The battle with my laptop + NIC is finally over!

Final giant hurdle was earlier this week. Michael went ahead and started installing gentoo, and on one of the bootups it was going crazy kernel panicking. Then he couldn’t mount the drive or do anything to make it respond properly. Wheehoo dead harddrive! So he had a spare laptop harddrive and ended up putting that in and doing the Gentoo install on that. For the install he put his wireless card in it “just to get it going” and things went great. So now my laptop has a basic gentoo install on it with a wireless card.

What of the other NIC? Michael got it working basicallywith a kernel patch, proper firmware and tweaking on his box. He said he might try to duplicate the process on my box, but there were so many little things that were annoying with the process that he doesn’t want to do that just yet. Fine with me %) Yay I have a wireless laptop! Next step is to get a window manager on there and compile the proper apps.

It’s so nice to have my laptop talking to the world again. It’s rather useless when I can’t move files off it.

Of course since all our NICs are working nicely and happily again Michael’s power adapter for his laptop dies. Doh. Had to grab a replacement yesterday on our way to a wedding of Michael’s cousin (who I had never met).

Well it wasn’t a wedding exactly. They were married last year, but I guess it was a tiny event, so this was a “Renewal of Vows” and a reception at a hotel in Bensalem for family and friends to attend. It was nice, even if it was a family event where I had to meet all sorts of people I had never met before (and attempt to remember at least half their names, it helps that there are a lot of Jenns and Elizabeths). The food was pretty good too. We stayed from about 6-9, since things were winding down a bit by then.

On the way home we stopped at krispy kreme, which recently opened a store in Montgomeryville. People who work at the Montgomeryville Krispy Kreme are much nicer than the ones in NE Philly, but I guess that can be expected. Mmmm doughnuts.

We got home and I watched Dr. Who, finally the last episode of Trial of a Time Lord! I’m so glad I found a PBS channel that plays a couple episodes a week, there are so many that I’ve missed.

Oh, I realized I never mentioned it, but we did end up getting Munch a new tank the other night. Looks similar to the old one, but it’s a little skinnier, which means the lid from the old one doesn’t fit properly, arg. Still, it’s probably a good thing we got the new tank when we did, Munch was looking all miserable and pale. He’s feeling better and eating again now. Yay Munch!

*wanders off*

I only had these cards out of this bigger box for about 2 minutes before he decided to climb in it and get comfy. At least he’s not eating the box.

Also got this picture when I printed up an invoice, he was stalking the printer, I thought he was going to grab my paper in his teeth and run off with it when it was done printing.

It seems I spoke too soon, he’s now trying to eat the cardboard box.

I ended up with a pretty bad headache yesterday and got nothing done. I hate days like that, headaches are horrible and boring. You’re in pain and terribly bored, watching tv is the only reasonable option, and most of the time that hurts your head too. So Michael came home last night and just ordered a pizza and we watched some tv. Bleh, I hate headaches.

This morning I woke up headache free, and realized what slacking off on a day of housework looks like. I never even took out the trash (Michael did)! Ugh.

I spent some more time revamping wallaceandgromit.net to brush up on my php skills. Made the menus more dynamic, which I’m quite happy with. I’m also pulling together a portfolio of websites I’ve worked on, which should be a nice suppliment to my resume, and I should have one anyway.

Someone in IRC menioned Vampire the Masquerade this afternoon (actually referring to the computer game version), and that reminded me that I have a few V:tM books on my shelf. Two version of Ravnos Clanbook (v2 and 3 I believe), a copy of “World of Darkness: Gypsies” and a copy of the “Book of Nod.” I highly doubt I’m going to be playing this game ever again, so I hopped on ebay to see how much I could get for these. The clanbooks seem to sell at around $3-10 each, didn’t even find a copy of WoD:Gypsies, and the Book of Nod is fetching about $4. I should probably sell these. Then while thinking in that same vein, I pulled out my Magic cards. Mostly they suck, but again, are they going to do anything but gather dust on my shelves for the rest of my life? It’s fun to pull them out and look at every year or so, but I’m sure someone else could enjoy them more. I’m considering putting them up on cardshark.com (which I’ve bought through before) and trying to sell them, or maybe find a card shop in this area who can give me an estimate to the worth of my rare and foil binder and boxes full of commons/uncommons.

