April 1, 2003

i wouldn't say i'm a "patriotic" person, but last week when we were at the bruins game, and again tonight watching the game in ottawa, i do get chill down my spine when the crowd loudly applauds the national anthem.

i tried to get the usb ding-dong to work on the lustre server (so i could just leave it in a closet). i spent at least an hour wondering why nothing was happening when i plugged it in / loaded the module. it turned out that i hadn't built the ohci usb controller driver. oh well.

also i built a shiny, new rh9-based cross-compiler.

i used to like april fool's day, but boy do i hate it these days. there are way too many people who can post their non-funny april fool's jokes where i might run into them. oh well.

April 2, 2003

somehow joe and i managed to trick phil into coming over to get indian. after that, i managed to trick him into looking at our lustre server. a full rebuild of the kernel + lustre and 3 bugs later, i'm able to edit this on a (remote) lustre mount (and also serve it from the local mount), and even save it without it complaining about fsync() errors!

all in all, it's been a good day.

right now on msnbc, they have some reporter in iraq on the phone while he's trying to help rescue an iraqi family or something and there is some firefight going on or something. they had to run out - they were taking fire or something - and it was pretty hectic for a while. i am kinda disappointed that there aren't as many live video feeds as there were last week.

i think i upset my friend chris with some comments i made about the new moz roadmap. it's definitely worth a read, if you have some free time.

anyway, i'm excited (as much as i can get about something like this) about the new plan, since i'm a fan of smaller, split-up apps (apple's tools: iCal, Mail.app, Address Book, Safari) than the larger monolithic apps (Mozilla, evolution). i'm especially looking forward to the split-out mailer, since i'd rather use safari or camino than mozilla-the-browser.

maybe i should go to sleep.

April 3, 2003

i just woke up.

in the dream i just had, phil was over at our place. for some reason he was getting and sending letters and packages there. i had some of my luggage; it was falling apart. i thought it wasn't bad since i've moved a couple of times and gone to europe a couple of times too. but that's kinda crazy.

on my desk i had either a 17" or 20" apple lcd display. we were playing some computer game or something. the whole place was a mess. we had a fish tank like in the sims. nobody had watered it, which was joe's fault. instead of dying, the fish started floating around in the apartment, as if they were in space. then there was some water in the fish tank - it had been there all along.

April 4, 2003

well i started playing ghost recon on elite level, and like halo on legendary, it's a very different (and better, more or less) game. it would be nice if the engine was updated, but i am guessing the multiplayer is pretty good. phik and shaver don't have it, and we don't have xbox live, so i can't really tell.

joe and i were going to go get my driver's license renewed tomorrow, since it expires this year. i am not sure why we were going to do it tomorrow, but i don't think it will happen since the last bruins game of the season is on tomorrow afternoon. joe and i must have seen at least 50 or 60 bruins games this year. i don't really want to miss the last regular season game, especially since it doesn't matter at all.

i'm sitting here watching the iraqi information minister lie through his teeth on tv, and i can't help but wonder what if he was telling the truth and the us gov't was lying? that would probably make an interesting book/movie, but it is pretty much impossible i guess.

sigh, i keep meaning to go to sleep (it's 7:11 am now) but i end up playing a level of ghost recon, or reading some other web page, or waiting for the centcom briefing (which just came on).

lately i've been thinking about how the start of this war 2 weeks ago and in afganistan on my birthday almost a year and a half ago to the day weren't as shocking to me as when the first gulf war started, whichever year that was. this isn't to say i didn't watch the tv when the bombing of baghdad started. in fact, i think i mentioned that i was streaming it to joe.

anyway, my guess is that 9/11 really has had a muting effect on media events or something. i might be wrong, and just want to write that, but who knows.

my friend nat used to have a web page back in at least late '99. i don't know if he has these pages, but i think i'd like to read them.

April 7, 2003

my friend from high school / college lenza was in town for something this weekend. he got to see it snow:

tonight i watched tv:

we had bbq tonight and i am dehydrated.

April 8, 2003

i had some strange dreams last night. i am not sure exactly what was going on, but it had to do with terrorists and the stanley cup.

speaking of the cup, i got playoff tickets for sunday. this will be my third playoff sports game that i've been to (i went to two penguins games when i was in school and they were $13). it should be fun.

