Tag Archives: geek

And now for some good news…

Posted on by
12

Apple is replacing my iBook logic board for free!!! Apparently, the display problem I’m having is a known problem in one batch of 700MHz iBooks, and Apple has a free warranty replacement program in place for all the affected machines. So they’re replacing the guts of the machine and not charging me a red cent.

The cloud around this silver lining is that it might take as long as three weeks to get the computer back to me–it’s going out to California. But hey, it sure beats spending a bundle on a replacement…

Envy, and Night of the Living Headhunters

Posted on by
10

Okay, so.

I’ve been working on a very large job for one of my clients, a huge retail chain that’s in the process of taking all their design and advertising in-house. They’re also in the process of upgrading their existing workstations, and they’re going with Power Macs and Apple Xserves rather than Wintel boxen.

So for the past four days, I’ve been setting up a bevy of dual-processor G5 systems. My client has twelve shiny new G5 boxen (each with 3.5 gigabytes of RAM and a brand-new 23″ Cinema Display), two new Xserve servers (each with a three-terabyte Xserve RAID array), and the desktops are all getting loaded with the entire Adobe creative suite and the entire Linotype font collection.

I’ve been drooling all over myself all week.

Want want want want shiny happy G5 system want want want.

This particular client is also putting a lot of pressure on me to come to work for them, overseeing their new in-house advertising and design group in Atlanta. Problem is, they don’t want to make me an offer; they want me to research the median salary in Atlanta for that job, and put together a proposal for them.

If we’re doing our research right, it looks like the median salary for something reasonably close to what they want is somewhere between $102K and $153K a year. Which is significantly more than I made from my business last year, and is even more than I was kinda sorta but not really offered to move to Boston earlier this year. If they go for it. If it all pans out.

Trouble is, I have another thing cooking with another of my clients down here that might end up worth a great deal more, if it pans out. Which is a big “if”–that client nominally has funding, but it’s tied up in an overseas bank right now for reasons far too complicated to go into.

And, of course, it’s possible that both of these opportunities will go exactly nowhere, though with the scond client that seems unlikely–they’re getting their funding, it’s just taking a while.

And when it comes right down to it, I odn’t really want to live in Atlanta. I’d much rather live in…oh, I dunno, Boston or summin like that, but we won’t go there.

Grr. So frustrating. I have absolutely no idea what to do right now.

Still want a G5.

Civilian Space Exploration meme

Posted on by
4

Ganked from happypete:

In honor of the launch of SpaceShipOne for all the marbles on Monday, I’ve got a meme.

Add “civilian space program” to your Interests, and post about it. Let’s see how far it goes. See if we can generate some interest in Boldly Going….

To add “civilian space program” to your interests automagically, click here.

Quote for the Day, courtesy Deke Slayton, the late NASA astronaut, from the book Moon Shot; he’s quoting Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the first human to envision rockets for space travel:

“Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.”

Amen.

For those of you who are Windows XP admins…

Posted on by
2

…I’ve hust put up a complete FAQ on Windows XP security. I hope Microsoft doesn’t get too offended…

A peek into the future

Posted on by
14

I’ve been looking for a new programming project, since I haven’t really felt like doing any more TCP/IP programming for a while, and I finally decided to make a program that could predict the future.

It’s a simple matter, really. If you know the basic laws of motion, and you see a ball rolling across a table, you can use the laws of motion to predict that the ball will fall off the edge of the table if it’s going fast enough. Applying the same basic idea to a larger system, if you know all the laws of physics, and you can create a model of the entire world, you can use the model to predict the future, right?

So that’s exactly what I did. I wrote a program that would simulate every subatomic particle in the solar system (I decided not to model the entire universe, because I’m running the simulation on a 600MHz iMac), and set it up to show me what will happen in the future. Among the more surprising discoveries:

In the future, cows and other barnyard animals will be converted to run on natural gas, a clean, renewable energy source.

In the future, supplies of gravity, once thought to be a limitless natural resource, will diminish until the government has to start rationing gravity. People with an even numbered street address get to use gravity on even numbered days of the month, people with odd-numbered street addresses can only use gravity on odd numbered days of the month. $500 fine for using gravity on the wrong day.

In the future, a balloon animal will be elected mayor of Washington, DC, and surprisingly, its ideas on economic reform will prove to be very popular.

In the future, mimes will be driven to the brink of extinction by unlicensed poachers, and nobody will really care.

In the future, money will be printed on aluminum foil, because it’s much shinier than paper.

