Blog Archives 060218 to 051228

Old pointless chatter instead of new pointless chatter.

 

Off-site Menu

Hosted on my father's computer

Random Quote

There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
- H.L. Mencken

Valid XHTML 1.0
Valid CSS
Unicode Encoded

060218 Davis, CA, USA
The group I'm working for in Franklinton is in a push to gather the data needed for support of a patent. We started hitting a wall, simply because the site is mostly an applications site and the project was in dire need of protein work which was difficult or impossible at the site. So, with the patent deadline looming, it made the most sense to send me to the primary US R&D site; Davis. So here I am, back in California for 1.5 - 2.0 weeks.

Actually, I arrived at 12:10 AM Tuesday 060214, just a few days after the decision was made to send me. Being in the same state with family (my bro', sister in law, and a pack of cute nephews), I had hope to be able to slip away for a day to visit with them, but I am now seriously doubting that I will be able to get away for more than an evening. I am here with serious time pressures and the work is complex (there had been a chance that things would fall into place easily, but that is not the case). Oh well. I'll have to take what free time I can get.

060213 Raleigh, NC, USA
Random observation: Anger arises from powerlessness. Anger can grant a sense of strength, if only the strength to lash out. People who feel empowered or in charge of their own destiny / circumstances generally do not get angry, unless frustrated by outside influences.

060208 Raleigh, NC, USA
Aw, poop. Here's the final word on the lovely big hard drive I bought:
"It is a limitation of the NP8890 (Sager 8890-S Notebook). The motherboard and system BIOS doesn't support the 160 GB capacity Hard Disk drive. The Promise ATA controller BIOS is not upgradeable on NP8890."
So, unfortunately, this is one of those times where you discover that a cutting-edge system has worked itself into a technological cul-de-sac. Earlier systems had a different set-up and the ATA controler could be flashed, and later systems had the capability to handle very large drives built in. My system just can not do it. Dang. This means that I spent about $120 extra for all that empty space that my computer will never be able to recognize or use.

At least now I can stop trying to fix my laptop and I can finally return to just using it.

060207 Raleigh, NC, USA
I'm still too dang busy and my computer still needs some tweeking. I put in an big new harddrive and the darn computer can not seem to recognize all of it... It recognizes only 131 GB out of the 160 GB that the drive is supposed to have, despite having an up-to-date system and an up-to-date OS with all the latest patches and such. Seagate is working with me to figure out what is the problem.

I recently returned from Toronto, having seen Wagner's Gotterdammerung with my mother. It was a good performance, with a very minimalist set and the people in modern garb. The lack of distraction helped one focus on the story and the music, so it worked well. The Sigfried they had was an excellent tenor, but clearly not chosen for his appearance; he was short, pudgy, balding, and rumpled. At first, it was a bit comic, having this chubby little guy swaggering around like he was a 6'6 Adonis, but after a little while your mind adjusted and you came to appreciate the clarity with which he projected the attitude of the character. It fit with the set; image and appearance were not the point, story, attitude, and sound were the point.

Now, however, I'm back at work and buried under a blizzard of details. My passport came in with my visa to China approved, which is darn nice to have in hand. Now I need to pack up for a 2 week trip to Davis, for some R&D work there, followed by 2-3 weeks back in Franklinton finishing up here, followed by moving to China, followed by spending a week at a conference in Denmark about three weeks after arriving in China. One of these days, I'll have enough frequent flyer miles built up to spend 'em on an upgrade to first class during one of the long transoceanic flights. That will be nice.

060129 Raleigh, NC, USA
As might be obvious by my three week lack of posts, my computer was well and truly hosed. I had to toss the bad hard drive and reformat a new hard drive. The initial installation of WinXP was a bit messed up and XP kept attempting to treat my firewire port as the network connection, instead of the ethernet port. It took another reformat and reinstall to fix that. Then, a windows media player update resulted in lethal interactions with another program such that the computer became an utterly locked-up useless brick every time a CD was inserted. Sigh. Anyway, I think things are finally fixed up on the computer front... I hope.

In other news, I was at a meeting with a bunch of high-level business types. Power-suit wearing movers and shakers making big decisions. I looked at them and thought "I could do this." Then I thought about who I would have to become in order to be the person who would be in that position... I am really not sure if I like that person. When deciding where you want to go in life (goals, not locations), it is important to also ask "Who will I be when I get there?". Any journey changes and shapes who you are... I'm going to have to give more thought to the journey and the becoming, rather than just the goals.

