Tom at 16

Week of February 3rd, 2003

Latest Update: Monday February 3, 2003 07:50

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Saturday Feburary 8, 2003

I know, I know... USE that new digital camera of your's Tom... Post pictures!!! Tell us more. Patience my friends. I'm in the enviable and rather amusing position right now of having more tools and toys than I can currently keep track of ;-)

Left is Kronk. Right is Leah's new desk, new LCD, my new Maxtor USB HD, the Linksys USB wireless adapter (atop the scanner), and a newly-minted Janus (Well, old Janus sprouting a clean install of XP).

Good grief. And people tell me Linux is difficult and/or complex to install. As noted, I installed XP on Janus for Leah. Which involved blowing away the existing Linux partitions and starting over. So I installed XP. Reboot. Then I installed SP1. Reboot. Then I went to the Windows Update site and pulled down all the latest security fixes. Reboot again (Hey, wasn't one of the prime initiatives of the XP program to rid the world of multiple reboots?). Then up pops the little icon on the task bar informing me there's some new security patches I need to install. Huh? I was just there and installed them all. Nope, there's more. And two more reboots. Then I dig out Norton Anti-virus and install that. Reboot. Update the virus definitions. Then I decided to install Norton SystemWorks -- just cuz it was sitting on my desk at the time. But I'd already installed NAV, so when the install options came up I de-selected the NAV from the SystemWorks CD. The Norton installed interpreted my actions to mean I didn't want NAV on the computer, so it removed the copy I had just installed. Siigghhhhh. By the time I dug out all the requisite CD's, installed some apps, and make a backup image, the whole process cost me something along the lines of five or six hours. By way of contrast, I had RH 8 installed on Kronk in under 40 minutes; within 50 minutes I was working on a document in OpenOffice.

Am I happy with Kronk? Well, yah, I guess. For the first time in my long and distinguished career of buying/building systems, this one is just a tool. A nice tool, mind you, but a tool nonetheless. I've been hacking on RH on Kronk for 24 hours now, and everything simply works as advertised. Which, on reflection, means I'm happy. Put another way, I don't have a lot of time for Gee-Whizz, or tuning of the carburetors -- I just want the damn thing to work and get me to the grocery store. Long connecting rods impress me a lot more than a set of polished and ported heads these days. If I just lost you, think torque instead of horsepower. While the concepts are related, they're two very different beasts. One gets you down the quarter-mile fast; the other lets you cross mountains with 100,000 lbs on your back.

Is it fast? Yeah, relatively so. Kronk's dual 2000+ Athlon's load KDE faster than Janus' dual over-clocked 450 MHz Celerons, but that's to be expected, no? The real test will come when I emerge X and KDE under Gentoo, and that won't be happening until next week. Tonight Leah and I are escaping from the kids for a couple hours, and tomorrow I plan to spend some time catching up with my friend Billy.

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Friday February 7, 2003

It has indeed been a tad chaotic around here... I've been fighting the flu since Monday; Leah's got a sore throat and not much in the way of a voice; Danielle's got a raspy cough; and Landon's nose won't stop running. 'Tis that time of year I suppose. Add to the fray the fact Leah's working a full 40-hour week now, which means I've got to get Landon to daycare on day's when I've got a full plate. Unfortunately, Landon's having "issues" with daycare right now -- crying, fussing, and telling me he doesn't want to go, but not why. Add it all up, and I've had some really long days this week.

I added a new system to the "stable" yesterday. Kronk (from Disney's The Emperor's New Groove) is a dual Athlon 2000+ system with 1GB of DDR RAM (two 512 DIMMS with two slots still open), an 80GB hard drive, a 64MB nVidia-based graphics card, SB Live, a 4-port USB 2.0 card, a DVD, and a CDRW. All pretty standard stuff (other than the dual CPUs). What sold me in the end was the packaging. The system is in a full (well, 3/4) tower case with two card high velocity fans moving the air around. All the drives are on quick-release rails. There's a USB port on the front of the box. The cables used are of the high-end, round, steel-braided variety. There's lots of room to work inside the case, and everything is tied up and arranged neatly. In other words, functional and nicely presented.

