Since my main computer is out at Quakecon, I pulled my Shuttle out of the closet for likely one of its last tours of duty. Seeing as how I’m only going to be using it as a computer tonight and tomorrow, I didn’t want to go through the hassle of upgrading everything. What that means though is that I have no Firefox 3, so when I tried to look up a link that I had been to earlier, attempting to use the awesomebar to do a page title search resulted in a massive fail. I’m already missing the awesome.
My only project before I go to sleep tonight is to grab some screen captures from some videos from the game event that I finally got so that they can go up on the website for promoting next year’s event before I start handing out business cards with the web address on it to people tomorrow. Unfortunately I had to download a trial version of some software to be able to read the format that the videos are in (curse you, Sony, and your proprietary formats!), but hey, since this computer will likely be formatted before the next time it sees any use, not a big deal.
Personal - Dallas
Quakecon is tomorrow, so I’ve spent the better part of this afternoon getting everything on my computer ready. I also went ahead and started making my backups of everything that I’ll need to for my upgrade since I want to make sure nothing that might happen to my computer at Quakecon could screw me over in that regard. Luckily it’s not like Quakecon is all that far from my house, so any emergency runs to and from the event are completely doable.
The exact timing of when everyone is going to arrive is still something up for deciding. Whenever I go I’ll likely only stay until 7:00 or so because Friday really will be a long day for me there. I’ll go ahead and predict in advance that I’ll probably get bored some each day, but hopefully I’ll be able to find enough stuff to do that it won’t be the kind of boredom where nothing sounds remotely fun. If that happens, I guess I have a bunch of consoles at my house that could use some extra playing time.
Personal - Dallas
My test today wasn’t easy in that weird, uncomfortable way but easy in the fact that I could have taken it two years ago and aced it. Let’s just say that I’m not worried in the slightest about my grade in that class, and by extension I don’t regret taking it over the summer. Let my summer begin!!
As it turns out, my first programming project is an unplanned one that has be learning ASP.NET. Technically I could be doing it in PHP, but IIS + PHP + MySQL is just more trouble than it needs to be, so I’m basically fumbling my way through ASP.NET and SQL Server. There is a ton of stuff to readon MSDN about it if I ever want to worry about studying it “correctly”, but for the time being, anything that works as intended will be fine.
Personal - Dallas
After I take my last SE test tomorrow night, I guess you could argue that my “official” summer break finally begins. Granted, I get less than a month off, but that’s more time than Rockwell Collins gave me last year, and I think by now we all know that I’ve enjoyed this summer much more anyway. Even then I guess it’s not entirely accurate since I’ll still be working with Mr. McDonald, but you can consider it summer in that my schedule is truely entirely flexible. My plans for the first 4 days? Why, going to Quakecon and seeing a movie, of course!
Quakecon won’t post a problem for the streak since I’ll be coming home at a reasonable time every night, so I guess HP football would be my next hurdle to clear. We do have a couple games that are far away, but by then I should have an iPhone and posting should become stupid easy. From one week to one month and now over one year, this streak just seems to be unbreakable. I imagine that it’s like a Jenga tower though, and sooner or later the wrong piece is going to be pulled out. Whether it’ll be a catastrophic implosion or simply a minor collapse is yet to be seen.
Personal - Dallas
Additional time to ponder over my pending upgrade led me to research getting a new keyboard and mouse. My current ones work fine, but they’re both fairly basic and I’d like to have a few more buttons on each that I can customize for various (nefarious) purposes. Specifically, some thumb buttons on my mouse would be nice (I’ve gotten used to navigating forward/back in my browser history with those) and come customizable keys on my keyboard for launching programs. My only requirement is the the mouse must be cordless; I’m not enough of an insane, basement-dwelling, overobsessed fanatic to think that I need the extra nanosecond response time that a corded mouse would give me, and I love not having to deal with a cord on my desk. The keyboard, however, moves around so little that I’m perfectly fine with having a corded version there.
So, after doing a little research, I discovered one probably purchase and one possible purchase. The probable one is the Logitech G11 keyboard which has 18(!) programmable keys for my customizing pleasure, and in a very cool feature, is backlit so that the keys can be seen in the dark. The only possible purchase is the Logitech G7 mouse, mainly because of the horrendous battery life that it seems to get. With my current mouse (the LX5, part of a wireless desktop bundle), I maybe have to change the batteries twice a year. With the G7, apparently the battery life is only measured in hours (of actual use time). It comes with two battery packs and a place to charge them in the transmitter stand, but I’m just not sure if that’s something I want to deal with. I’ll likely be doing more research on the mouse front, but I will likely be getting some sort of new mouse with all the rest of my computer parts.
