Spam!

Nope, not unsolicited e-mail, I had Spam for dinner! My roomie and I, in an effort to clean out our cupboards, had spam, creamed corn, and some Mott's apple sauce cups for dinner tonight. I don't think I've eaten Spam in at least five years, still yummy fried, with mustard, nice and crunchy...

LUGgage

I renewed my driver's license today. I'm posting the photo below, it's horrible. I took one look at it and said "Is that really me?" I then felt motivated to go work out at the WRC after work. I look like a hitman for the mafia, only slightly more cheerful.

I'm playing with the latest nightly build of Mozilla today, it's certainly come a long ways from the early days, but I'm not ready to give up Internet Explorer as my primary browser yet. I just wish they'd get the BeOS port back up to date, the three things that the BeOS lacks, in my opinion, are a fully functional web browser, a good IMAP mail client, and multiple user support. Having a solid port of Mozilla would eliminate fill two of these three gaps.

I attended my first CedarLUG meeting last night, as did about 7 other people. I think they'll probably be more beneficial to attend when classes are in session, due to a higher attendance. It was definitely the stereotypical geek crowd in attendance, we wound up watching Ninja Scroll, which left me wondering who was sadder, the Japanese for making something so violent and foul, or the American geeks who dig this stuff so much.

Craptiva

I was at my grandparents' house briefly this weekend. Their IBM Aptiva was "making a grinding noise" so I looked it over. The fan on the power supply was going out. This is a fairly common repair for a PC, as is the CPU cooling fan. I called IBM's tech support number, and found out that the machine was out of warranty (they bought it in February of '98) and that although they could give me the part number, they couldn't actually send it to me or tell me what it cost, I had to call a separate number for that. I called the other number, worked my way through the touchtone menus, and reached a live human. I gave him my part number, and he gave me the cost: $160. Yes, you read that correctly, one hundred and sixty dollars for a part that should cost about thirty. I told the IBM guy that "it would be a cold day in Hell before I paid $160 to IBM for a power supply". I'm hereby boycotting all IBM products for the forseeable future, as well as writing them a nasty letter. My grandparents decided they could live with a little fan noise for $160 (they can take out their hearing aids, they'll never know it's there), meanwhile, I'm considering just buying a new case and motherboard, I could move all of the other components into the new case, and it would probably cost less than $160, assuming I can pick up a motherboard for their K6-233 relatively cheaply.

This kind of price gouging is ridiculous, and of course I can't put in just a generic power supply, because IBM's design is slightly modified to require a specific proprietary style.

I received my new SanDisk USB Compact Flash Reader yesterday. I was tired of the sluggish transfers from my digital camera over the serial port. This is much faster, you access the flash card like a removable drive, and since my camera saves the images in JPEG format, it's no problem to open them on my computer. I bought it on eBay for around $35 after shipping and handling. My local OfficeMax was asking $50 for one!

Tonight is my first CedarLUG meeting! I think it'll probably be a pretty small crowd, since it's the summer, but hopefully I'll have a resource to turn to when I have Linux troubles. I think we're going to watch a DVD on a Linux system too, that should be interesting. I brought along Being John Malkovich and The Bone Collector just in case anyone wants to watch them. I wore my Tux polo shirt today too!

Long Time - No Update

I haven't updated this site since last Wednesday, shame on me! I have an excuse, really! I spent last Thursday in another Windows 2000 training session, where I learned how to update and install software remotely on user machines, this looks like it could save me a lot of time in the future, as well as allowing users to find the apps they need no matter where they go in our college.

I put 600 miles on my car this weekend, traveling first to Mankato for my cousin Jana's high school graduation (see picture below), then to Davenport for a wedding.

Monsoon Update

We're underwater here at UNI. The primary entrance to the University is flooded, with cars stalled in the roads. This storm came up like something from the movies, everything got perfectly still, with just a gentle mist falling, then it turned pitch black, and the storm unloaded on us. In 15 minutes we watched the storm sewers overflow, visibility dropped to about 50 yards, and boards blew off the roof of the building where construction is taking place, fortunately the construction workers scrambled down as the storm was starting.

It looks like I'll be ordering in for lunch today.