It was noon and I was bored and stalking my email. I look, and see a 20″ Sony monitor in front of 54-1412. I walked over to Andrew’s room and told him of the email. He immediately went and sprinted out of the dorm in an attempt to get the monitor that had been emailed to reuse 7 minutes earlier. I went back to my computer after that and then saw someone had claimed the monitor. They lived in EC, so they probably had taken it by then. I called Andrew to tell him, and he came back. After a while, I look again at the reuse list and see another 20″ monitor. This one’s an Apple Cinema Display 21″ 19.8″ viewable. I immediately email the person to claim, and get it. I also see Andrew has claimed the reposted 20″ Sony. I am about to leave and see Andrew. He got the monitor back to his room. I rush over to EC with Andrew. He needed the power cord to his monitor. I got my monitor, put it on the dolly cart, and we walk it back to BC. I clear off a place on my desk to put the monitor, and have a place set up. I then realize I need a power cable to go with mine! Sadly it didn’t come with one, but on the way to return the dolly to desk, I find Mark who has spare power cables. Yay. I hook it up and it works happily.
An update on reuse machine. It is working with Windows XP now, and works with the TV in the lounge. Slowly everything is coming together. I am happy.
Monitors are EXTREMELY heavy. Unless you want to be masochistic, don’t carry it alone. I guess there are those people here at MIT who truly are masochistic.
Here’s an update to my computers. I downloaded the XP install iso from the MIT site and burned it onto a disk. I inserted the disc into the reuse box and tried to install, but was unable to see anything other than white noise. So in search of a monitor that would work, I went to the conference room where I could connect a VGA cable to the monitor. I successfully installed Windows and carried the box up to try and connect it to the TV. All I got was a blank screen. I sighed as I realized I needed ATI drivers to make it work. I went to Zac’s room to borrow his monitor to try and download the drivers, but soon realized the ethernet drivers were missing. Stupid Windows. Maybe I should just give up, install linux, and run Windows under a virtual machine. After all… they’re starting to have 3d acceleration.
Windows is not easiest to use. It just has the most software.
Before I left home in Denver, I sent in an order for a DVI-D cable. This was so I would be able to work on my reuse machine over IAP. Surprisingly, it has already arrived. It took only one day of shipping, and I am happy. The box is currently in the lounge reinstalling XP and working happily. Now I can get that one working and then I will be able to redo my main machine. Wish me luck!
Preanticipate boredom. Hopefully the remedy will come early.
By the way, the new Macbook Pro 17″ was just announced, and the 7-8 hour battery life sounds amazing. If only the price weren’t so expensive.
While speaking of 17″ laptops. Lenovo’s Thinkpad W700ds looks amazing with its second monitor as well. That would be so useful to keep windows to the side while I worked, just to keep me distracted.
I have been using the new distro for a week or two by now and an sadly less pleased with this version than the previous one. I keep having random kernel panics forcing me to hard reboot. NetworkManager also doesn’t work quite as well as I would have hoped. Pidgin was also not working until I deleted my ~/.purple and redid the configuration. Flash 10 randomly crashes or audio gets corrupted. The battery meter is not functioning correctly. The machine turns itself off automatically after about 20 minutes of being unplugged. The battery should last at least a few hours if not more. VLC skips frames while trying to play an HD picture although the same file plays perfectly in Kaffeine. There was a time I could not log into my account from the KDM. I had to create a new user account and copy over config files.
Overall, I am fairly displeased with the number of problems in this version. Many problems are probably because of incompatibilities in the config files from different versions. So, since I need to clean my machine anyway. I am going to nuke my entire machine and start fresh. Install Vista with a smaller partition. Install a clean OpenSUSE 11.1. Leave some space for Gentoo. Install VMware and install XP with hardware 3d acceleration so I can still play games like Age of Empires 2 which won’t run under Vista.
Nuke everything before trying new software. Being clean is good.
Sorry about not having written an entry since new year’s, I just haven’t had a desire to write. Anyway, all I have to say is that new year’s eve did not go quite as I had planned. Nowhere near what I had planned. We were to go to dinner, ice skating, and the mountains to watch the fireworks, but we had a detour that took all night. I missed the exit that my GPS was yelling at me to take, and I mention that Sarah lived around the area. My friend decides to visit Sarah as the two had not seen each other in a while. We were held in the house for dinner and eventually began a game of spades. That lasted until after midnight where we missed the fireworks.