April 9, 2003

the crappy pizza/sandwich place by our house has been closed for a few weeks. i never understood how they stayed open, since their food was terrible at best, unless it was mob connections.

anyway, i forgot to mention yesterday that a little sign was put up on the window saying that it was going to become a Subway. i suppose in this day and age it's fasionable to object to large corporations, but i do enjoy subway's sandwiches. with a little luck, they might even stay open until 11 pm, which is almost unheard of in this area.

joe's excited too, but i think it's because he doesn't know that the jared diet isn't 3 footlong double-meat BMT's a day. live and learn, i guess.

speaking of diets, i just realized the only thing limiting my ice cream intake is that a quart of ice cream starts melting before i have time to finish it. i need some sort of refrigerated ice cream holder or something.

i just downloaded a nightly of minotaur, aka "thunderbird" (i think). it seems to use about as much memory at startup as mozilla, but when i click on a url in an email, IT OPENS UP MY PREFERRED BROWSER, rather than opening it in mozilla. yay for progress. also its preferences are much saner than mozilla. also, its icon isn't just the mozilla M, so my friends won't get confused when trying to use my laptop. also...

i just built camino from cvs to get its new googlebar. camino feels like it renders pages "faster" than safari, but going back/forward in the history is much much slower in camino. oh well.

April 10, 2003

two words: commercial-free triple OT

i spent some time tonight specing out a pee cee in case i get a job where i need one. sadly, they seem to have killed my cart so i don't remember what i had, but it probably would be about as much as the 20" cinema display i'd get for my mac.

for those of you who have only heard about fox "news" from the daily show, it's actually just about as bad as they make it out to be. they claim to support the "liberating" of the iraqi people, but god help you if you support the UN being involved in the reconstruction of iraq in any way. unless stern lecturings are your bag.

on deck tomorrow are many more hours watching playoff hockey. hopefully the bruins can pull off a win. it should be a pretty good series. if the bruins can put together 60 solid minutes on the ice (or 100+ if it goes into the infinite OT) they can beat any team. unfortunately they haven't been able to do that much of the season (even early on, when they were winning a lot, the second period would be a bit unfocused).

April 11, 2003

sigh, the bruins lost again and i lost my nhl 2003 playoff in the second round to ottawa. apparently, the bruins have never come back from being down 2-0 in the playoffs, but hopefully they'll win on sunday. or, at least i hope it's a good game. i messed up when we were watching the game today, and we basically ended up missing the entire 3rd period due to me forgetting we were on TiVo buffer. oh well.

i've still been listening to hail to the thief almost constantly, but right now soma (smashing pumpkins, not the strokes) is my favorite song. especially since i leanred how to (lamely) play it on guitar this week.

i spent a lot of today reading reviews of motherboards. i was leaning towards the asus with the nForce2 chipset, but it seems the dual channel RAM stuff is only helpful if you are using the chipset's graphics stuff, and not a graphics card.

i can't wait to see zwan on SNL tomorrow night, since i missed them being in town due to my sister coming. i listened to their album again yesterday; it's still lots of fun.

April 13, 2003

so much hockey. yesterday we watched 2 whole games, and quite a bit of a third, in addition to catching the last few minutes of two more. since the bruins weren't playing, they were pretty good games. it doesn't look good for them getting out of the first round, or even getting back to new jersey. joe and i went to the bruins game today, and well it was pretty typical bruins hockey. oh well. i think we get to watch two or three games tomorrow, too.

i won the easy level of halo today. boy was it easy.

it seems battlefield 1492 was a hit, so i might have to get my pc before i get a job. of course, shaver and phil don't seem to have all that much time for halo so i'm not sure how much they'd spend on bf 1492.

the other day i did six loads of laundry.

friday night they played the greatest american hero theme song at charlie's (it's in their juke box)! i tried relaying it to phik in canada but he thought my pants called him so we'll have to drag him there some time so he can hear the full version.