It’s a little sad realizing that such gaming days are over. I’m just not interested it in anymore, and the people I used to play 8 hour RPG sessions with, and ride to tournaments with are in New York, and I don’t think I’ll ever see them again.

Going to make dinner now.

*wanders off*

It was not a good weekend.

On Friday (the 13th, appropriately) Michael and I were sitting upstairs relaxing and watching some Red Dwarf after Michael’s tough week. I decided I wanted to eat a brownie, so we walked downstairs and I heard a water noise.

THE FISHTANK HAD ANOTHER LEAK!!!

F#@$#!!!

Ok, so we somewhat expected this would happen, we noticed the glass separating and the caulk stretching, Michael intended to fix it this weekend.

So at 9pm we’re covered in fish water cleaning up this watery mess, and just glad that we caught it in time. It was after 10 by the time we had finished cleaning up, and we were both in a pretty lousy mood and went to bed.

Saturday morning Michael started to fix it, and while he was putting the caulking on it one of the panes of glass cracked

F#@$#!!!

This is not something that can be repaired. It was near the bottom of the tank, so too much pressure would be on it even if we tried to patch it, and it’d look awful. We’d need another tank, over $100. Sigh.

The rest of Saturday Michael went to help pack to move, and I stayed home and mowed the lawn. It just wasn’t a very happy day. Sunday was not so perfect either, I just wanted to crawl into a cave and sleep.

We did decide that I need to seriously look for a real job, for a lot of reasons: savings, happiness, success, independence. I might get into it more in a friends-only entry sometime.

So this morning I got up and started looking for work. I have a recently created resume, which still needs some work, but at least it’s up to date. I logged onto a few job hunting sites and started exploring what skills are currently in demand. I decided that I need to definately brush up on my PHP skills, I haven’t touched them in far too long and I know I’ve gotten rusty. I need to pull together a portfolio of sites I’ve done the primary work on, and I need to through my current sites and make sure they’re looking good and properly validating.

This afternoon I spent a bunch of time moving wallaceandgromit.net from all .html to all .php. I had put off doing this because I was afraid of breaking external links to the site, but it’s something I needed to do and better do it now than sometime close to the movie release date next year, when I expect more traffic. I redid the look of the news articles so they’re looking much more spiffy, and I went through and validated the site’s HTML and CSS. I’m considering putting a mySQL backend to the news to get me back into using mySQL again, but we’ll see.

While at the philly chix meeting last week Erin mentioned a mozilla web developer extention that she particularly liked. I surfed through mozdev.org and found it, aptly named Web Developer Extension. And I must say, I’m quite pleased, it does lots of cool stuff. Simple to validate a page, ways to make it put borders around table cells (good for when tables get out of hand), ways to see the page without images and styling, ways to see it easily in different resolutions (by resizing the brower to proper sizes), a way to populate form fields (nice for testing forms and you don’t have to fill them in for each test!) and all sorts of little neat things. It’s very nice.

We need to buy a fishtank tonight, Munch hates living in a bucket.

*wanders off*

I had a good day yesterday. I ended up going into work with Michael because I had a philly chix meeting in the area at night, and having Michael drive all the way home to pick me up is silly. I parked myself at a computer in the corner and intended to do some reading and catching up on emails and reading journals all day. So I was sitting there and one of the managers dropped by and asked if I was interested in doing any work. Ah! They haven’t called me since May to do any work, but I come in for a non-work day and they have work for me. Of course I accepted. It was only about 2 hours of work, but I was glad to do it. And it felt good to do a little work again.

After work was the philly chix meeting, which was much fun. I got to tell them about my laptop woes, and all sorts of fun stuff. Most exciting (for me anyway) was when we were talking about ways to find artists (photographers, writers, cartoonists) and I mentioned the e-volution audio project, and that it needed writers. Duh, I was sitting next to a published author! Gwen published a book a few months ago, and she said she’d be delighted to turn it into a script! On top of that she knows a lot of good scifi writers who’d be interested in writing for a radio show. Kickass!

Gwen, Erin, Maggie, Lyz

It was getting late when we finally got home last night, but I felt good.

