Random Fluf Archive

Life continues to be interesting. As in the oft-quoted (if apocryphal) Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times!" Yes, these are interesting times indeed.

For instance, my bout with unemployment was/is interesting. I gave myself up to the Lord, asking Him to meet my needs. So the first Monday of my joblessness, I made the official phone call to New York State and went through the phone menus, pressing the appropriate buttons and saying the appropriate things. I was officially enrolled in the ranks of our nations unemployed. Once again a statistic. Then the next day, my boss called and asked if I could go out to an IT client and fix their problem, for a previously-agreed-upon consultant's rate. OK, sure.

On Thursday, my boss called again and asked if I could come in and work a day. Again, sure. Then he asked me to come again on Friday. Then he asked me to come again for the whole following week. And then the week after that. Getting the picture? I was officially unemployed, but still working full-time. That went on through year's end. Then at the beginning of January, my boss decided that since he'd been paying me anyway, he might just as well make it official and rehire me. So they put me on what New York State calls a "shared work program." This lets employers do things like cut everybody down to four days a week with some financial help from NYS Unemployment Compensation, rather than achieving similar cost savings by simply laying somebody off completely. So since the beginning of the year, I've been working Tuesday through Friday, and eventually New York will cough up some unemployment funds for the Mondays that I'm not working.

God is good. All told, I missed two full days' pay, and I'll be missing a half day's pay for each Monday that I'm out. My first three days off ended up using up my vacation time for the year. Not too shabby. At least, I ain't complaining.

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Thursday, 31 January 2002
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No entry.

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Friday, 1 February 2002
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A new law governing the creation or propagation of email-borne viruses... And in other news, some startling revelations about spam. These from a rather Onion-esque site called SatireWire. Good stuf.

Yesterday I had to spend a goodly chunk of time reinstalling everything on my work computer. I'd been operating in Manly Mode™, which specifies among other things, "If it ain't broke, fix it till it is." So, having little better to do at the moment, I decided to swap out my video card for something a little newer. The old unit is an 8MB ATI Rage IIC AGP, while the replacement was slated to be a generic Savage4 S3 Trio 3D 32MB AGP card, for which I ponied up a whopping $27.50 with shipping.

Bitter experience has taught me that wise men swap Windows video cards only after first setting the display to Standard VGA. Then one shuts down, inserts the new card, and installs the proper driver. Er-hem! That is, I thought wise men did it that way. At least, I'd occasionally gone down in flames previously when trying to cut corners on similar installs. And I'd also previously had good experiences with this method, which essentially tries to allay the necessity of making Windows think too hard.

So I reset the video driver to Standard VGA and rebooted. Only Windows hung completely solid at some point in the boot process, midway through arriving at the desktop. Didn't matter whether I tried to log into the network or simply bypassed the login, either way the system simply froze solid. No mouse, no keyboard... punch the Ugly Button. Repeat until user reaches a slow boil. Garnish with parsley and serve warm.

So then, hoping to retain my installed programs, I booted to a command prompt and tried to run Windows setup. At a certain point it froze up rock-solid. Ack! OK, on to Plan C, which involved the old "copy C:\SYSTEM.1ST to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM.DAT and then reboot" trick, which is supposed to take you back to the "preparing to run Windows for the first time" screen. Sometimes that works. I've actually done it successfully a few times. But not this time. Which left Plan D, which was a clean reinstall after renaming the original Windows folder to something else. I really hoped that worked, because Plan E began with "FORMAT C:" and I had a few things on my C: drive that I preferred not to lose if possible. Nothing major, mostly downloads that I would just as soon not have to redo.

As it happened, Plan D did work, and after a few more hours of what Dr. Keyboard calls "refettling," I was more or less back in business. If still utterly clueless about why Windows didn't like the Standard VGA driver. Maybe I should simply have deleted the video card from Device Manager and then rebooted with the replacement in place. Next time I get bored I'll probably try that. Never repeat mistakes — there's a practically limitless list of brand new and exciting ones that you haven't even tried yet.

And in other boredom-related news, I've given up on trying to download more ISO images for some current Linux distributions. Even with a partial T1 line at work, speeds are dismal. And for some reason the PC I was using to ftp the images down kept spontaneously rebooting. Even with a download manager that resumes where it was so rudely interrupted, that can get to be a bit much. So I Googled on "linux cd $" figuring that somewhere among the two million plus hits would be some of those places that sell CD-R copies of open source software. Sure enough, on page two I found Edmunds Enterprises, which sells everything noticeably more cheaply than CheapBytes. And they take American Express. Though of course they can't resist the temptation to make up some of the difference with generous (to them) shipping charges. Still... not so bad. For a grand total of $23.40 I ordered the following short list:

Debian Linux 2.2r5 Official CD's (3 CD Set)
Red Hat Linux 7.2 Bundle (5 CD Set)
Redmond Linux Install CD
WinLinux 2001

I've commented favorably before on Redmond Linux, which is now known as Lycoris, for reasons which no doubt seem good to their lawyers. I seem to have misplaced the CD that I burned of it. And WinLinux looks intriguing. I bet I try that one first. I'm guessing it'll be horribly rough around the edges, but who knows? And I haven't tried RedHat for a few revisions. And Debian... I could never get it to install at all. But I kind of hope I can, what with their apt get update utility. And as for Mandrake, I have good copies of 8.0 and 8.1 already. Let the install-fest begin!

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Saturday, 2 February 2002
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No entry.

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