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Sunday, 17 June 2001 — Father's Day
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Today my daughter was out of town with the Rochester Blazers softball team, playing in a tournament against some Canadian teams. Good thing I'm not sentimental about such things.
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Monday, 18 June 2001
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Well, I finally have a FedEx Ground shipment tracking number for my motherboard and CPU from PC Boost. It looks as if they should come Monday, June 25th. I placed the order on Monday, June 11th. Two full weeks. That seems really sluggish to me. I'm not too tickled about this. I really hope they got the order right, and the parts are perfect, because this kind of time lag is pretty unacceptable in general. Ah well... It's only another computer, after all. And a solid step down from the bleeding edge, which I generally find to be the best compromise between solid reliability and top performance. And of course, it saves a few dollars as well. I'm not sure what operating systems I'll put on it. Probably a lot of them, since that's not very difficult to do nowadays. Probably Windows 98 SE, Windows 2000 Pro, and Linux Mandrake 8 to start with. I plan to put in as many drives as I reasonably can, to give the various operating systems some flexibility. I wish I could have afforded an even better motherboard, with twin CPUs and IDE RAID onboard, but realistically, I don't actually need them. I expect to have some fun with this stuf. And I'm hoping it'll be fast enough to make it easier to tinker with my Cakewalk recording software. I've always wished I had a little recording studio at home. I'm hoping this might be the next best thing.
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Tuesday, 19 June 2001
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The following courtesy of (unbeknownst to him) this thoughtful Brit. Check out his website some boring afternoon.
So You Want To Be An Engineer?
Q: When does a person decide to become an engineer?
A: When he realizes he doesn't have the charisma to be an undertaker.
Q: What do engineers use for birth control?
A: Their personalities.
Q: How can you tell an extroverted engineer?
A: When he talks to you, he looks at your shoes instead of his own.
Q: Why did the engineers cross the road?
A: Because they looked in the file, and that's what they did last year.
Q: How do you drive an engineer completely insane?
A: Tie him in a chair, stand in front of him, and fold up a road map the wrong
way.
You might be an engineer if:
* Choosing between buying flowers for your wife and upgrading your RAM is a
problem.
* You take a cruise, so you can go on a personal tour of the engine room.
* In college, you thought Spring Break was metal fatigue failure.
* The salespeople at the local computer store can't answer any of your questions.
* At an air show, you know how fast the skydivers are falling.
* For your wife's birthday you gave her a new CD-ROM drive or a Palm Pilot.
* You can quote scenes from any Monte Python movie.
* You can type 70 words per minute, but you can't read your own handwriting.
* You comment to your wife that her straight hair is nice and parallel.
* You sit backwards on Disney rides, so you can see how they do the special
effects.
* You have saved every power cord from all your broken appliances.
* You have more friends on the Internet than in real life.
* You know what http:// stands for.
* You look forward to Christmas, so you can put together the kids' toys.
* You see a good design, and have to change it.
* You spent more on your calculator than you did on your wedding ring.
* You still own a slide rule and know how to use it.
* You think that people yawning around you are sleep deprived.
* You window shop at Radio Shack.
* Your laptop computer cost more than your car.
* Your wife hasn't the foggiest idea of what you do at work.
* You've already calculated how much you make per second.
* You've tried to repair a $5 radio.
Happy Tuesday.
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Wednesday, 20 June 2001
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Yesterday I reformatted my work PC and reinstalled Windows 95C on it. Yeah, 95. Seems we lost a few 98 licenses, and rather than pay twice, we're going to reformat once. I'll be repeating as necessary on the PCs of some other losers. I've since found that Windows Media Player 7 doesn't work properly under 95, nor does USB for this VIA-chipset motherboard. Other than that, there are few differences. All this licensing hoo-hah has taught me one lesson — keep track of the blankety-blank paperwork. And make all PC moves and swaps go through one central person or group, whose responsibilities include tracking all changes, so records stay up-to-date. OK, one-and-a-half lessons.
Another thing I've found out is that there's a ton of new (as in unopened shrinkwrap packages) software for sale on eBay. Most of it's not worth a bucket of lukewarm spit, but there are a few deals there. My policy is to deal mostly with actual vendors, rather than with individuals. I look for "Buy Now" tags, and either buy the item right away with no bidding, or contact the vendor directly to consummate the deal. And always, ALWAYS pay by credit card, period. In case of boo-boos you can always challenge a transaction in writing, directly between you and your credit card company. We just bought a copy of pcAnywhere 10.0 Host and Remote for about $25, and 18 copies of MS Office 2000 Small Business for under $200 a pop. It's out there.
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Thursday, 21 June 2001
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No entry.
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Friday, 22 June 2001
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I guess I'm so busy living my life these days that I don't have any energy left to write about it. The Great OS Downgrade Project continues apace at work, with various unlucky (l)users getting their hard disks wiped and reinstalled. Hey, I did myself first, they can just live with it.
Tonight I have a date. With my daughter. We're planning to go see Disney's Atlantis (ack). As critic Kurt Honeycutt of the Hollywood Reporter puts it:
Essentially, Atlantis is a superficial exercise in techno razzle-dazzle, wedding traditional 2-D animation with digital 3-D effects in CinemaScope.
Ho-hum... but to spend time with my daughter, I'm willing to face more than a mere 96-minute descent into neo-Disney entertainment Purgatory. But it's not so bad. At least Rachel isn't dragging me to see Rob Schneider in The Animal. Yet.
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Saturday, 23 June 2001
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No entry.