In other news this week…

I was able to boot my laptop without the kernel panicking by booting it without the NIC inserted (of course as soon as I put it in after booting it panicked). So I got the files off it that I wanted, some info about where the firmware unpacked to, the .config for the 2.6.7 kernel, and I’m still planning on going the gentoo route with the little thing. *pats laptop*

I finished updating my system the other day, and was annoyed to find out that my new version of firefox (0.9.3), which I use for an RSS reader, was a bit broken. It seemed to have some issues with upgrading while extentions were in it, since all my extentions disappeared, and things looked very broken (like the section on the left where I had control of my RSS reader was still there, but it wouldn’t close). This led to a host of other problems, like the address bar not working, back/forward/stop buttons not working. I ended up deleting all my preferences files (backed up bookmarks.html), uninstalling and recompiling firefox (which was probably silly, there must be a cache somewhere or something I could have cleaned out) and starting it up without importing anything from anywhere. That worked, finally. It’s annoying that this happened. But then I remember that I love this environment, and having an environment that I like and not having to deal with spyware and crap is good.

I’ve actually been quite busy with a few projects, which is feeling good. Getting things acomplished definately does a lot to improve my sometimes hopeless moods.

Now I am going to make some tortillas for tacos, yum yum! Brownies for dessert %d

*wanders off*

I haven’t really been in the mood to post lately. Not much to say really.

We recently changed our diet a bit. As I’ve probably mentioned, this past winter was a bit rough for me, just stressful with so many changes going on, buying the new house and all. I got into bad eating habits, too much chocolate in an attempt to counter my lousy mood, not being active enough because I felt down. Over 5 months I put on about 6 pounds, and I felt really crappy about it.

So a few weeks ago we began changing our diet. No more soda, no more fruit juice, no more daily desserts. Cutting back on processed foods, and learning how to cook.

I’m already finding that I feel much better about myself, and I’m enjoying food much more again. It feels great to sit down to a taco dinner with yummie tortillas that I just made, that don’t contain lard or any other scary things that were in the packaged ones we used to get. Making the switch to drinking only coffee, tea, milk and water has been much easier than I had expected, but then again I do love water more than the average person. The loss of chocolate has been a bit harder, so I have ended up buying a couple brownie mixes since we started this %) But even these brownie mixes are better for me than buying the (amazing but so very-bad-for-me) brownies from the local grocery store bakery.

As for my laptop. Well, the NIC worked in windows until we did a windows update, HAHAHA. So this weekend Michael decided to try Fedora Core 3 with 2.6.7 kernel on it to see if it’d work “out of the box” and skip lots of headaches. No such luck. On monday I did some work on it with the help of a friend of mine to weed out all the possible trouble, and learned that the driver is broken in 2.6.7 and the kernel would need to be patched. But then Fedora got all weird on me and wouldn’t let me recompile the kernel (some gcc bug which is apparently fixed with gcc upgrade, HAH). So I pretty much gave up on Fedora. I tried to boot it up today to see if I could at least grab a few things off it, like my .config, but it kernel panicked on bootup. Which is very annoying because I wasn’t even able to touch the kernel yesterday, didnt touch anything in /boot and I really don’t think I did anything traumatic to it…

I think I’ll grab Michael’s help to install Gentoo (stage 3) on it, with a patched 2.6.7 kernel. Maybe maybe maybe this laptop will someday have wireless!

I’m still kicking myself for not doing more research into chipsets it might use before buying it. Sigh.

Yesterday was not such a good day. Lots of things went wrong and made me feel like an idiot. I thought about posting but it would have just been a miserable, sarcastic rant about how stupid I am.

So as the crappy day wound down I thought I’d do some cooking, and hope I didn’t screw that up too badly. I searched around for some new tortilla recipes to get a good idea how much I should add to the ones I wanted to make, since the last time they turned out way too dry.

I was very very happy when my tortillas turned out amazingly good! Crazy what a little more water added will do ;) I was so pround that I took a picture. And to think I’ve been buying ones from the store all this time! Nasty ones that have stuff like lard in them, homemade are better and cheaper (even if they take some effort).

So that cheered me up, and then the weather turned cooler, so I was in a much better mood all evening, yay!

