Category: Revelation

Not a bad day, overall

Half of our group was off playing golf on company time, so the rest of us figured we deserved a break too and went to Hooters for lunch. Last time I was at one of them was coming back from Oshkosh 2003 when I got weathered in at Muskegeon. Nothing’s changed, except the age dispartity between me and the hot young waitresses is now a few years greater.

I managed to get to UPS to pick up our new iPod Shuffle, but of course being Apple they had to do something wrong and they left out the cable to connect it to our stereo. At least I’ll have something to listen to at work until my new photo iPod comes.

Also, I finally got the FedEx shipping information so I could ship my broken iPod back, so I got to the FedEx Kinkos store and got that shipped off.

And then when I got home with the Shuffle, I find two packages, one my hotly anticipated copy of Bone Wars, the Game of Ruthless Palentology from Zygote Games, and the other my slightly but lightly used new camera, a Nikon Coolpix 8800. Unfortunately it was already nearly dark by the time I got it unpacked and the battery charged, so I didn’t get any pictures to show off yet. But it’s a very nice camera.

More kayaking pictures

Here are some pictures from last weekend’s kayaking.

kayaking/DSCN2129Vicki gets sideways.
kayaking/DSCN2131Traffic jam!
kayaking/DSCN2133

Nothing too artistic or cool, but I like them. It was a beatiful day, but unfortunately the river was quite low because of the lack of rain, and the weir was 95% blocked by a gigantic tree – I probably could have pulled myself through the gap, but I didn’t have any confidence in Vicki’s ability to do the same so we turned back instead.

iPod Number 6 Progress

I spend a lot of time with an Apple support today. He wanted me to go through all the steps with the iPod Updater and iTunes that I’d already been through last night. All the time I kept whining about how many times I’ve gotten dud iPods in the past, and what an inconvenience it was. Finally, after exhausting all the other options, he said “I’m going to transfer you to another iPod specialist”. Oh, great, I thought, another hour going through all the same stuff. Instead I was on hold for 20 minutes or more, and the new guy finally came on he asked me for the dispatch numbers for all my previous iPod repairs. (Once again Apple proves itself incapable of looking up the information in their own damn database – idiots.) Anyway, he tells me that they’re going to give me a new Photo iPod! Score one for the power of positive whining. So I said “well, as long as you’re going to give me a new one, can I pay the difference in price and get a 60 gig one?” And he said “Sure”. And so evidently I’m goin got get a brand new top of the line 60 gig iPod.

Woo hoo!

I’m da man, baby

Our “feature players” are computers with no keyboard, no screen, just a tiny little 4 line dot matrix display with a few touch buttons. One of our sales and demo sites, in China, had a little problem – due to a bug in the version of software they’re still running they desparately need to rename a file before tomorrow morning. And in order to connect a keyboard and screen, or even a network cable so they could ssh in, they’d have to remove it from a rack and move it out of the projection booth. Don’t ask me why.

There were around 5 people at work trying to solve this problem, including my supervisor, the guy who signs the POs to pay us contractors, and two other developers. They called me into the meeting to discuss it at 4:00pm. At 4:15 I’d finished explaining how I’d solve it. At 4:30 I had a first burn of a CD that would solve the problem. At 5:00pm I’d fixed a couple of strange little problems with the first two cuts at it, and had an ISO that they could email to the site in China, have them burn it, and put it in the DVD drive and fix their problem.

(Technical details follow, you might want to skip this part)
Continue reading “I’m da man, baby”

Progress, of a sort.

I fixed yesterday’s problems with the machine locking up every time I tried to burn a DVD by opening up the case and reseating all the cards and cables. Yeah!

Last night I worked on setting up a new computer for the flying club’s ops center. The old one started freezing up and dying about a month ago, and so I took it home to work on, and then never had time to work on it because of the move. Even after reseating everything and cleaning, it still freezes up after a few minutes of operation – it continues to work and the screen refreshes, but it no longer responds to the keyboard and mouse. A club member donated a machine which was even slower than the original (400MHz versus 550MHz) and has less ram (384Mb versus 512Mb). But it’s adequate. I installed Morphix Linux on it, which probably isn’t the best choice but it uses XFCE4 as its user interface unlike most small Linuxes that use IceWM or Blackbox or Fluxbox, which look like somebody with really bad colour sense and latent depression tried to copy the worst features of Windows 95. XFCE4 uses a Mac OS X-like application dock, and uses bright pastel shades so that it looks like something out of this century. The ~/Desktop/Autostart directory contains a script to start up Firefox with a special home page with some links that I find useful.

I stripped the stuff that users shouldn’t be doing off the menu bar, and set it up in /etc/init.d/xstart so that when a user logs out, the user’s home directory is blown away and re-copied from a read-only file system “safe”, and the display starts again. That way nobody has to worry about any of their web cookies, passwords or other cruft being left behind. And because it’s Linux, I don’t have to worry about them installing stuff or getting viruses or spyware.