Personal - Dallas
I noticed today that I had fallen behind on my Amazon purchases since 21 came out this week but it was still sitting in my cart. After I bought it, my dad thought that it would be a good movie to watch tonight, so I went to Blockbuster to go rent it. The blockbuster close to our house has an entire section of the wall dedicated to 21 but none in stock, and then another Blockbuster I tried didn’t have any either. Realizing that this was the 21st century we were living in, I figured I’d try my first digital rent and see how that process went. It would have been an interesting experiment save for the fact that apparently it can’t be rented yet from iTunes or any similar store, only purchased.
So, I’d purchased the DVD, it’ll be on it’s way to me next week, but we wanted to watch the movie tonight. So, what did I do? I resorted to the faithful torrent and got a copy in about an hour. Seriously, I exhausted just about every avenue I could think of to *pay people money* to rent it and watch it tonight, but the physical copies were in short supply and apparently the digital version doesn’t even exist for rent. Had I not just purchased it on Amazon I could have paid about $10 more and bought a copy of it in person, but I wan’t going to pay that much money when all I wanted was a legal way to rent it. Come on, movie studios, is that really too much to ask?
Personal - Dallas
I started working on our HTPC this afternoon, and once I got back from Fry’s with a new SATA hard drive so that I could eliminate the IDE cable and get some semi-respectable cable management going on, I started installing Vista. The install went smoothly, the desktop came up (although in ugly 640×480 overscanned on our HDTV), and I then went onto upgrading to Vista. Wait, what? Yeah, there’s a loophole in upgrade copies of Vista where you can do an install on a clean drive by first installing Vista without providing the product key and then do an upgrade from inside of the newly installed Vista. I didn’t make the rules, but it works.
So, the second install (or “upgrade” if you will) finished, and I then started to install drivers. First on the list was the graphics driver so that I could get a better resolution and actually see my whole desktop. Install, reboot… and explode. For some reason the computer now is quite confused on what to do and won’t boot into Vista, so I’m probably going to pull out an old monitor and hook it up so that I can actually see everything that is going on. Good thing this can be my weekend project without anything else getting in the way, I guess.
Personal - Dallas
It took me until about noon today (and then another couple hours of bug squashing), but I successfully finished my project in time. That done, over, finito now, and my attention can be turned to entertainment and personal interests for the rest of the summer (the test on Tuesday being an exception once again). As far as my projects go, I’ll probably start off by doing a little bit in research in the next few days, but I likely won’t start anything until afte Quakecon is over.
Since I didn’t go to work with Mr. McDonald any today due to finishing up my project, I’ll be going in tomorrow afternoon for a few hours most likely. We’re in the process of making a wiki that will house basically all the tech knowledge so that it can easily be searched, found, and updated as necessary. I’m the primary support for that project no not a lot can really be done with it when I’m not there. That’s not a huge problem since he has many other things to take care of besides that, but it does tend to become the focus whenever I am there.
Personal - Dallas
Shortly after beginning my final push on my project, I became quite aware that my knowledge of Swing was nowhere near good enough to properaly implement a GUI interface for my project, so I fell back to the (demonstrated in class) console method of text menus and a whole lot of loops. While it is a ton of typing, it’s also fairly basic and just requires everything to be done properly. Considering that it’ll actually let me get the project done in time, I think it probably ended up being the better option.
My statement that I have nothing on my schedule my schedule between tomorrow and Quakecon isn’t entirely true since I do have my last test next Tuesday, but that’s not a big event in my book since it should be fairly simple and won’t require that much studying. I didn’t do the Vista upgrade on our HTPC last weekend so that will probably happen sometime this weekend, and then of course after Quakecon my tech life gets very interesting with my computer upgrade (which is quickly turning into a whole new build, but for just over $1k, it doesn’t seem like I’m buying a whole new computer). I’d have to say that overall, this summer ranks about 100 million times better than the last one.
Personal - Dallas
An early post cometh today since I’m going to be playing WoW for a while then continuing work on my project (still due Thursday despite some efforts to push it to Tuesday). I feel fine with where I am right now; still have some work to do, but very managable in between tonight and tomorrow. Most of what’s left is just the glue for getting everything together, and I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on how that’s supposed to work. 44 hours, not a problem.
Basically after this project is done, I have nothing on my schedule until Quakecon next week. This is very nice since it will give me a chance to rest and make sure that I get everything up to date and ready on my computer for the event. I’m most likely going to be meeting Andrew and some other people before we actually go there on Thursday, but all of that has yet to be decided.
Personal - Dallas