This morning was good, and refreshingly cool. I spent some time working with the manLinux.com guys to get things going with their site (the domain is new, but group has been around for a little while). It’s a fun documentation project that I can exercise my mad documentation skillz on and actually have people read them. I’ve been able to recruit a few friends to the project too, so I have people to work with. Still recruiting by the way, so if you’re interested just let me know.

Since it was so nice out I decided to finally deal with the big rusty barrel that’s in my back yard. I have a lovely back yard but there is no ignoring the big rusty barrel that the previous homeowners used for burning things. Inside there were all sorts of wires and junk, and as much as I hated this ugly barrel in my nice yard, I kept making excuses not to deal with it.

I ended up taking a trash barrel and it’s lid so I could dump the barrel over and go through the junk inside. I couldn’t just throw it all away (too much) and I couldn’t toss it all in the back (too much metal, plastic and glass). So I started sorting it out, throwing the dirt and ash in the leave pile out back and putting the other junk in the trash. Apparently I’ve watched too much CourtTV, because I half expected to find a body at the bottom of the barrel, but I had no such luck. I obviously amused myself by taking pictures of this ordeal. I even had a neighborhood cat drop by to be my audience (this is the cat I call Caligula’s girlfriend, because it’s the first “wild” cat he met, and is always hanging around (I took this just yesterday) and making Caligula get all puffy tailed). So I spent a couple hours with this lovely barrel, it wasn’t much fun, but once I was finally done and dragged it over to the garage I felt much better. Of course the batteries in the camera were also dying (I take so many pictures these days) so I decided I’d wait until I had the yard properly cleaned up (weeds that had grown around barrel taken away, rocks that “decorated” area round barrel removed) before I take a final lovely picture of my back yard.

That’s about it. Michael’s working late tonight so I think we’ll order a pizza tonight, mmm pizza, maybe even some soda (which we recently removed from normal our “at home” diet).

*wanders off*

I got up a little after 6 this morning, made myself a cup of coffee and wandered upstairs. I decided that I was going to tackle my laptop’s wireless issues once and for all.

7 hours and a burned knoppix 3.4 cd (which didn’t work with my card either) later I was actually further from my goal than when I started. I managed to uninstall all pcmcia stuff only to realize too late that I didn’t have the debs backed up anymore so my testing was done for the day HAHAHA. I rock. My only hope now is either burning the debs to a cd, or using knoppix + Michael’s card to get the debs back on my laptop. Bleh. There are a couple how-tos I might try tomorrow, but they both require entirely new kernels, possibly patches, which I’d also need to move over to the laptop.

I’m quickly losing my faithfulness to debian on this laptop. At this point I’m not sure I care what distro the stupid thing runs on, as long as it works. Windows still is not an option, because I’d hate it, I know it is possible to get this card to work in linux!

I shouldn’t beat myself up over this, this is a tricky card even for really smart linux people, and what do I understand about modules? Very little. What do I understand about PCMCIA? Uh, that’s a thing for laptops right? So I probably should have tried something a bit easier for my first venture into poorly documented module meddling in debian. But I wanted so badly to get this working %(!

I was a bit frustrated after spending so much time on this, especially since toward the end I felt like I had no idea what I was doing. Mostly I wanted to throw my laptop out the window and shoot it a few dozen times.

So I went to Mars 2145.

YAYAYAY DOOM 3!!!

I installed Doom 3 on my Windows partition this afternoon. It’s nice to have a Windows game now and then so that harddrive doesn’t die from lack of use %) And boy did my computer have a work out! This game is so crazy, my geforce3 could handle it but it was choppy at times. And load times, oh boy, 2.0ghz p4 + 512mb ddr ram was not enough to lower load time for levels to under a minute (estimate, I didn’t actually count, it felt like a while…). Still, it was quite playable, even if it was a pretty dark game.

a couple more shots here

And of course I got to kill things, which is what I was in the mood for.

I’m currently baking some potatoes to make some twice baked potatoes (without the bacon) for dinner. Yum yum!

So now I must attend to those. *wanders off*

EDIT: These Doom3 screenshots were taken at lowest graphics intensity for the game.

It’s still in the 80s. I put aside cleaning yesterday because it was just too hot to do any without being miserable, but pushed myself into doing a couple hours worth. It wasn’t any fun. I really don’t mind cleaning, but when it’s in the mid 80s it’s definately not my favorite thing to do.