Carpe motherfuckin’ Diem part I: Saturday

Posted on by
6

I shan’t go into the disturbing details about Saturday morning, as they’re a bit on the kinky side and I wouldn’t want to disturb the more delicate of the readers of this journal.

Saturday afternoon, a couple friends stopped by and we all headed out to Orlando for lunch with smoocherie, fritzcat, and a number of the members of the Orlando poly community. It was a blast, in no small measure because I finally got to meet animatra in person. We’ve talked online, and meeting her in meatspace was a lot of fun. She’s more…animated than I had expected.

After lunch, we all piled into a number of vehicles and headed over to Skycraft. For those of you who are not Orlando residents, Skycraft is a place right out of a cyberpunk novel; it’s a weird little store that sells everything from missile parts and laser diodes to electronic components and fiber optic cable, almost all of it salvaged from elsewhere.

Yes, actual missile parts. In fact, they have a number of decommissioned missiles hanging from the ceiling.

It’s a beautiful, beautiful place…enough to make a grown man weep. I managed to escape without too much serious damage to my wallet, but it took every ounce of restraint I could muster.

You can learn a lot about the measure of a person by watching that person at Skycraft. animatra‘s inner geek was on clear display, and even smoocherie showed a bit of geekiness I’ve not observed before.

After Skycraft, it was time to head to Acme Hobbies to look for things for the Nativity scene we’re building this Christmas. You may want to think twice before reading about it, if you’re (a) deeply religious, (b) easily offended, or (c) any combination of the preceding, as it’s not your typical Nativity set. I’m going to hell. Are you?

Hacking the Segway: Cool Link o’ the Day

Posted on by
4

So, you’ve always wanted one of those dorky uber-cool Segway scooter things, but you don’t want to spend five grand on an electric scooter? There’s an answer for you!

Using off-the-shelf components and a little electronic know-how, you can build your own self-balancing scooter for a fraction of the cost of a real Segway unit. It makes me wonder, really, if there’s not a market for a gizmo like the Segway with a more reasonable price tag.

The only thing the prototype is missing is blue LEDs and maybe some spikes. Oh, and some barbed wire–it needs barbed wire. A Mad max version of a Segway just sounds like a lot of fun.

(Thanks to enoelie for the link…)

And just for the record…

Posted on by
6

…because it amuses me…

I’m not the first person who’s ever said ‘Fuck Linux’. I may, however, be the first person who’s ever said ‘Fuck Linux in the ear with a jagged metal dildo.’

Oh, so THAT’S the problem…

Posted on by
8

So I’m up beating my head against my Linux box, which I’ve been struggling with all evening. I have Samba and atalkd installed, but I can’t reach it from the Macs or the PCs in the house–can’t can’t can’t. i can see it, but I can’t log on…

I was heading to bed, about to concede defeat after four hours’ bloody struggle, when i had a flash of inspiration. Maybe I couldn’t log in because the …firewall …was …preventing …network …access?

Checked the firewall settings. The AFP and SMB ports were open. Nope, that’s not it…

…but what the hell, I’ll disable the firewall completely and see what happens.

Bingo.

Goddamn goddamn goddamn. Seems like when you tell Fedora Core 2 to open ports in the firewall, it doesn’t actually open the ports, it only says it does. (Err, mostly–it really did open the http and ssh ports, wtf?)

Well, there’s four hours of my life I’ll never have back. Fuck Linux in the ear with a jagged metal dildo, anyway. At least with Windows, you expect it not to work.

So anyway, it’s working, and I’m off to bed, with a weird sort of smug self-satisfaction at solving a problem I shouldn’t have had to solve in the first place.

Oh, and by the way… Apparently, I’m a strange attractor, whatever that means

Mmmmm, Linuxy goodness!

Posted on by
8

So I got my system to work in Fedora Core 2 with the 2.6 kernel finally. I just went through the X configuration file and removed all references to /dev/psaux, and damned if it didn’t work.

Now, why it worked with the 2.4 kernel but not the 2.6 kernel is beyond me. I don’t even know what /dev/psaux does. But hey, it’s up and running, and I’m typing this entry using Mozilla for Linux even now!

I’m also setting up telnet and ssh and apache and all kinds of other goodness, so Shelly can get into this machine and experiment on it. Her new job requires her to be able to troubleshoot Apache servers via telnet, so this’ll make a good test bed machine for her to play with, and no real harm done if something blows up.

Anyway, since I have Apache running on here, anyone got any ideas about what kind of Web content we should put on it? It’ll be semi-private, as you can only reach it if you know the IP address (which changes periodically as it’s on cable modem with DHCP), so my mind immediately runs to naughty places, which will come as a surprise to…well, nobody.