Tag Archives: ancient computer

Drifting in a Netherworld

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Fall. Well not officially but still… everyone can feel it. Summer’s warm embrace is loosening and slowly turning into the cool of autumn. And haven’t enjoyed it a bit… not much time off. And now the sickness. Apparently my latest illness which seemed to be fading, has struck my sinuses. Now I have had to deal with this quite painful secondary infection… So much for time off. To top it off my knee-jerk coughing spree kept me up till 4:00 AM yesterday night. The only thing enjoyable was a reading a VERY depressing Japanese (Yeah for English translation) animated novel. Well maybe not enjoyable but at least I least I felt better about my own situation after it.

Fortunately I have been feeling better with each passing day. Mostly thanks to intensive pill-popping. Of course, to make the experience more exciting, my condition always seems to worsen in the evening. Lovely. So I decided to get some work done. I have updated my Linux box recently, with a newer version of udev, a new kernel (which I soon found to be broken with a new implementation of the Alps touchpad driver…) and few other things. I cleaned out a few old things, like useless libraries, a few games including Quake 3 Demo (sorry it was just too bloody) and UT2004 Demo (love the fast action, but I don’t have time to play), and best of all Mozilla. That’s right! Now I have only Firefox and Thunderbird… without all the additional bloat. I also
threw out the Gentooized version of Eclipse, and got a newer copy for my own personal use off the Eclipse.org site. A few minutes later (and DSL reconnects), I had everything I needed. Sort of. My update kept on crashing with the configuration of wings (awesome 3D modelling program), but that bug report I sent in yesterday paid off. I am currently in the process of
reemerging a few kernel dependent programs, and my update.

I have given up on my old laptop. The not-so-hot release of FreeDOS now lives on it. What a change I might add… I really do prefer a Unix system… but at least I can play my old DOS games again. Weee… OLD SCHOOL!!!

As for back-to-school (university) preparations, I am debating on whether to take PEY or not… and whether to pursue a degree in bioinformatics (I suck at Bio and Chem labs and their reports :() or take that one icky statistics course and take the AI courses. I would really love to hack robots (especially space probes/drones/rovers) as a job^H^H^Hcareer.

The Shingle Crab Cometh?!?

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The universe saved. Again. But children beware!!! The shingle crab has come, and he is going to eat you unless you help pay his university tuition. Yes, today was another day in the re-roofing saga. Mostly I hopped around the heap of old singles we had pulled off yesterday. This was apparently an interesting sight of me in my green fishermen hat, black shades and a blue/white mold mask on my face. I guess the mold mask really was the oddity, but hey, its ragweed season again. The last thing I want to do is to inhale litres of air filled to the brim with pollen, mold and dustified shingles. Anyways I hopped around the pile like some sort of a humanoid crab, and gained the stares of a few children and teens passing by. Normally I get my share of anonymity [sic] and no attention. Hence, I became the shingle crab from outer space. 😉

Re-roofing is going at a good pace. We cleaned up and boxed all the shingles, and have made 5 trips to the local CRC (dump). Probably only 2 more visits are needed. My Dad only has to replace the window sides, and add a bit of ice protection to the windows. Tomorrow he will probably get to putting up shingles… I hope, and if I have anything to do with it.

As for life, nothing much is happening. I have been fighting with Slackware to install it unto my ancient computer. After an exhaustive battle, I decided with going along with muLinux. It maybe a mini-Linux but it is pretty much everything I am going to need, (workstation, X11, GCC, Perl, Tex, JVM). Then I can get around to writing my epic, which I am calling Solation One until I come with a better name.

I hope that once this roof is done, and everything for school is prepared I can get around to rebuilding my non-existent, shattered social life.