April 14, 2003

another hockey marathon tonight. the 7:30 start of the wild/avs game meant that when one game was at intermission, the other was playing. it's now 12:16, so i've been watching hockey for a bit over 5 hours.

<shaver_> I am going to mail Cujo a copy of his "Detriot is serious about a Cup" interview when they get swept by a team named after a Disney movie

it happened to be a beautiful day here, and since i don't have a job i could go for a walk and read a little bit in the park. tomorrow is supposed to be even nicer (warmer).

the new safari build is pretty nice. the tabs are a lot more responsive than camino; ie. when i switch tabs the page is there instantly. it still doesn't handle veanne's friends page well, and some other stuff doesn't work right. but, it's not annoying to use (unlike some non-moz browsers), v. snappy, and now have tabs so i don't really have a reason to use anything else. until something better comes along.

some people were giving me grief about getting a pc, since i am a "mac guy" now. i don't really understand that, since i already still have 2 pcs (although i don't actually use them on a daily basis) and will continue to use my macs for my every day things.

i did a couple of changes to it today, after reading some more reviews and stuff. it's probably a good thing i didn't have enough money in my checking account, and have to wait a couple days for the transfer from ing to go through.

i tried playing splinter cell again. it's supposed to be great and fun and stuff, but it's completely boring. and this is coming from someone who's won halo on all 4 difficulty levels, and watched 4 or 5 episodes of dilbert. fortunately, it was just what i needed to make me tired enough to go to sleep.

April 16, 2003

my daily internet affirmation:

Despite the name, Hecht promises the network will be no He-Man Woman Hater's Club.

jacob@krunk:jacob$ whois hemanwomanhatersclub.com Whois Server Version 1.3 Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net for detailed information. Domain Name: HEMANWOMANHATERSCLUB.COM Registrar: BULKREGISTER.COM, INC. ... Creation Date: 22-may-1999

ok that's not interesting. apparently that's not an original term, and was some show or something at some time. oh well.

i am exhausted.

April 19, 2003

[ ed: this isn't very coherent. it sort of rambles at the end ]

hmm i haven't updated for a few days. some clever people might have figured out that it is pretty much because my new pc arrived.

over the past couple of days i've spent most of my time either playing battlefield 1492 or running 3dmark03 to try to figure out why sometimes battlefield 1492 "crashes.". i'm not sure what's happening, but it just exits to the desktop sometimes after a while. it was happening pretty much every 25 minutes when i was playing with phik and shaver, but since then it's been pretty random. i can get 3dmark03 do do the same thing, so i've been changing this and that and trying to run it 4 times.

needless to say, the guess-why-battlefield-1492-exits game is not as fun as battlefield 1492.

anyway, here's my system. i welcome suggestions:

• AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton) w/ AMD retail fan/heatsink
• Asus A7N8x Deluxe motherboard (nVidia nForce2 chipset)
• 2x Kingston HyperX DDR PC2700 512M
• ATI All-In-Wonder 9700 Pro 128M
• Hitachi (IBM) 180G 7200 RPM drive w/ 8M cache (even now i can still hear phil saying, "but are you sure it can write out all 8M when the power goes out?")
• some 300W power supply

at first i thought it was the wavelan interface going up and down (i have a little linksys wusb12 dongle) but i'm getting a good signal with that, and it happened during single player bf1492 too.

i've tried about a thousand different things - mostly video card related - but it seems to be that when i underclock the cpu/fsb (from 166 to 133) the problems go away. even if this "fixes" it, i'm not sure what that even means. hopefully phik and shaver will help track it down, since they are really smart.

i have a whole bunch of things to complain about, from how lame and stupid people are on internet forums, to how much "faster" - smoother and less flickery - moving windows are on my (slower) mac laptop than the new pc (in xp), to how unpolished windows feels (i really am turning into one of those mac guys... sigh) to how crappy the ati tv listing stuff is, compared to TiVo and what i imagine an apple app could be like.

also, the fact that i can choose a different skin for each different part of the ati media center (cd, dvd, tv, etc) drives me bonkers. yes, bonkers. and don't get me started about how there's no "native" theme. the eazel usability people have ruined me for life. back in the day when i used to hack visual basic, bad interfaces would never bother me.

i wouldn't say that i'm surprised by any of this. the fact that it actually booted and i could install windows on it without a fuss impressed me. my college roommate lenza used to have all sorts of troubles with his computer (i think it was an asus+amd+atiaiw too, but 3 or 4 years ago) so i was kind of assuming something wouldn't work. anyway i'm just rambling now. i mentioned that earlier.

