Month: September 2004

My computer is quite screwed up. Currently, it “runs” windows. By which I mean, I can get it to boot without bad-sector-ridden boot floppies. It now hates the internet.

And I thought Windows XP Professional was more networking friendly than the “home” variant. I thought wrong.

The mail client renders its own gui wrong half the time, but fails to read mail off servers properly all the time [Update: For those curious, this is apparently window’s idea of someone checking e-mail]. Visual studio grinds to a halt each time I mistakenly hit “properties” on a source file, and that source file happens to be in fortran. McAfee prevents clean shut downs and causes an infinite “hang” state. McAfee also conflicts with DLA and the “windows installer” preventing me from removing or installing any software. McAfee also prevents itself from being disabled anywhere. I guess if you don’t have any software, you can’t really have a virus? Intel things like to install themselves in “My Pictures” no matter where I ask them to go. I have no codecs and can see/hear very little of my media. Windows attempts to update drivers for all devices on my machine by itself, but doesn’t know how to do it, so it complains. It then complains when I disable “auto-go-ahead-and-screw-everything-up-myself” mode.

Of course, since it wiped out my MBR and I lost my boot floppy to bad clusters, I’m burning a distribution install disc to see if it is smart enough to get me out of this hell hole and to a place where I can work.

And play.

Deviating to some informatively non-negative news. Though delineate‘s interface looks rather simple, the backend data holding and classifying scheme is quite capable, and complicated. I am currently figuring out how to unleash these features on to the page without cluttering it. What am I talking about you ask?

For instance. Hmm.. if you’ve seen the permanent links for the current images, they look like so: domain/shoebox/picture-title/. Now I picked “shoebox” specifically to give it an unclassified feel. I mean, you randomly dump old photos in a shoebox right?

But that’s not the only way of accessing images on delineate. Consider for instance, domain/genus/flowers. Sweet huh? (Yeah, it renders funnily on IE, but will be fixed before the official release of such things.) Internally, images hold some meta information related to their content, so such nifty look ups are easy. There are a bunch of other things like this which will be fun (and probably necessary) once the number of images grow.

I’ll leak said features a lil’ bit at a time.

There have been a bunch of rumours going around which I hope to clear up. Firstly, there have been those who dare proclaim that this journal is dead. That’s so obviously not true. I’ve just been “away” (for reasons I will enumerate later, though I must admit it’s been quite nice).

Then, some joker actually elevated said rumour to an all new high, that I am dead. Sorry evil one, not yet I am not.

With those out of the way, where do I begin? OK, this is either frickin’ hilarious or ironic depending on how you look at it. For some two years, I lived in a part of town where there are no interesting places to eat after 9 or so in the evening. Actually, there are no interesting places to eat even before that, but that’s a whole new story altogether. Anyway I could afford to if I wanted to. They just didn’t excite me enough for me to want to. Now, I’ve moved to a relatively fabulous locality, with a ton of interesting cuisine available even at the weirdest wee hours of the morning. Of course, the catch here is with the exceptional rent increase, I can’t afford any of it.

Frickin’ ironic.

Unrelated, I’ve been having the weirdest computing trouble, apart from the obvious lack of internet at home. Do you remember the “old” Apple switch ad campaign? In particular, do you remember Ellen Feiss’ story? Now I had a similar experience, except with far more disastrous consequences. I was sitting there, like, doing whatever it is I do, and all of a sudden my computer goes, like, berserk. It’s all *beep* *beep* *beep* and reboots to come up with what is essentially a useless blank screen. Not like I panic, but I am annoyed.

I reboot to GNU/Linux and continue on with life as if nothing happened. Until there is a need for my wireless ethernet card to work which is insanely flaky on it. Angered, I decide to reinstall some things to remember the #&@$**$! geniuses at HP have a sort of “disaster recovery disc set” that wipes out all your data before actually “fixing” anything. So I shell out some money and get a copy of Windows and attempt to “fix” my install. Now this is even more of a genius. Apparently it doesn’t like doing this sort of thing either and warns me that it will wipe out “My Documents” and other folders in the process. Crap. So I cancel setup, only to realize it’s now wiped out my MBR and it only boots to my non functional windows installation. F’in genius.

So, I almost didn’t have a computer, except for me figuring out grub weirdnesses and making a boot floppy so I can get back to my trusty GNU/Linux partition after all this excitement. Actually, said boot floppy had a ton of bad clusters which led to a lot more excitement, but I value your time and will stop.

Anyway, for rather interesting reasons I choose not to get into, most current activity has been diverted to delineate. If you’re one of those relatively long term frequenters of this site, there’s nothing really new to see, but otherwise you might want to take a peek. It might be interesting.

In related news, I’ve finally figured out my next major photography related purchase. A Canon EOS 20D body with a 17 – 85 mm, F4-5.6 EF-S IS lens. Now that lens is obviously just a start, and I think that camera has to last a while with a temporally expanding set of lenses, filters and other accessories since it’s now priced at just under 2 grand. *Shudder* But then again, it’s apparently capable of things like this [>3MB!].

I’ve really got nothing to say. Being annoying-roommate-free is good, but being unable to afford the basic necessities like broadbroadbroadband sucks.

If someone knows one of those easy-to-rob bank places I’ve been hearing so much about, please drop me a line. I have a ton of shopping left to do.

Speaking of a ton of shopping, I’ve worn out one of my credit cards and it’s (embarrassingly) failed to work twice over this past week. I’ve asked for a new replacement, but I had to endure the “how much more careful women are with their things than men” lecture from the bank lady.

Speaking of lady, I’ve slowly migrated from “exceptionally asocial” to “quite social” in the recent past.

OK, so I probably did have something to say.

I’d gone on this trip, and not having access to the internet was weirdly interesting. (Some pictures here and more general verbosity will follow later.)

Oh, and I now have a phone.