Bobbis.net

So, Monday afternoon, evening and night I was busy moving. Meri came by to help with assembling some furniture for us during the time she was able to help out (Thanks). I got my bed, Tom's couch, and a bunch of other things moved in so that I can spend the night. Gaila was also a big help with assembling the rest of the dining set and helping with a bunch of heavy lifting and being handy.

Colin and I found that the Internet is not working yet in our building. According to the instructions we are supposed to go to their web site and register our NICs. Though nothing is accessible form the apartment, and when I go to their web site the registration process does not work. First problem is that they don't have our complex in the list of properties they service. Second, the username for the account is suggested to you and comes in the form of a truncated concatenation of your last to first name (example JohReari), no way to enter your own username. Then when it asks for a password to assign to your account it thinks you haven't filled in the password field. Though, by looking at their site I can understand that they can't really do anything. At least there is a phone number, hopefully Colin called them or I can call them when I get home.

I still need to move 2 desks and my dresser, so there is still a lot of work to do. I hope we can have the apartment figured out and clean by the weekend.

Pictures when things a cleaned up :-)

So, I'm finally getting around to packing for my new apartment. I got all the utilities lined up and I know when we will be getting in. Mom has been on a shopping spree with the excuse to buy stuff for my apartment and the camper. I am attempting to clean up this mess down here and organizing what I will be taking and what I will be leaving. Doing stuff that hasn't been done for 15 to 20 years (example cleaning out my desk drawers). Monday is moving day for Colin, Gaila, and I (and hundreds of other people in town). If you want to help out, just give me or Gaila call. I have class Monday 10 to noon and will be taking the afternoon off from work to do the moving.

Anyway, it's time for dinner. Laters.

So, it has been a little while since I've posted last. I took a picture of my nice work setup:

Now that is out of the way, I have set up my new Dell computer, and find that it blue screens overnight with a memory parity error. I run all the test on the service partition and it doesn't find anything wrong anywhere. I'm going to need to get some memetest action going on it now, and/or reinstall Windows (I'm running the factory installation for the time being, which makes me wonder about why I would have a problem straight out of the factory).

Aside from my computer, I called on Sunday night to come fix a Mac (yeah, something I'm really good at). Turns out the HD was blown away and I had to format and re-install. Though, since they didn't want to spend money on an OS upgrade, I was stuck with reinstalling from the original media running 10.1 (gasp!). At least I got paid for it.

Now, today, I had an appointment with the foot doctor to take care of an ingrown toe nail. I am now setting here with an aching toe that needs to be taken care of. Hopefully, I'll be all good and healed by the time any heavy lifting for moving will take place.

So, there we have it. If you want to waste a lot of time I suggest checking out Planarity. Gaila and I have been spending a bunch of time playing with this lately. She has gotten to level 17, and I am going on to level 10.

So, I picked up my computer from Durham yesterday over my noon hour. I decided that I would use my display here at work before I move to my new apartment on the 1st. I got this crazy idea that I could adjust the display height so that it would be on top of my built in PowerBook display and I could go dual monitors at work. This turned out to be pretty cool. I even was able to play two videos at the same time, one on each display. Here's the pic of the setup at work

I later set up my computer at home on my KVM. Though I plan on formatting and reinstalling when I get to the apartment.

• 3 bananas
• 2 eggs
• 2 Cup Flour
• 3/4 Cup Sugar
• 1 tsp Salt
• 1 tsp Baking Soda
• 1/2 Cup Nuts (if desired)

Bake 1 hour at 350° F

Wow, now this is an omen when trying to configure a difficult conf file.

Well the best video I've seen so far of the implosion is Here (62 MB, Right-Click Save As, Language may not be work safe, mirrored here from fortis.student.iastate.edu). You can also find more information at the rofflehaus wiki.

Well, I go to pick-up my computer at 4:30 or so and find that they close at 4:00 instead of 5:00 as listed by their old web site which was the site as of when I ordered the computer last Wednesday. They finally moved (but put no indication of the move on the old site) to http://www.it.iastate.edu/sales/. I will now have to wait for tomorrow sometime to pick it up now. Grrr.

So... Monday, I wake up and check my email. I got a message saying the Meeting Maker server was down, so I try to remote desktop in to restart the service, only to find the machine is not responding. So I had to rush to work in order to get it back up and running again. Meeting Maker hard-froze OS X Server! The rest of the work day goes by as normal. I called IT Computer Sales for the status of my order. They said Wednesday or Thursday.

Monday night is going down to Des Moines to do stuff with my cousin's computer. In return they took Gaila and me out to Outback Steakhouse (YUM!). After getting things all setup and a crash course on Palm Pilot I picked up Dad from the airport. Long day, but a pretty good day.

Today, I wake up to no important emails. But when I get in the door I find several messages about the WWW server being down. Sure enough Kernel Panic, SCSCI errors and a blinking light on the RAID. Simple restart, things are back to working. I spend most of the rest of my free time compiling and installing Nagios so that perhaps the next time a server goes down, I'll get a page. So far, only 2 servers, two days in a row locked up while Tom is gone. I still have 7 more days to watch over these guys, and I hope that is the worst. (It is common for large problems to happen while Tom is on vacation. The last two years was a major virus outbreak on campus. We're keeping a close eye on the AV server here. )

After taking care of the server problem this morning, I got an email from my instructor saying that the class will be watching the Towers Implosion. We saw it on Channel 13 without sound and then had class. I totally forgot about it until that email came. I was courteous enough to let Nick know and bring my co-worker to class to watch it.

During class I got a message on my cell phone that my new Dell system has come in. So I'm going to be leaving right now to pick it up. So, it's time to go.

So, last weekend (the weekend before last), I was up in Grundy Center for a family thing. My cousin approaches me and asks if I could come down to fix a computer, I agree and we part ways. So, now I am scheduled to go down to my cousin's to work on her computer. I give her a call to find out the details so I know what to expect and what stuff to bring as she is only on dial-up. So, anyway, I find that the computer she wants me to work on is an Ascentia 810n. I figure it was some crazy off-brand, but ask her when it was manufactured. The response, 1994. Ohhh. You want wireless on this thing you say?

I do some Googleing and find an old BYTE article that describes this machine. I find that it's a laptop, 486DX2 (pre Pentium) with 20 MB RAM and 510 MB hard drive. My thought is that you can barely get Windows 95 on that sucker.

Luckully, she has other computer work to do. She needs a new Palm Pilot configured. She mentioned Zire, so I know it is at least still supported by the manufacturer. As for the notebook, I don't think I can do much for it other than sell it for $1.00 in a garage sale or take it to the recycling plant.

I guess, at current market rate, dinner for me and the girlfriend is about par for the work I'm going to be doing.

So 10.4.2 came out, and now I have to restart my laptop with an uptime of 33 days 6 hours 30 minutes. (June 9th I believe?).