‘Cause most things true
Are simple and complex
So it is with You
What else should I expect
[...]
You are to me
A beautiful mystery
You are to me
A servant and a King
You’re a beautiful mystery.
Thanks to Caedmon’s Call for taking the edge off the night. Off the last week, for that matter.
Gosh, we suck so bad this year.
You might want to check out this blog if you’re interested in the whole New Orleans fiasco.
Someone so just knocked on my door because I was playing Youngstar’s “Knockin’ Pictures off Da Wall” a little bit loud.
When my roommate Mark answered the door, Kristin and I were in the middle of yelling “knocking pictures off the wall!”
Very funny. Steve, needless to say, was impressed to hear the story after years of disturbing the peace in the dorms. It was only 11:45, for goodness sakes! Everybody just calm down.
Show your graduate students some respect.
So… I just heard a terrible bang from the room above me.
Either this person knows me and is reading my blog, or some little pot needs to stop calling the kettle black. It’s past midnight, and I’m trying to pretend like I’m getting my beauty sleep here.
Get with the program, folks.
It doesn’t help that I’m getting about 20 e-mails an hour (average size 100kb) from the class I am TA’ing for. Icky.
I’m going to go contra-blog and keep a sequential record of what the hell is going on right now.
After having identified that my MBR was corrupted randomly under Windows XP on my laptop (yeah, the one with all the files on it), I managed to boot into Knoppix. I used a wonderful ssh startup script in conjunction with a wonderful ethernet/DHCP script to get an IP on my router’s local network.
The wonderful ssh script set me up a temporary user (“knoppix”) with a password of my choice. I then got on my full-time Linux box and ran an scp (secure copy) from that machine to my NTFS partition that was mounted read only on the Knoppix side. I proceeded to copy my entire “C:Documents and Settings” folder to my big mother Linux hard drive.
I am now ghosting my factory Toshiba install onto my laptop, then I’ll migrate files. I’m hoping to be done around 4:00 AM, since I need to “wake up” at around 7:30 AM for classes. Ghost progress is closing in on 50%.
62% complete. CD 3 of 3. Starting to wonder why I even like computers in the first place. Taking some time to clean up the room.
Hiding inactive icons, SP2 in the queue. 4:00 AM end time, here I come! Wait, how long does SP2 take to install?
Oh, monkey balls.
Beginning to wonder if the MBR is permanently corrupted. That’s why I’m doing this tonight, anyway, so I guess I’ll find out when I reboot into the image. Remember, this is a pre-SP2 factory machine, so I’m going to have to pull the network cable and install SP2 from CD before going public. 92%. Eyes are a bit blurry, but a fresh OS will make them clear up.
100% complete. MBR is not corrupted. Windows XP Professional “first boot” process commences. Would I like some help from a little bouncing question mark? No, I would not.
How the poop could my MBR get corrupted by an Adobe Acrobat plugin? This sure fudged the poop out of my night. Gee whiz, it’s hard not to get profane here.
Could I have fixed this without reinstalling? Probably so. But the ol’ trusty, undocumented “fdisk \mbr” didn’t work. What was I to do?
SP2 is in the queue, we’re about 3 minutes in. Noticed that SP2 has a warning that you should back up your files before proceeding. They should have mentioned something like that when Acrobat 6 is starting up.
Setting an alarm to wake up at 4:00 AM. Assuming SP2 will be approximately 70% done by then.
Completely done with SP2. Rebooting. Windows Updates. Realizing I’d already be finishing up on a Kubuntu install by now. Not going to say anything about how far along I’d be on a Gentoo install.
29 post-SP2 updates, 3 Norton Antivirus update cycles. Waiting and hoping. Probably will install Office, then migrate files, including a fresh install of Firefox and Thunderbird, and all of the appropriate profile migration there.
Thanks go out to Klaus Knopper, by the way, for putting together a system that can save butt like Knoppix truly can.
Also, thanks to Kristin for listening to the play-by-play during the lonely, nervous parts of the scp process.
Office. ‘Nuff said.
Office 2003 SP 1. Horse poop. MS should stop using progress bars. They obviously don’t know what they’re supposed to mean.
Actually, they should all run backwards from Windows 2000 on.
Last Office updates, video drivers, and WMP 10. Almost to that file migration thing, which of course is all that really matters.
Migration commences and looks good. I might get 2 hours of sleep! Once I move the Firefox and Thunderbird profiles I have a working computer…
Firefox profile has been migrated. Thunderbird is in progress. It looks like open source saves the day, night, and early morning.
All done. ‘Nite!
So, here it is:
Machinery’s Handbook
A wallet (I would prefer to pick it out)
Barenaked Ladies – Born on a Pirate Ship
World peace
Barenaked Ladies – Maybe You Should Drive
Barenaked Ladies – Stunt
Subscription to “Fast Company” magazine (I have a discount card)
An extra room in Norman to store and play a drum set
Caedmon’s Call – 40 Acres
Technical Writing Basics
No offense to Sigma, but my current pet project is a Quicken replacement, Win32 compatible, Qt 4.0 toolkit, GPL.
The reason it’s my pet is that it isn’t started. It’s going to use the Qt sqlite driver (instead of blasted QDATA files), it needs to be able to import from QDATA, and the only other meaningful feature is a checkbook reconcile.
That’s it. That’s why I’m toying with writing it; no extra features.
Should only take a few days, even counting the fact that I have never written a Qt program, let alone using the brand new 4.0 library, which is freakin’ sweet, by the way.
We’ll see how it goes. 4.0 is installed to /usr/local on my backup, Kubuntu installation. That took some work, by the way. Ick. Desktop OS meets Development OS.
I think the only slam-dunk way to get into a prestigious school these days is to start up an environmental organization when you’re under 10.
Gawrsh.