Okay, Linux is installed and working, except for sound and wireless, of course. :)

I can’t remember what color scheme I was using, which is kind of annoying.

Went wardriving today. A lot of wireless networks have popped up since I last went around here. Including several new ones in my apartment building.

Life is good.

Woohoo!

I was sitting at home, watching “Nurse Betty” that Tivo had so kindly recorded for me a day or so ago, when the UPS guy showed up at my door with Tera’s new hard drive! Yay!

I spent most of yesterday getting Windows installed and configured the way I like it (and it took 2 and a half hours just to install the Sims and all of its expansions…which will be rendered useless in a couple months with the Sims 2 comes out, but oh well).

Today, I will be finishing that up and then installing Linux. So I get to get all frustrated with the sound again.

Yay for Tera!

So, it’s 2004.

I woke up this morning and the electricity was out. It stayed off for awhile, then came on long enough for me to make some scrambled eggs and toast and then went off again. It was sometime after noon when it finally came on and stayed that way.

TiVo is doing good. In addition to it taping my favorite shows and movies with my favorite actors, I now have it taping talk shows that my favorite bands and singers appear on. Puddle of Mudd was on a rerun of Mad TV today.

The PC Linux OS is doing better. I dunno what was up the first time I ran it, but when I did ‘df’ it said it was 100% full. Now it says like 42%. So I can save things now. Which is cool. I haven’t tried USB again. I didn’t mess with it much before since I couldn’t save anything anyway.

I decided to read “Lord of the Rings.” Well, I started with “The Hobbit” actually. I am on chapter three of “Fellowship of the Ring” right now.

New semester starts in a week and a half.

Go here: http://www.addictinggames.com/mindreader.html

I love my TiVo.

I set it all up last night. I will take and post pictures at a later time (more on this in a sec). Now all my usual shows will be recorded, as well as things I never remember to watch, and any Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise, or Renee Zellweger movie that comes on. Plus whatever TiVo wants to. Never again will I forget about “Home Movies” (although it’s being moved back to 11 pm, so it would be doubtful that I would forget anyway). And I can catch up on all those episodes of “Kim Possible” that I never see. Yay!

So, I decided to try out the PC Linux OS live cd instead of Knoppix on my defunct desktop. First impression was good, very pretty and clean. I liked how it had Gaim 0.73 instead of like 0.59 or whatever I was using in Knoppix. And Apollon so I could download music. And then, I realized that it really sucks if you don’t have a hard drive. You can’t save anything. There is no ramdisk, like there is in Knoppix. So I still have it running, but I may switch back. I don’t know. Tera’s hard drive should be here soon.

Another thing I discovered about the PC Linux cd is that I can’t get USB to work. I took a picture of TiVo and was going to get it off the camera, but I can’t. Not that it matters, because I wouldn’t be able to save it anyway. So pictures will come when Tera’s hard drive gets here. Unless I switch back to Knoppix. I don’t know. TiVo may keep me so busy watching shows that I won’t be bored enough to just sit at the comp all day. Hehe.

I do know one thing. I definitely need that NIC and a bigger hard drive. Right now I have a phone cord stretched annoyingly across my living room. And I think TiVo’s hard drive is going to be full probably before the end of the week. Hehe. I’m off to count my money and see if I have enough to get one of the two.

Well, I lost this post the first time I wrote it, so hopefully I can remember everything.

I went and saw “Return of the King” last night. It was very good, the best of the three, I think.

I love my new phone. I was sending IMs during the intermission of the movie with it. Hehe.

I got my grades. Well, all but one. My math 300 grade isn’t up. Dunno what is up with that. I didn’t do that great this semester, but I did pass everything (assuming I passed math 300, that is). Next semester will be better.

I just finished reading “The Joy of Linux.” It was a good read, very funny at times, as well as informative. I highly recommend it to everyone, whether you use Linux or not.

And some good news: I got all the stuff I wanted off my desktop hard drives yesterday. So when my new hard drive for Tera comes in, she will only be missing a couple months worth of stuff. So yeah, that screenshot I posted a couple weeks ago of my Linux partition: it doesn’t really look like that. I was able to get stuff off without any problems whatsoever. So the problem is definitely not the hard drives themselves.

I’ll be heading home soon for Christmas, so I don’t know how much I will be posting. Just in case, I will go ahead and wish everyone happy holidays!

Yay, finals are finally over.

Now once I figure out if I have passed this semester or not, I can finally relax for a few weeks.

I’m sending off Tera’s hard drive tomorrow, so I should be getting her a new one soon. Let’s just hope I can get the data off of my desktop without any problems.

I had a fun little board game party last night. I cooked and my team won Cranium. I found a recipe for these cute little penguins made out of olives, cream cheese, and carrots, so I made a few of them.

Yay!

I got my digital camera to work in Knoppix! Apparently there are some obscure things you have to do with Olympus cameras, including setting some obscure setting on the camera itself and removing some obscure module. But it works!

So here are some pics of my car, as promised, and one of a tree.

And for an update on the laptop…
I emailed Sager about either getting a replacement hard drive or switching my laptop out for the new Sager NP4780 and I mentioned getting a data recovery company to get the data off my dead hard drive. They warned me that this could void the warranty and told me to contact the hard drive maker. So I email Toshiba and ask. They said they didn’t do data recovery but referred me to DriveSavers. So now I’ve emailed them. Hopefully this will all be sorted out in a couple weeks, and hopefully my warranty won’t be voided since Toshiba didn’t really say anything about the warranty. But I figure if they referred me then it must be okay?