April 20, 2003

phik came over, and we did some skating / whatnot and then had some tasty ham-n-cake at the blizzards. we also watched another period or 3 of playoff OT and then the rest of the blues/canucks game. and then tomorrow, staggered avs/leafs: oh boy.

last night, my computer seemed to work fine - i ran the benchmark like 5 times and no crashes. i came back from the dinner and tried to play bf1492, and it died a bunch of times (even with the cpu underclocked). i really have no idea what the problem is, so i guess i'll try calling ati tomorrow or something.

April 21, 2003

i broke down and called ATi today (hands-free is the only way to be on hold) and they suggested getting a better power supply, as i had tried all of the bios settings they were going to recommend.

unfortunately, today was the boston marathon, which makes cross-town (to pcs for everyone) travel a pain. it wasn't all that bad, but it did take a while. i got an enermax 365W power supply. it's the colossal squid of power supplies: thousands of power thingies and stuff. and, it has a thing to connect to the motherboard.

so... i go to plug it in, and... it doesn't boot. i will skip me being confused for a minute, and fast forward to the part where i notice that the power supply IS SET TO 230V! insanity. anyway, switched it to 115V and it boots fine. well, almost. there are some weird graphic things - the windows buttons seem to be off a little bit. but 3dmark03 and bf1492 still don't work.

anyway i'm getting tired of this story. it seems, as joe seemed to find on the internet the other day, that kingston ram doesn't work so weel with nForce2 chipsets. so, i'm going to try to return that tomorrow and get some corsair memory. wheeeee.

and the OT tonight? i don't know if i'll be able to handle tomorrow night.

and family guy being on adult swim? life is sweet.

April 22, 2003

i forgot to mention last night that yesterday morning i was woken up by the sounds of military jets screaming around. fortunately, i was coherent enough to remember that it was patriots' day, and they were doing a fly-by at the red sox game, and i didn't think the world was ending.

i figured out the snacks needed to get my windows box mounting my os x home directories. you have to run Applications -> Utilities -> Directory Access, and set the workgroup (and restart windows sharing). make sure "Allow user to log in from Windows" is enabled for your user in System Preferences -> Accounts. now, the real snack was: if you upgraded your system from 10.1, you need to re-type in your password.

i had to use apple's knowledge base to get that; google didn't end up helping me.

i need to go get something to eat before hockey.

i went for a walk tonight. some trees are (finally) starting to bloom, which was nice.

April 23, 2003

for some reason i've been dizzy all day. it's not so bad now, fortunately, but when i was installing my new ram it was pretty nasty. speaking of ram, it seems i again got not exactly the right kind of memory. fortunately the new ram seems to work ok, since the ram that they recommend is a good 50% more expensive (not counting another RMA restocking fee).

also, my pc has 8 fans in it. this summer will be fun.

speaking of summer, it's still way too cold here. i'm going to try to go to sleep.

shaver mentioned that he's pretty happy with the leafs performance. it's interesting to think that the leafs only won 2 more playoff games than the bruins. but then again, the wild have won one more than the avs.

i'm cold and there are wolves after me.

April 24, 2003

my powerbook is gone. it hasn't been able to use blank cds lately, and there are some dim spots on the display so i took it in. the apple store guy thinks the cd thing is a software issue, but they'll probabbly replace something on the display. that didn't really bother me much, but i figure it will probably just get worse, so it's better to fix it now. i worry that they'll replace the display with one which has some bad pixels. if this goes well i might get apple care on it, since i have to decide witin this month.

but things could be worse.

while i was waiting for some diagnostics to run, some guy came in with his eMac. he said it didn't boot, and he really needed it since it had his thesis on it. oh and his thesis is due monday.

the tech there said there wasn't much he could do right then, and the guy was pretty angy. but not at the tech - at apple.

now, if i was the tech, and i wanted everyone to love my company (something i used to feel back in the day), then i would have done anything i could to get this guy's computer going. as it is, he will never buy another mac again. but, if they get it fixed, or get his thesis off and give him a loaner, then he'll probably not only get macs later on, but recommend them to his friends.

howver, throughout my life, conversations starting with "i'm not telling you how to do your job, but..." generally don't go so well.

phik said he was no longer cup crazy, so we didn't watch any hockey. however, when i was flipping through channels on my pc, i came across the ducks game while it was in 3OT. we caught quite a it of hockey even though we started that late.

