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WEEK 14 2004

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Saturday 3 April 2004

Saturday - feeling a bit better. Fixed a sprinkler head in the front yard, fertilized front and back, and also spread some fungicide in the back yard. It didn't do much last year, but I'll try again.

Played around a little bit with the linux laptop. I had made the wireless work with my fathers access point a while back and it's lack of WEP encryption, but not my own. So I checked into it - easy, really. There is a plain text configuration file, /etc/sysconfig/nework-wireless/ifcfg-eth1 (or something, it varies with different distributions) which needs the settings for the WEP key. Put that in, do an /sbin/ifup eth1 from root and Bob's your uncle. Hell, it's almost intuitive, I could probably have figured it out from first principles without checking google...

Friday 2 April 2004

Friday - I'be been a bit sick the last couple of days, so no great amount of posting.

Thursday 1 April 2004

Thursday - Netscape is now refusing to download things. I thought it was a problem with a single file, but it is anything. What next? IE works OK, so it isn't the firewall or anything. Probably something to do with the cats walking on the keyboard.

I've been watching Stargate SG-1. Only the sound track is messed up. The musical track is so loud that you can barely hear the actors. Sometimes you can't hear them at all and are reduced to guessing from context at what the mouth motions mean. I don't know if it's the local cable company or the Sci-Fi channel to blame.

Wednesday 31 March 2004

Wednesday - baseball is opening soon, and that reminds me of a football story. Go figure.

Anyway, years ago we had an office pool and one of our female staffers, a programmer, kept winning. We tried to figure out her strategy but couldn't, and finally asked at the end of the season and got her answer: "I pick the most western team." she said. Since her geography wasn't very good (teams in the midwest in particular were often wrongly chosen) she was winning for no reason at all.

I didn't say it was a particularly good story.

But it does illustrate the perils of gambling. The state lottery is over 40 million again today, by the way.

The band was practicing again today. And again I asked them to turn it down and close the garage door - and they did the latter. Probably not the former, I could still hear them. The music wasn't too loud, but the speech synthesizer being used to turn their 14 year old voices into Metallica was really effective - and loud. It gets even better: people were dropping off their kids, with electric drums and guitars, to practice in my neighborhood. Now, isn't that nice? They started at 12:30 and played ( and I use the word loosely ) until five.

Tuesday 30 March 2004
Tuesday - I was sent a link to a...game....a sick, sick, sick game of penguin batting...what's your score?

A pet peeve of mine is when in a movie (usually bad science fiction), solar prominences are shown moving in real time. The footage is time lapse - objects hundreds of thousands of miles across that take a long long time to do anything! Here is a shot of the sun with a solar prominence, stolen from APOD:
:

Monday 29 March 2004

Monday - not a lot to say, just working away. The weather is beautiful - it's a pity to be working sometimes.

I've been looking into SSH, port forwarding and VPN technology, stuff to aid me in accessing a remote AIX workstation. Today I heard that maybe the software I need is available on the Windows PC after all. That'd be nice...

Sunday 28 March 2004

Sunday - Oh, sort of slow. Which is the point to Sundays, right? I wanted to come up to speed on a CAD program, but I kept getting distracted/busy with other things. Took a walk in the morning, looking for real estate in the unincorporated areas to the west. I decided to clean the garage a bit, then tried to work again but it was too noisy, so I messed with the cars, went roller skating with friends, ate dinner, watched an interesting show on straw bale houses on tv.

I tried to work this evening and someone was rocking out down the block. I finally just went and asked them to stop - some guy vacuuming his house with all the doors and windows open, with the BeeGee's turned up to eleven so that he could hear them upstairs over the vacuum! Personally I'd wear headphones, in the closet, with a blanket over my head, if I was a BeeGee's fan!

So, the CAD demo problem I was working on - still about where I was. Oh well, it is Sunday, the supposed day of rest.

No rest for the wicked they say. Hmmmmm.........you don't suppose.....

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: Here is a shot of the Hyper-X in flight yesterday. This is the "stack", which consists of the rocket booster portion, which is white, and built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, and the "flyer" which is black, at the nose. The "flyer" separates from the booster at high mach number in the atmosphere - a new thing - and then the cowl door to the front of the engine opens and the engine stars and runs for ten seconds or so. The SCRAMJET engine is the small black blob under the flyer.

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