Category: my ramblings

Finished my crazy hardware swap-around yesterday. Just updated my Hardware page.

Installed 128MB of memory and a SB PCI128 last night. Rockin’ out hard. I didn’t get all of my hardware moved around yet though. That’s for tonight. Then hopefully I’ll get around to doing NewtDump.

I’ve been listening to this song ever since I got involved in this contest. I think I’m going to have to buy the album.

my god, I’m tired this morning. Alarm went off at 6:30, I turned it off and then fell back, saying “I’ll just lie in be for a few minutes…” Woke up again at 7:10. I guess it didn’t help that I got home at 1 and stayed up until 2.

Looks like this afternoon I’m gonna pick up 128MB of RAM and a new soundcard for my machine. Mmm, ‘lectronics.

Until last night I totally forgot that I have to get a corsage for the formal next week. Crap.

Plan for tonight:

• Buy memory and soundcard with Calum before catching the GO train
  • Memory – 128MB PC100 DIMM from Sonnam
  • Soundcard – Probably a SB PCI 128 OEM from wherever.

• Go Home and install new hardware – reshuffle CD-ROM drives etc.
• Work on NewtDump – tonight I want to implement:
• do the 8-bit character translation thing using the code from Steve Weyer
• Automatic filename generation
• Add more stuff to prefs – default download directories?

Just had lunch with Calum. Apparently him and his friend Dave have coined a new term: chillaxin’, a combination of chillin’ and relaxin’. I personally don’t think there’s much of a difference between the two, but whatever.

Last night I discovered Bubble Tea for the first time. What is Bubble Tea? That’s what it is.

I’ve posted the Degrassi Drinking Game written by my friends. Note: not written by me. Really.

I just read this entry from the latest “Summary of Police Activities” post to the uog.police_security newsgroup:

Jun 04  08:44   Fire Alarm - Athletic Centre.
                ACTION: Guelph Fire and University Police attended.  Found to be caused by water.

If anyone can explain this to me, please do.

People drink coffee here like fiends. I went to get another coffee at 10:40 and the first pot of the day was already empty.

Went to the Guelph SLIC conference this past weekend. It KICKED ASS. I met a ton of people, made great new contacts, learned lots of stuff, and had a great time. Now I’m really looking forward to going back to school.

Still don’t have any transportation or a place to stay for OLS though. Crap. Gotta get moving on that soon.

I feel really busy lately, but I’m not sure why. I’m always saying “I’m so busy!” but then I look at what I’ve got on my plate and it doesn’t seem like that much. Let’s make a list:

• working hard at Maptuit
• working hard on NewtDump
• organizing stuff for the College of Arts Student Union and the College of Physical and Engineering Science Student Council at Guelph
• piecing together my new Windows 2000 partition om my computer
• the normal website maintenance, including adding more stuff to Newton Resources
• generally being involved in the Newton user community: answering people’s questions via e-mail and newsgroups, conferring with other respected people in the community, various projects that come up
• soon, might be doing website development for the Guelph Campus Coop
• let’s not forget spending time with my GF and my friends 🙂

Is that a lot of stuff?

Haven’t had much time to write here lately, especially from work. Been busy. Here’s a quick recap:

• Won both competitions at the 5th Annual Toronto LEGO Robotics competition.
• Backed up and then formatted my C: drive last night, after my Win2K upgrade didn’t quite work out as planned. Put a fresh install of Win98SE on this morning which I’ll then upgrade and *then* I’ll reinstall my applications.
• Going to Guelph this weekend for the Student Leaders Interacting and Collaborating (SLIC) conference on campus. w00t.
• In July I’m going to the Ottawa Linux Symposium and hopefully that weekend I’ll also be able to fit in some whitewater rafting with the CS Club.

Sigh.

I could stand my replacement Keytronic keyboard for about six seconds before I felt like throwing it across the office. In my cupboard, however, was an IBM Rapid Access II keyboard. This is similar to the black IBM that was stolen from my desk this morning (damn you, marketing!) but has dumb “Internet” keys, and volume/CD controls. Of course, since I’m running Linux, none of these keys do anything.

Only after a full hour of searching on Google did I finally find rakd, the Rapid Access keyboard daemon. Using this plus a small change to the OS kernel, I can use those dumb looking buttons for something useful. Yay.