a short period of time in a call center where we called businesses and conducted surveys. I can’t believe I ever took the job because of how much I hate the phone. I actually used to call people for eight hours every day. When we got any sort of recording we were usually able to verify that we had the right telephone number and even, sometimes, the name of the person we needed to talk with (we only wanted people that could answer financial questions about the company, so they needed to be at least a head accountant). You ask the secretary (who we affectionately called the “gatekeeper”) if we could talk with the Accountant or the CFO at the company. Usually asking a vague nameless question like that gets you voice mail. Well, the Voice Mail usually had their first and sometimes their last name on the recording (“Hi, you’ve reached the office of Dale Higgins…”). So then you write that down and call back later and confidently ask for Dale Higgins.

Where am I going with all this, you might ask. Well, I really want to change my answering machine message to simply give my email address and then say something like: “If you have a request you would like to make of Shawn please email shawn dot dowler at gmail dot com. That is the fastest and most reliable way to get a timely response. We are not responsible for unreturned phone calls.” I have another address I could give out that would leave out my last name. I think that might be vague enough. I don’t know how people would take such a message, though. Maybe I could add: “If this is an informational call not requiring a response, please leave a message after the beep.” I figure that that’s probably the most cordial way to handle the situation. Then it’s goodbye phone, hello email!

On my way home from the Church Membership Records Audit I stopped by the dry cleaner’s to pick up Krissy’s clothes she had left there. We always go to the same place where there is a really nice woman that works there with her surly husband. I always hope she is manning the counter when I go to do anything. Today the husband was vacuuming behind the counter when I walked in, ticket in hand. I handed him the ticket and he went over to the clothes roller coaster. When he came back he said it was five dollars. I always pay with a credit card, it just makes things easier to keep track of finances that way. I took out my card and offered it to him. He didn’t move. He just stood there and snidely said, “It’s only five dollars.” So I stood for a second with my hand outstretched, not moving. Then I finally said something like. “Oh. Alright. Let’s see if I have any cash.” I knew I had a 50 dollar bill on me, that was a gift I had received, and it is part of the Wii fund. I honestly didn’t know if I had five dollars. I found one, though, and gave it to him.

I just couldn’t believe that he would scoff at my plastic money. I understand that each transaction with a credit card costs him money, but I would assume that that cost is already factored into the price for the dry cleaning service. I’m just proud of myself that I didn’t get mad.

Our neighbors across the way has a habit of leaving a bag of trash outside the door of their apartment. You’d think they would get it on their way out in the morning, but such is often not the case. Krissy and I thought it might be a nice gesture to take it out to the trash for them when we were already going that way anyway leaving the apartment. After a while it got to be kind of a running joke. The missionaries came over once when the trash was there and they took it down when they left. It looks like the fun might be over, however.

Today we got one of our apartment manager’s infamous letters telling us that we’re doing something wrong. They try not to target any individual for some reason, which only leads to inaction. This time the wording was in the passive voice: “We have received several complaints that there has been trash left outside apartment doors in the hallways of building 1726.” I doubt that it will really stop until someone actually knocks on their door ant tells them in person to quit it and hands them a written letter with their name and apartment number on it telling them to stop or else.

I wonder if they will ever know what happened to their trash when they left it outside their apartment.

I decided that I ought to test out the Dell C600 laptop I got from Krissy’s dad. I only have one stick of 64MB RAM, so I put it in the machine. I popped in a bootable Linux CD and off I went. I was able to verify everything. I ran memtest on it all night, too, and the memory I have now is good. That’s surprising considering that it’s been hopping from laptop to laptop for longer than I know anything about. I got a 20GB hard drive off of eBay that’s on its way. I’m trying to do all of this as cheaply as possible so I took a gamble on an “as is” sale. Let’s cross our fingers. I also put a bid on an Atheros based mini PCI wifi card that someone pulled out of an old Toshiba laptop. Let’s just hope I can figure out a way to connect it to the Dell laptop’s internal antenna.

While I was looking for a PCMCIA network card one of the pictures was of a scantily clad woman. I thought it must be a prank or a mistake, so I checked out the seller’s profile. They seem to be a high-volume seller basically running an eBay-based business selling computer components. The list of their sales showed that almost all of their products had, as the primary photo, which is supposed to be of the product in question, lingerie models posing. I guess it’s true what they say, as the seller seemed to be doing pretty good business.

Krissy was having so much trouble today with staining all four sides of the table legs that she had to figure out a way to hang them up. If we had a garage that would really make things so much easier, but we don’t. Krissy got the ingenious idea to hang the legs up in the bathroom by the shower rod. So I rigged up some twine (hooray for Boy Scouts!) and get it all ready for her to hang them by the bolt near the top of each leg. I must say that it worked out perfectly! That means no more showers until the stain has dried, though. And we have to run the fan in the bathroom 24/7 until the fumes stop wafting off of the wood, but it’s still better than what she was doing before!

Pictures coming soon.