The next few days were taken up by me visiting a few friend’s houses playing a few games like Munchkin. I went to Newnan’s on Sunday and had a nice catching up in his hot tub. It is much more painful to run to the hot tub in the cold than to run from it. We then played Gears of War until we finished it quite late into the night.
Monday began with me waking up quite late and my parents yelling at me to get packing. I arose and ate a lunch of noodles and took my clothes downstairs to wash. As I wait for my clothes to wash, I return to my computer to watch some Simpsons and talk with my friends. As the last of my clothes finish washing, I begin packing them into the suitcase. My mother had already packed a great deal of food so I had to search around for places to put my clothes. I finish up packing and soon after we leave for the airport. I get to the bag check and see my bag weighs 65 pounds. Much over the 50 pound limit. Luckily, I had anticipated this and brought two suitcases, one within the other. I stepped aside to take the little one out and reweighed the bag. 35 pounds. Much better. They send off my bag and I walk toward the security checkpoint. I pass through the metal detector and my suitcase is pulled aside. They ask to look through the bag. The pudding my mom packed needed to be thrown out, and the buns my mom made were also almost thrown out, but were deemed okay. Relieved that everything else was fine, I went toward the trains to the concourse. I get there and very quickly hop on my computer to check things one last time. Luckily Denver International Airport has free wifi.
We all climb aboard the plane and strap in. I sit next to the window and have an empty seat next to me. There is a crying baby in the back of the plane, but I just shut them out with my headphones. Since JetBlue has DirecTV and XM radio, I pass the time easily as my redeye flight goes through the sky. We touch down safely at Logan airport at 4:40 AM and I quickly go to baggage claim 4 to pick up my bag. I stand around watching everyone waiting for the bags to start to come down the carousel. As I look around, I notice a distinct light blue button on a backpack. MIT ‘10. Yes! I’m not the only one heading to campus. I walk up to the lady with the backpack, inquire as to how she plans to return to campus, and ask if she might split cab fare with me because the T has probably not yet started at this hour. We retrieve our bags and take the taxi back to campus. We do our introductions in the car and I find out her name is Tammy/Tammi(SP?). The cab drops us off in front of BC and we each head home. I get back to my room and notice that my beaver I received from Vivian is missing. I interrogate my roommate and Harvard Girl about his whereabouts but the two of them seem to be very vague. I yell at Tim until he searches the room and I am reunited with my beaver. All is good.
Never mention your other friends when you’re with one already. Plans will be ruined by those named Sarah.
Last night Marie messaged me to tell me “yo you haven’t blogged in a while.” Well, here it is. And why is it that I need to be yelled at to blog again? Is it because I’ve been away from the internet? No… that’s not it. Is it because I’ve done nothing? Partly, but still not the main reason. It’s because I like to take my breaks and do nearly nothing. It is a nice change from the normal having too much to do and no time to do it.
I guess I should summarize what I’ve been up to. On Christmas Day, my parents and I went to our cousins on the other side of the city for a birthday party. We didn’t make it home until after midnight. The next few days were uneventful, although I began trying to find an alternative for the broken Xbox360 and Rockband. I found FretsOnFire and Unsigned. They both work with the console instruments and are both free. The problems are that FretsOnFire doesn’t support vocals yet, at least that I can find, and Unsigned seems to have less of a community to help. I was able to obtain all of the Rockband and Rockband 2 songs for FretsOnFire and will hopefully be able to play it on the reuse machine that I got. Yay for IAP projects.
Monday was an MIT Club of Colorado meetup for alumni and current students. It was nice to see how many alumni there were and how successful they were. Later that day, I went to see Benjamin Button. Warning: that is a 3 hour long movie. Get comfortable. It was a very … interesting movie. Especially when the old man who was 7 could definitely be seen as a pedophile going into a little fort with a little girl. My break has not consisted of much besides trying to fix OpenSUSE and its wireless problems. NetworkManager doesn’t want to work properly. And playing Pokemon with Vivian.
OpenSUSE had a festive GRUB menu for Christmas. The penguins were animated too. ^_^
Okay, now I need to get ready to go out with a Yalie and watch New Year’s fireworks.
Don’t be lazy and do nothing. Your friends will yell at you.
The MIT Chorallaries have this one amazing song that I have always wanted to find the lyrics for, but have been unable, so I will transcribe them for you!