I didn't really think about it too much at the time, but when I was unpacking everything I realized my purchasing decisions involved a number of "firsts". Firsts for me, that is. This is my first Athlon-based system. This is the first time in many years I let someone else build the box for me. I did this for several reasons: Warranty is easier to arrange should it become necessary; I wasn't saving that much by buying a package versus individual components; as noted, I liked the overall system; I didn't have time to comparison-shop a dozen different components; and I wanted to simply open a box, plug the sucker in, and turn it on. This is also the first system I've purchased in years that I didn't go with SCSI. In addition to the system itself, an external USB 2.0 hard drive (Maxtor) for backups and file transfers, a 15" LCD monitor (for Leah; I work at 1600x1200 and any LCD monitor that supports that kind of resolution is worth almost as much as a new car), and a Linksys USB wireless adapter -- all new technologies for me.

For the next couple days, I'll be playing musical computers. My old dev box is going upstairs in our bedroom for Leah. It'll connect to our network via the USB wireless adapter. I'll strip RH off the system and install XP Pro (Leah's preference). She'll get the new LCD monitor, plus we'll connect all the peripherals to this system (printer, scanner, etc). I rarely print anything; Leah and the kids print stuff all the time.

I'm going to take my old Compaq Deskpro (anyone remember Donovan?), and put a copy of Windows ME on it. The kids can use it to play games on. It won't be networked.

My new box already has a copy of RH 8.0 on the front of the drive (which I'm working from right now). I tried RH 8.1, but it froze two minutes into the setup process. This weekend I'll carve up the rest of the drive and start building up a stage one Gentoo installation. Fun, fun, fun...

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Tuesday Feburary 4, 2003

Frankly, I have not a clue what happened to my day. I sat down at my desk about 5am, opened a browser, and started to research something I had stumbled across last night. From there things proceeded in a relatively routine manner: Breakfast for the kids, make a lunch for Danielle, sort through the night's email, phone call, another phone call, outline an IBM piece due next week, more research, more phone calls, more research, dinner, more writing... and suddenly, I was horrified to see it was almost 10:30. PM. As in, past my bedtime. My how time flies when you're having fun...

I'll have to catch up tomorrow. On the list: RH 8.1 (finally got it installed on another spare box), and Mulberry for RH 3.0.1

BTW, thanks for all the reader feedback from my post yesterday. Ironically, I'm in roughly the same percentile as President Bush -- about 60% popular in my views ;-) ;-)

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Monday February 3, 2003

I'd love to tell you I had a quiet, relaxing weekend with my family, sans anything electronic. I did not. Instead of dozing on the couch or lounging in a hot tub with a cool Mai Tai in hand, I spent the weekend fixing OP's computers. The good news is I was largely sucessful; two computers in two days, reborn from bare-metal, problems resolved, software restored, and all partridges returned to their respective pear trees. The bad news is I feel about as fresh as an overcooked pot roast. C'est la vie. My goal this weekend was to quit procrastinating, clean up my TO-DO list, and once that was done, make a conscious effort to keep my damn mouth shut next time someone tells me all about some woe they're experiencing with their computer. Listen, nod at the appropriate moments, look sympathetic, but whatever you do Tom, do NOT let on you understand a word they're saying.

"You write about computers, don't you Tom?"

"Yes I do. But I really don't have a clue what I'm writing about. I just make stuff up as I go along..."

Yes, the destruction of the shuttle Columbia Saturday morning was indeed a tragedy. I watched the early reports filter into CNN throughout the day. And the assinine speculations. Survivors? Er, sorry to be callous folks, but when a glider made of composite materials, travelling at 18 times the speed of sound, at a height of 200,000 feet, experiences a structural failure survivability is an abstraction.

And while I, like the rest of the world, feel sadness for the families and for those impacted by the disaster, let's get on with things shall we? A full day of in-depth interviews and reporting is sufficient. I do not want to hear any more live, up-to-the-minute reports from a mayor of some town in Texas I've never heard of [This is Joe Nomind reporting to you from Someplace in Texas. I have no idea where, exactly, I am or what I'm supposed to be telling you, but rest assured, we're monitoring the situation and will keep you apprised of any new or novel developments]. And the one I like the best? The couple out for dinner in a local diner somewhere in Florida. They're being interviewed, and reassuring the camera just how bad they feel and how deep a chord this disaster has struck in them. Mmm. So why are you out for dinner? And why can't you stop grinning?

I consider a shuttle flight similar to a military operation. Participants are well-trained and fully aware of the risks involved. And sometimes, shit happens. And when you're "dead sticking" an aircraft/spacecraft at 18 times the speed of sound, a lot of shit can and eventually does happen.

Which doesn't mean I don't think we should mourn the loss of so many bright, eager, and dynamic individuals. I do, however, think we should stand aside and let the investigation proceed. I also think CNN needs some new producers.

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