April 26, 2003

today i installed windows for the 4th time on my new pc. last night i installed it for the 3rd time. i'm getting pretty good at it, and if i keep this up i'll never have to register XP.

it's also given me quite a bit of time to continue reading dealers of lightning. it really is much better than the other book i read about parc ~6 months ago. while i was reading this, i listened to disc two of 26 mixes for cash, which (right now) i think is one of aphex twin's best albums.

listening to aphex twin and reading about the pioneers at parc makes me wish i felt like i was really good at something (it doesn't matter if i really am or not) instead of feeling kind of mediocre about things. then again, it took them 18 months to do the MAXC, and i have no idea what i could do if i actually stuck with one thing for 18 months.

last night i tried to install rhl 9 on my pc (tentatively named 'milano'). X was very angry: it wanted to go at 65 Hz while my lcd display only does 60 Hz. i refuse to play the Modeline game, because it is 2003. ATi has some linux driver stuff, but only for XFree86 4.2.x.

so today, i installed rhl 8.0. first, the cds i had were bad so i had to re-download/burn them. X worked in the installer, which was a pleasant surprise. it *almost* worked normally, but i didn't get a 1600x1024 option to choose from. ATi's drivers don't seem to work as it doesn't seem to find the agp something or other, probably due to linux not being familiar with my motherboard chipset thingies. unfortunately, at this point i glanced at a calendar and noticed it was 2003 so i booted back to windows and practiced flying in bf1492.

i keep clicking on icons in the quicklaunch part of the taskbar, thinking that it works like os x's dock.

it's almost 7 am so i'm going to try to sleep.

April 27, 2003

the parc book continues to be outstanding.

April 29, 2003

today i went running.

and i got some corned beef, which got simon all excited.

i also spent quite a few hours adding album covers to my iTunes library, now that iTunes 4 is out. i seem to have a lot of albums that amazon claims it only has 1 or 2 of in stock. the rendezvous stuff will be nice when i get my laptop back. it's Ready to Ship, so will hopefully get here before the weekend (although i'm not holding my breath).

the iTunes store is an interesting little thing. there are quite a few cases where it ends up bing a realy good deal - such as radiohead or zwan singles where getting the 2 or 3 b-side tracks would be a good deal at $3. and getting albums like 2112 which have only 6 tracks for $6? i won't even bring up the greatest american hero theme song.

but there are some problems.

the iTunes store doesn't have a lot of stuff yet. i didn't find any: bt, aphex twin, the white stripes, pete tong, led zeppelin, paul oakenfold, zwan, and a bunch of other stuff i tried. and no zwan/radiohead singles, either.

also, iTunes 4 makes "auto searches" (when you have the track list selected, and just type some characters) jump to things in the column that's currently being sorted, rather than just by song name which it used to do. i can understand it doing this, but i used the old feature all the time and i think the new one isn't as good, since i keep my library sorted by artist, not song name.

April 30, 2003

my laptop arrived this morning, literally minutes after i checked its status and it was still listed as "Ready to Ship". yay.

i've been trying to get X working right in linux on the new pc. it seems the gatos stuff is what i want to use (with rh9), but something's not detecting my display correctly, and thinks it can only do 1024x768 (it does 1600x1024).

so, i'm going to hard-code that into the driver, but before that i have to build X. which i don't mind all that much, since this is supposed to be a fast box. it's fun to watch 10 file compilations go by before the disk led goes on. at least that's what i tell myself.

this morning i got a phone call from utah. i don't think i know anyone in utah. (i was asleep when they called)