Work was relatively uneventful. I learned that they’re going to keep me until early-mid November. Apparently one woman wants to take a vacation, and another is going for a surgery, so they made sure to schedule all of it so that they could keep me the whole time, since training someone else would take time and I’d probably take another assignment if they let me go. It’s nice to stay with the same company for 2 months, and I’m not treated as “The Temp” like that assignment I had while living in Rochester, I really feel like I’m part of the team there.
Still, I am tired when I come home. Homemade tortillas and biscuits aren’t so fun to make when I’m exhausted when I come home, and neither is attending meetings in Philadelphia! Because of my workstation being down this past week I wasn’t able to plan very well for the Philly Chix meeting, but I did get the word out and was determined to make it this time. I planned for a meeting in the city, at 30th Street station, but neglected to bug people enough about it to make sure someone would show up. I took the 6:03 train down Thursday night, sat at 30th Street Station until 8:30 waiting for someone to show up. They never did. I took the 8:45 train home. I wasn’t upset really, it’s my fault for not being able to plan better. And the trip down to the city gave me a chance to read about 100 pages into The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which I had brought down with the rest of the new Philly Chix books. It was fun to read in a different location, on the train, at the station. I was really tired when I came home, but the night wasn’t a total loss.
My computer… All we have spare are 20 gig drives, and who wants just a 20 gig for a system? Michael suggested doing raid0, and I told him to go ahead %) I fear that an attempt by me for such a thing would take forever, and I might not have a usable system anytime soon (which is important for the LAN party in two weeks!) So in his spare time this week he’s started setting it up. Last night I got to start building packages on it. There are still a few kinks to work out with X, so I’m using Michael’s computer right now, but hopefully it’ll be fixed soon.
Because of my lack of computer, I got bored with just reading and working, and decided to pick up my stupid old laptop again and play around with it. I got Linux For Non-Geeks (Which should be called “Fedora and Gnome for Non-Geeks”) from O’Reilly for the Philly Chix recently. It came with a couple Fedora Core 1 cds, and I figured, hey, I want to play with computers, how about I try to install Fedora on this laptop for fun? Instead of using the Core 1 cds, I grabbed the Core 2 cds I got with another Philly Chix book recently, and loaded them up on the laptop. The laptop wouldn’t have internet, since I decided that the pcmcia slot was the thing that was broken on it, but I could mess around with it anyway. I used the Linux for Non-Geeks book to get me started with it, so I could see how well the book does, and I was impressed with how simply it explained everything. It still just targets basic users of a system, who’d just want to install basic things like browser, office suites, etc. My laptop went through the install ok, it detected a bunch, but not my soundcard. It compiled support for USB into my kernel (we all know how those fat Fedora kernels are) so for fun I decided to try and see if it’d see my digital camera. Success! It even had gtkam installed, which I had never tried before. It’s a nice little program, I might use it on my workstation in the future, since command line gphoto2 is so dull. Then I rebooted my laptop, kernel panics. You can’t be serious! So it’s probably something other than the pcmcia that makes my laptop go all crazy. I can boot into Fedora sometimes, but kernel panics are bad, and no doubt it’ll corrupt my filesystem by these random reboots again. It’s an old laptop, and the problem isn’t anything removable (like drives or slots) so it’s something that wouldn’t be economically feasible to
fix.
Michael got a lot of stuff done this weekend, which he describes here. Right now he’s out with some friends, so I get the house to myself, whee! Actually, mostly I just spent this alone time paying bills, doing laundry, and catching up on reading people’s journals. I’d say it’s been a pretty good weekend overall.