Travels and Images
WEEK 39 2003
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Picture of the Week
Lancaster
Weather
A Year Ago, This
Week
Saturday 27 September
2003
Saturday - my brother in law came by on Friday
night, so instead painting we went to a nice big breakfast, and then fooled
around with computers for most of the day. We got the game machine to talk
to the old game machine via a crossover cable that I happened to have laying
about. So, now all the machine really needs is a better graphics card and
a sound card. We had an old ISA card, but decided it wasn't worth the effort to try to configure without
any documentation - ISA was hard enough
even when you do have the instructions! I'm sure we can pick up a nice PCI
/ PNP sound-blaster compatible card somewhere for $5 or so.
Friday 26 September 2003
Friday - worked a bit on test cases and whatnot.
Not a lot to say. Talked to my friend who is back from her honeymoon, and
who is in no hurry to return to work here, alas. Good for her - but more
work for me. So it goes...
Tomorrow - painting! My father has given me permission to take
another couple of days for that...
Driving into the equinoctal sunset
on the way home...
Thursday 25 September 2003
Thursday - dinner was at Appleby's in Palmdale.
I had some sort of steak tips in Madeira, they were OK, but not memorable.
I helped a bit with geometry tutoring, tried out my friends new DSL ( seems
to work OK ) and took a short walk. Not a lot else going on...
Wednesday 24 September
2003
Wednesday - not a lot of new stuff. Driving home
last night I noticed that the setting sun was directly in my eyes. Since
it is an east-west road this was a clue that we were at the Autumnal
Equinox. We had a nice sunset actually - if I had my camera in the car
I would have taken a pic for the page here, but you'll just have to take
my word for it.
The floppy drive is now working - I'm not sure if it was the drive or
the cable, but I replaced both and it now works. Most of my floppy cables
were 'keyed' and the pins on the motherboard aren't, so that was an issue.
I also turned on UDMA and what-not for the drive, and it seems a bit faster.
There is still a thirty second pause on boot for some reason, but other than
that it seems to work as well as could be expected...
Tuesday 23 September
2003
Tuesday - lots of little things at work - test
cases and what not. Not very interesting. I did look at the one of the CFD
codes that I have source for, and it appears that it would be fairly easy
to parallelize.
Working on the 9-year old's LAN box this evening. With various and assorted
parts it seems to be going together fairly well, once I had convinced
the old 450BX someone had given me to boot from a mystery 5GB hard drive
I had laying about. Not sure what was on it, but it's all been reformatted
now as NTFS space for Windows XP. The floppy drive isn't working - I got a
bad batch not as cheap
as I thought a while back... XP seems rather slow, compared to LINUX
on similar 450BX boxes that I have. I need to defragment and such before I
can make a call on that I suppose.
Monday 22
September 2003
Monday - back to work.
From Fred Reed's
page:
Alone in a darkling wood, with things all about flying and hunting
and growing in a vast ungraspable dance, I suspected that I was in the presence
of something above my pay grade. Just what, I couldn't say, nor of what intentions
or provenance. I didn't think it was much concerned with me. It wasn't physics.
Recently I found the
noted astrophysicist Stephen Hawking quoted, perhaps correctly, as saying
that humanity may be on the verge of understanding everything whatever. Physicists
often say such things, speaking of string theory, singularities, and the
3K background radiation-words redolent of insulation and sixty-cycle hum.
If one may differ with a cosmogonist, I suggest that we understand almost
nothing. And without the slightest disrespect, I note that the brightest of
a large population of hamsters is, after all, a hamster.
Which is something I meant to bring up a while back. While watching X-men and X-men II the memory came back of a question
that some essayist had: "If chimpanzee's had the power to create a super-chimp,
would they create a human being?" And the answer was: no. They'd create a chimp with super strength,
super hearing, super fur, a super sense of smell. Almost certainly they wouldn't
include super intelligence. And neither
do humans, in their hollywood fantasies and sci-fi adventures. Oh,
the occasional mutant can read minds, or is smarter than most (though usually crippled in some
way if so), but none is across-the-board better. It could be just the demands
of the medium, the need for a good story. But I wonder.
Fred's an interesting read. ( Heh - I wrote "reed" the first time. )
Cynical and a bit depressing, but observant.
Newcomb's
Paradox. For no particular reason.
Sunday 21 August 2003
Sunday - the Christening went
off very well Saturday - the infant was well behaved and there were none
of the...unfortunate incidents...that
afflict small children when held aloft in public, which various and sundry
people had recollected beforehand. Indeed, the beautiful church in San Diego
Old Town and the clement weather made it a pleasure to attend.
Afterwards there was a little get-together, where the adults relaxed
with an adult beverage and lunch while the children raced about burning
off the suppressed energies of earlier in the morning, and in the process
inventing a new game for the croquet implements. The improvisation resulted
in only a single bumped knee, so that went well.
Afterwards there was a quick trip to Fry's computers to upgrade the memory
in a windows machine. If you install FPM RAM in a machine that expects EDO
then the FPM shows up as half it's correct size. I used to know this stuff,
but it is rare to see 72 pin SIMMs these days.
Sunday morning was devoted to a delicious blueberry pancake breakfast
by the hostess, followed by naps, and wallowing about in the sybaritically
warm pool. Eventually, late afternoon, it was time to head home to Lancaster.
The Explorer was, as always, a pleasure to drive.
Picture of the Week
Photo Notes: The apse, Church of
the Immaculate Conception, San Diego Old Town.
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