You know…

I’m thinking this is why Linux doesn’t work on my desktop anymore. And, as you can see, I am still stuck in Knoppix. Windows will work for about ten minutes at a time, which gives me enough time to get pics off my camera and upload them. Heh.

Grrr…

So I need to figure out a way and a place to store my data that is on my laptop. My desktop is no good because (a) it hardly has any hard drive space left, and (b) I expect it to die at any minute. In fact, I thought it did die last night and I was going to be left computerless. Somehow, Windows was the only thing that would boot (including Knoppix…strange, huh?) and it is giving me periodic errors saying that it can’t save stuff and files are missing. Yes, it is time to make sure the cell phone is charged so that people will have some way of reaching me in the near future.

I’m excited about my birthday party. If only it was tomorrow and not another week..

Well..blah…

My laptop kind of died on Halloween (or, more precisely, at 12:10 am on November 1, as witnessed by my webcam). Not really sure what is wrong with it, but I might need a new hard drive.

But, good news…I am having a birthday party on the 15th! If you want to come, call or email me and I will give you the details (assuming that I know you).

Hmm…that’s about all the news I have.

If I wasn’t selling that card on ebay, I would take it into the parking lot and beat it profusely with a hammer.

I can’t get my new Orinoco card to use the right drivers. Because now it wants to use the module that came with the driver for the other card. And it works, of course, but I can’t use Kismet with it. I don’t know why it won’t use the orinoco_cs module. I’ve spent way too long now trying to figure that out. And I have a feeling that now I have too much angry energy to get any real sleep tonight. Not to mention, I still have homework to do. BLAH. I need a hug.

Okay, so I decided to list it on Ebay.

If anyone wants it…
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=45000&item=3052221207

And an updated wardriving map. Let me know if you want to see a particular area up close.

I got my Orinoco card yesterday.

It works like a charm. No packet loss with this one! I guess I will end up selling the other one on ebay, although I haven’t quite decided yet.

Umm…not much else to talk about.

So I was wardriving down Kingston today, and my battery was getting low.

So I decided to stop by Best Buy and get a power inverter, so I wouldn’t have to stop. Cost me $71. I got in my car, plugged it in the cigarette lighter, plugged in Tera. BEEEEEEEEEEEEEP. It wouldn’t stop. It was a very annoying high pitched beep. Plus it wasn’t working. So I drove to campus and got online and looked up what this meant. It meant that Tera is too much of a power hog for that inverter. So I ordered one online for $40. Return the other one. So I saved $30 for a better inverter, but of course, now I have to wait for it to ship.

Soo…here’s what I’ve gotten so far…

These are of Knoxville/Alcoa and then campus, respectively. Click on the thumbnail to see the larger picture.

I’ve only been out like two or three times, so I don’t have a whole lot yet.

The rest of my life is crappy. Don’t ask.

Argh. I’m sooo mad.

I’d been waiting all day for this eBay auction to come to an end so I could snipe myself an originial Orinoco gold card, and then I lost it.

Basically, what happened was, I found this auction for an Orinoco silver card but the card pictured was gold. So I emailed the seller and confirmed that it was, in fact, gold. He just thought it was silver because the card itself was silver. So I thought, oh goody, no one else has probably noticed this, so I should be able to get this fairly cheap (Orinoco golds go for about $60-$70 on eBay). Anyway, I’m sitting at Mellow Mushroom, and it’s about two minutes till the end of the auction. I refresh the page one more time before I bid, just to see if anyone else had been waiting till the last minute, and THEN……my crappy Proxim card figures out that it’s about to be replaced and decides not to work! By the time the page refreshed, the auction was over!! The card went for $37!!! *cries* That is like the deal of the century. I’m very mad at my crappy Proxim card right now. Things like this is WHY I WANT TO GET RID OF IT TO BEGIN WITH!! *sigh* Now I must spend several more weeks trying to find a good deal on an Orinoco, while my antenna sits and waits for a card it can actually connect to. And this means I must spend more time in Windows (blah), since I can’t go wardriving in Linux with this card.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3048677218&category=45000

I got an unexpected email today.

Powernotebooks rebated me $30, since they lowered the price of their 4760. I bought Tera like a month ago! Such a great company. I highly recommend them to everyone.

I got my coffee table today. Finally picked it up. It’s too tall for my couch. I need a new couch now.

I think I did decently well on my Math 300 test today. Which is good, considering I never got around to studying.

Now if I could only find some time to work on my comp sci lab…

Oh, and by the way, do not buy the Linksys wireless broadband router (802.11b).

It sucks. I’m on #2 and exchanging it for a Netgear or something tomorrow.

Tera has gone wireless!

After struggling with my annoying Linksys router for an hour or so, I finally got her online with her new wireless card. At least, in Windows. It still isn’t working right in Linux. *sighs*

Anyway, the KLUG InstallFest is Saturday, so if you’re reading this and you don’t have Linux on your computer, you should come.

Umm…

I should be working on my lab. It’s due tomorrow. Blah.

Okay, as promised (an hour ago)…

And sorry about my hair in both of the webcam pics. I seriously need to find time to style it. Hey, perhaps I should do that instead of taking random screenshots.

Windows (ignore how tired I look in the webcam shot):

Linux (don’t you love my matching splash screen?):

Random shot of me taken by my webcam (don’t laugh…it’s dorky):

Well, I’ve gotten pretty much everything set up the way I like it now.

Sound is working. DVD player works. Webcam works. Just gotta get a wireless card.

I will take some screenshots later of my desktops. I still need to find a digital cam to get some pics of her.