060108 Raleigh, NC, USA
Huh. I'm not sure what happened, but just before ordering a replacement hard drive, I decided make one final file recovery attempt using boot disks and some recovery software... The computer recognized the drives and booted with no problems. There were some corrupt files, but I reinstalled what was needed and backed everything up while it was still working. I rebooted several times and everything has kept working. This is nice, but not comforting: machines are supposed to do the same thing every time, not sometimes work and sometimes not. Anyway, I'm not going through the pain in the rear of totally reinstalling my OS and all my programs until I really really need to... So I'm going to make frequent backups and keep using the machine. If I'm amazingly lucky, then the problems were a simple overheating problem. I'm not counting on it, though.

In other news, at the start of February, I'll be meeting my parents in Toronto and going to see a production of Wagner's Gotterdammerung. For those of you not familiar with Wagner's Ring cycle, I will reproduce a kinda humorous summary that was published a very long time ago. Mom has kept this clipping with her records for about forever. Here's hoping you like the Ring Summarized.

060105 Raleigh, NC, USA
Just a quick note. I've been very busy with work during the day and a writing assignment for WotC in the evening... Not much time for blogging. I've not yet even ordered a replacement hard drive for the laptop, so my computer is still out of commission. Ordering the HD will be on my to-do list for the weekend.

060101 Raleigh, NC, USA
Well, dang. I got to ring in the new year by having my computer fail; at 10 PM it started acting wonky, by 11 PM it was reporting it couldn't find it's hard drive or the OS, and by 11:50 PM I was forced to give up on data recovery efforts, having recovered nothing. Sigh. So much for the machine that was serving as my main communications device, my stereo, and my entertainment center. Hopefully I can get it repaired quickly.

On the plus side, I backed everything up to an external hard drive only a month back and my workplace gave me a laptop to use. So, I went in to work, grabbed the laptop and plugged the external hard drive in. Bang. Back up and running again, with only minor losses.. This could have been so much worse, but it's not; it is merely a minor inconvenience. Hm. I could look at this as having a problem for the first hours of the new year, but I think I'll look at it as having a solution in the new year to problems of the old year.

051229 Raleigh, NC, USA
One evening, when visiting with Jeff and Jenn for Christmas, we used Anika's Magnadoodle to play a modified verion of the Tanka game (developed in Heian court of old Japan). One person would write a quick Haiku (5-7-5) and the other person would complete it with a 7-7, attempting to provide a twist to the description. Because it was a pretty fast back and forth, most of them were fairly prosaic, mentioning things immediately in front of us and we did not worry much about the requirements of the old court forms (mention of season, nature, emotion). Here are a few examples of what we came up with, reconstructed from imperfect memory:

Example 1:
Cherubic child sleeps
Pudgy-cheeked and rosy-lipped
Serene and peaceful
---
So how come when he awakes
He's a snorting little pig?

Example 2:
Teething time is hard
Little squaller cries so much
Inconsolable.
---
Uncle bounces, happy kid.
Inconsolable, my ass.

Example 3:
Children learn so much.
How to move, talk, play, and count
In just a few years.
---
They grow in a flash and leave.
Parents have so little time.

However, I decided to go with a dark theme for the 5-7-5 of the last one of the night and Jeff came up with the best 7-7 of the night (again, this is reconstructed from imperfect memory):

Cold wind blows, wolves howl.
Merciles night is falling.
Shelterless, we walk.
---
We need have both food and warmth.
I torch my friend and enjoy.

051228 Raleigh, NC, USA
Over the last few days break, I have had a little time, so I have taken the opportunity to fix up lots of little things. Amongst the minor details have been fixing up broken links on this site. The web is an ever-changing thing and so any links from this site to outside pages may or may not stay functioning. Also, I have finally typed up and inserted entries in at 051009, 051107, 051108, 051108, and 051109. I also moved all entries from 051017 to 051114 to the archives.

When I was fixing the link to ruby text, (in the entry on 050810) I noticed that standards have finally been published for the use of ruby text, so I'll be attempting implementation in the next little while. We'll see how that works out.
If your browser has implemented the "simple" ruby text formatting standard, then you should see "world wide web" written above "WWW", below. If this has not yet been implemented, then you should see "WWW (world wide web)" in the following:
Note: To comply with XHTML 1.0 strict specifications, the ruby text display attempt has been removed. We will have to wait for XHTML 1.2, probably, to see the implementation.

It looks to me like Firefox 1.5 has not implemented any ruby text features. MS Internet Explorer 6.0 has implemented "simple" ruby but not "complex" ruby. At least, this is true as of 051228. It may change in the future.

Page Last Modified: 2006 04 21, 09:58:30

 

 

Blog archives