Ya know, for some stupid reason I really thought all our friends with macs would be more excited about us getting a G5. I guess I’m just being stupid or something like that….odds are I was just gonna bug them to see if they had a keyboard/mouse they could spare. Since we bought one used it didn’t come with one….on and the bluetooth/iSight works randomly…yeah I gotta get on fixing that.
Some cute pictures of Connor I’ve been meaning to post:
A lady we were walking by stopped and said hi to Connor and asked him if he was learning to walk. I assume she thought Connor was using the grocery cart as a walker of sorts. When he actually resumed “pushing” the cart she looked at me and said “scary”. I thought that was pretty funny cause it’s true. He grabs the cart and let’s out a little grunt, then it begins to move….I resisted the urge to go “hercules, hercules, hercules”.
Here’s a picture of Connor seeing Steve’s dog Polly again. He cried for a few minutes at first, but as you can see he warmed up right to him. I think Connor is a big fan of puppies, but for now he’ll have to wait until we visit Steve’s house again.
Where are all my Mac friends???
Today we drank the apple kool aid
So here’s what we decided to buy as a gift to us:
Yup, there’s now a G5 iMac in the house. Holy cow….it’s been 8 years since I touched a mac, there is so much I have no clue how to do. 
We bought it since Jen spends so much time out of the office and downstairs, plus we got a good deal on it used online from DSLR. Both of us were kind of excited to use one. Now I just need to figure out how to create L2TP tunnels off it.
-update #1: dammit….adobe photoshop elements 2.0 doesn’t work on Leopard 
-update#2: I need an apple keyboard and mouse, this dell one isn’t cutting it and the only spare usb mouse I had has a ball
The ceiling cat prayer
There’s even a lolcat bible translation project going on….
1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem. Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz. At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz. An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin. An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1
So about 3 1/2 years ago I installed a NID splitter due to random DSL problems. Lately my dsl has been going down for hours at a time randomly. I’ve even tried 3 different modems on it…I just figured it was the lines. I mean I’ve always been pushing it at 63db attenuation and 6db noise @ 1.9mb/512kb
So when it went out today, I called for some help from wolfdragon, and on a kick I decided to test at the NI.
The modem sync’d at 3mb…
Son of a…..and no matter what I can’t seem to find the spare nid splitter I had lying around for this exact situation. I probably gave it away or something when fixing a different DSL issue at one time. So I did what anyone else would do…I made my own out of a household one I had.
So far so good…always wanted to see if this would work honestly. Just maybe not in the middle of a freak snow storm.
What I learned today about SATA laptop drives
So last night I took the hard drive out of my work laptop (Dell Latitude d820) so that I could use my IDE to USB adapter and scan it for virus’s. I like to do that every now and then just to make sure.
So I took it out, and it didn’t look at all like what I was expecting. Little did I know that they started making serial ATA laptop hard drives….I had no clue at all. So after I got done being all pissy cause I thought I’d have to buy a new adapter, I took a look at the SATA cables on my main desktop for data and power.
Holy cow, the laptop SATA hard drive uses the same cables as a desktop SATA drive. Sure as heck I just plugged it in, enabled it in the bios, and it was there as another disk in “my computer”. I’m so used to things being difficult, that this really kind of shocked me honestly. I mean…it actually makes sense. Go figure.
Dammit...Ubuntu sucks
Ok, so I finally got Ubuntu to install….of course I had to download the alternate ISO CD instead of using the live desktop CD I already had.
So once it was installed, everything looked ok. Now…I knew I was going to have problems with the wifi card, simply because it was *nix and I don’t know squat. So I tried setting it up, and the computer locked up with blinking caps log and scroll key light blinking (which apparently is a kernel panic).
Reboot the computer, and 3 bars into startup it does the same thing. Eject the pcmcia card and it’ll boot just fine, just don’t try to use it or you’ll be locked up.
So I found some steps to fix the issue, and followed them. They worked just fine actually, but it still locks up on boot. So if you want to boot the computer, you have to back out the pcmcia card….get to the desktop ….and then push it back in. I really didn’t expect such an issue for a mainstream card like this (linksys wpc11 v4).
That’s not the real issue though, the real issue is the screen. So Ubuntu already had the right drivers and resolution set (NeoMagic MagicGraph 256) but firefox looked and performed poorly compared to XP on the same computer. I mean, that doesn’t make sense….I can’t sell this as a windows replacment if the thing can’t even scroll right. It wasn’t smooth at all, it was horribly jerky. I run Gnome 2.0 on my sparq ultra 5 and it runs better than that this almost.
So there we have it….I can make Windows XP run better than Ubuntu on an 400Mhz 192mb ram computer. Of course I’ve disabled so much stuff on it, basically you’d just have to look at it hard to hack it
Damn you Unbuntu 7.10
I thought that I’d be able to put a copy on an old 400Mhz Dell I had lying around spare. After all I had a copy of Windows XP running on it just fine (highly tweaked of course, only 13 processes).
So here I sit, on my second day of attempts. Aside from running dog slow during install, and some randome I/O buffer errors (because I didn’t have a floppy drive), I keep stalling out at 15% “Detecting File Systems”.
I even cleared the hard drive I was attempting to use. No paritions or anything. Very frustrating when the whle thing take so long you can only really try twice a day.
Yup, I'm in hell
It has been previously established that Nibbler likes to climb ladders.
So why that fact escaped me when I was up in the attic this morning….well I have no excuse for that. I guess I just really didn’t think he’d go up there.
I apparently was wrong.
Don't know why it's so funny to me...
but I’ve been laughing about this on and off for a few days now…
