All posts by cs

what is it boy?

social

Explain this mixed-up dog behavior. Can’t figure it for whenever the newly installed microwave beeps the dawg comes a-runnin’ like we called him. Tail wagin’ and ready for action something we don’t understand what. It’s like a Pavlov thing but the OLD oven had beeps and whistles too and he never cared less. It’s not like we give him food out of it…

The door bell ring sets him off to barking, of course. He understands the rumbling from the electric garage door opening. Dawg knows the sound of the kitchen phone desk drawer and the rustle of car keys therein. Amazingly, he can even distinguish the unique beat of our make and model vs other car brands passing by.  Why is he confused about the microwave?

no time for misbehavin’

social

Oh this is going to be good… The Microwave just packed it in. How are we to survive? The children have never known life without one. It will be like camping out inside our house. Timed just for the holidays and not part of the christmas budget we may have to tough it out — or at least until the madd shoppers of the season subside.

look out!

social

Analyzing the contributing factors we decided that the guy acted stupid. He could have lost his life for it. All accidents are a combination or series of mistakes leading up to the grand finale. Needless to say the hearts of driver and target (nearly a statistic) went a-flutter. The man, nearly flattened, was on a bike. Our 4000# hauler would have survived (rule of physics). Stupid because he disregarded every rule cliche you’ve ever heard during some corny ‘how to ride a bike safe and sane’ AV:
Riding at night.
Riding without lights.
Riding without reflective gear.
Riding on the wrong side of the road
Riding with one’s head up and locked
( and no helmet on it neither )
The last one is the biggie and I give him benefit of doubt that he was a novice — a man who last took to two wheels umpteen years ago and was now riding his kid’s conveyance because his car was out of commissh or something. Anybody who has ever been on foot in and around vehicular traffic knows (has learned) to respect cars. Right or wrong, the other guy is considred an menace or impaired or he just plain doesn’t see you. Cars win. You might be in the right but you’ll be dead right. Well, let’s just say that now he’s clued in. Luckily the chain of events were broken and this: ‘that was a close one’ — averted — but not without a thrill.

nerd stuff II

computers

Microsoft should start being concerned. The last time I tinkered with LINUX I realized that they were in little danger of being displaced. It wasn’t for the everyday user. Linux still isn’t quite ready for prime time but it’s getting there. My install, though it crashed on first attempt, was a success. The installation recognized most of my hardware. I got the network configured too. Linux can be as complicated or simple as you want it to be and it’s nice to have the command console shell. The desktop rivals the Windows GUI. This competition is gaining some steam.

nerd stuff

computers

Wanting to discover what this LINUX thing is all about, I’ve undertaken a learning project. I tried RedHat Linux 6.0 a couple of years ago by purchasing their boxed installation. The technical support, which was what I actually bought (since LINUX by all standards is open source and therefore freely obtainable) lasted for 30 days or so. I found that my WINmodem hardware was not compatible with anything but Windows (surprise) and thus my LINUX OS, as cool as it would be couldn’t go online. A computer these days that can’t connect to the internet is crippled. Later, I resurrected the idea thinking that I could network RedHat 6 using my LAN. The network card however, was too complicated to locate drivers for and not supported. I bailed again. These attempts were abandoned, the disc partitions removed and WINDOWS back in full control.

Now I have the idea to try again only this time, instead of a dual boot machine, I will use a dedicated platform. S’man has traded up and his old box will have new purpose.

Starting with a fresh space from scratch, the first event was to wipe the C drive (and that felt good). I used format.exe on a DOS boot floppy disc. After researching the various distributions that are out there (i.e. SuSe, Debian, Knoppix, etc…) I picked FEDORA. Without buying some books on LINUX my only recourse is to learn what I can from Internet websites and most of that info is hit or miss, schetchy. For instance, the procedure calls for downloading 3 huge files (called iso images) that neatly fit 3 CDs. That’s a 1.9 gigabyte transfer BTW. I found a mirror site (Duke edu) which was reasonably fast at ~580 KB/sec., luckily, which is reasonably good for a home cable connection. The errata that I read said to burn these downloads to CDs and install from those. This failed. Back to the Internet to find out why, I dug deeper to find that not just any cd burner would do. Sure, I could copy the files to CDs, but that it would take more $ophi$ticated $oftware to handle things.

Maybe I’m just being thrifty but I am loath to spend money for an operating system that is supposed to be free. After all, after you buy a big fat computer book ($49.95), an at-cost CD set for shipping ($9.95) vs CD burning shareware ($29.95) you could have bought the shrink wrapped Windows XP. I poked around and found a freeware CD utility (well hidden) that did the deed. I also need a boot floppy disc and this effort required finding the Image file and downloading a DOS utility called RawWrite to convert it. The first floppy that I made failed. The second one too. The third one, after trying newer media worked a bit longer but then bombed out. I downloaded a different image from another site thinking that I just had a bad file. Nope. I downloaded another RawWrite file from another site thinking that might be it. Turns out, after more discovery, that the utility doesn’t work right from a DOS window in windows. You have to run it from outside windows. Too bad there isn’t a LINUX cookbook to tell me this stuff. I should write one. Day ONE is over and I now have some install discs. Ready to begin!