Author: chuma

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.

I just posted this really bizzare article to /. It’s… rather bizzare. No, I have never participated in an orgy.

Marketing guys stole my black IBM keyboard this morning because they needed it for a trade show display. Grr.

I was going to write here on friday, but I guess I didn’t.

I seem to get the most work done on Friday than any other day of the week. That seems kinda bizzare to me. I think it happens that way because I feel guilty for not doing as much work as I should have prior to the weekend, so working like mad on Friday is a way to try and make up for it. Like right now, I’m writing here instead of working.

Tomorrow is Mongolian Hot Pot night. A search for “mongolian hot pot” on Google yielded more results than I expected. Apparently, myself and my friends are the only people who have never heard of this dish and therefore find its name hilarious. As a result, we will probably get blacklisted from Kowloon Dim Sum Restaurant.

so I had to go with NedStat. Grr. Dammit.

csoft broke my counter! Aagh! Death from above!

Yesterday morning as I surfaced from the subway people were handing out flyers outlining why Conrad Black is evil and that you shouldn’t buy the National Post.

This morning as I surfaced from the subway people were handing out free copies of the National Post.

I promise to myself that I will never be so obnoxious that I will get blacklisted from a restaurant. (Mental note: bring a friend next time who speaks Chinese so that the restaurant staff can’t say bad things behind my back)

I think I fixed my computer last night. After much updating and messing about with devices, Win98 is now happy. Note that Linux was always happy – it requires no additional appeasing whatsoever.

I took a great (ok, crappy, but whatever) photo of Jordan and Sari yesterday evening. They were just standing around talking on cell phones and it just looked… so funny. The photo is still on my camera though, so you’ll have to wait for me to get home and download it.

Crap! I’m going to the dentist tonight!

grog. pseudo-monday morning. Up until 1am wrestling with software that suddenly thinks that my CD-R drive can’t make CDs. And the audio CDs I do make only work in half the players I try them in. Grrr. I am a slave to coffee this morning… wait, that’s just like any other morning. slurp.

[tosses CD into player]

Well, my CD player at work likes this CD. 4 for 6 so far.