Michael patched up Munch’s tank, and yesterday we were able to fill it back up, put the proper chemicals in it and get the temp back to a normal temp so Munch didn’t have to live in the bucket anymore. He was very swimmy happy to be back in his tank. I’m glad he reacted well to the whole thing being cleaned out, I’ve read so many things about taking care of fishes that stress letting the water sit in the tank for a week and all this stuff, but we couldn’t keep him living in the bucket for too long. So I’m just happy he survived the whole ordeal. Michael was careful to put aquarium caulking not just on the new leak, but re-enforced all the corners with it so this sort of thing hopefully won’t happen again.

Today Michael spent some time going through xfce4 applications and telling us which ones were cool, so now I’m reaping the benefits of that, yay!

In this bit of a screenshot I have xfce4-weather and xfce4-xmms-controller (NOT xfce4-xmms). That tooltip for the xmms app is when I mouse over it, it gives me control to clear and see the playlist and stop/pause/skip/etc controls of what’s playing. xfce4-weather is the really cool one though, it seems to work very well (not like the weather epplet for Enlightenment, or kweather, which can be crankie). It can scroll through lots of weather information, has a picture of current conditions and mouse over tooltip tells you current condtions, a left click on it will pull up current conditions and a forecast tab! Woo! Apparently it uses “xoap.weather.com” to grab it’s information, which is pretty cool, because xoap is xml feeds! Like for me: http://xoap.weather.com/weather/local/19473. I don’t think this would port well to international weather, and it estimates your location (Says I’m in Pottstown in the xfce4 app for whatever reason…) but it’s neat that they have something like this (even if it has a “This document is intended only for use by authorized licensees of The Weather Channel. Unauthorized use is prohibited.” warning on it…).

I want it to be fall now.

*wanders off*

We were pretty busy late yesterday. Around 4 we headed out to Michael’s brother’s house, where they were holding Michael’s nephew’s birthday party. So many little kids and family members whose names I can’t recall. We had a nice time though, even if I find it difficult to be very social at such things. Ended up staying ’til around 7, when we left to drive to Media.

Media is a big town near Swarthmore College, I’d never actually been to the town of Media, but that’s where b2s (from #13thHour) lives and we were meeting him for dinner at the Iron Hill Brewery. Ended up being a nice meeting, he’s really cool, and I learned much more about him than I had previously known (he’s reasonably private online). The food there at the Brewery was pretty good, even though I found myself not too in the mood for beer that I ordered (I blame heat and humidity). It’s always fun meeting new people from this area, I always feel like I don’t know enough people around here. After dinner b2s gave us one of his old wireless routers, woo! So now at least Michael’s laptop is on the wireless, mine needs to get all set up and working properly.

pleia2, Time, b2s

Erm, I forgot my camera.

We didn’t get home til after 10 last night, I was pretty tired and was in bed by midnight. Michael stayed up setting up the wireless, and then it seems that a bit after 3 am Munch‘s tank sprung a leak! I slept through the whole thing (can’t hear much when the AC is going in our bedroom), but Munch is currently living in huge bucket, which he is swimming around but clearly isn’t very happy about. Sigh. Good thing he’s a versatile fish. It smells like fishwater downstairs %(

Speaking of leaks, it’s raining and our roof is still leaking a little. The biggest problems seem to have cleared up, and the leaks are still confined to just the storage areas (except for around the chimney), but we’ll probably need to talk to a roofer to see what to do about the smaller leaks… bleh.

Heat + Humidity + Tiredness + Leaks == crankie pleia2

I’m doubt becoming crankie rather than simply depressed is a step in the right direction. Neither feels very good. But the change from holding all my frustration inside and having it hurt me with depression to venting a bit is quite nice. There’s nothing I can do to prevent these problems, I guess I just need to get through my crankiness and deal with them.

And then I look across my desk and notice this. Which made me laugh.

I’m “Seeing Bugs”[1] so I should probably go back to bed.

[1] Michael calls it “seeing squirrels” but for me it’s always spiders and bugs, not squirrels. It’s when you see something moving and small out of the corner of your eye that’s not really there, and means you’re sleepy or your brain isn’t otherwise functioning properly. I wonder what the real term for this.