Ian's blog

Hehe my first post.

Greek Stuff:
I bought a cable modem today. Assuming I get the rebate it should pay for its self in 10 months. This gave me the opportunity of phoning technical support and spending 5 minutes trying to get something other than the engaged tone. Then probably 30 minutes to an hour getting them to enable the stupid thing. After spending many hours on the phone with there technical support I have learned a few things.

1) don’t tell them you have a anything other than a windows machine directly connected to the cable modem

2) They consider resetting the modem switching it off for 5 minutes, during this time they say they are doing something to your account *cough* bullshit.

I eventually got the required non flashing lights so I got off the phone.

I also found out that there servers got hit by Code red worm. I wonder if they need a security engineer at Road Runner 🙂

Anything past this point came from my web site. Since I am going to replace that page on my web site with LJ I thought I should copy over the old entries (All 4 of them) 🙂

If someone said they had a website called kittybrain.com and said they had an idea of putting a web cam on their cat and making it the star of the website. You would call them crazy right? If you click the link you will see that this is exactly what one of my friend is doing. I met the addorable cat a few months back and spent ages with a ribbon in my hand playing with him and the other cats that live there. The lucky cat has a custom made harness that the wireless camera is going to be attached to. All I can say is I love it and I hope it works.

Don’t people get it? I don’t want junk mail. I came home tonight and there was at least three pieces of mail asking me if I would like a credit card. I didn’t even bother opening them. I then looked at my email boxfor a website I run and I see emails with subjects, “Secrets Of Wealth Creation”, “Stock market taking you for a ride”, “Add 1-4 Inches To Your Penis…Guaranteed”. Those were just a few of the many waiting for me to delete. Every where I turn people are asking me for my email address. Emm NOOOO! I am not going to give you my email address even if you are going to give me a dollar discount. I am at the point where I filter all email on my personal account. Your email has to be in my address book otherwise you get dumped in my junk folder. On one of my email addresses I just deleted 81 junk emails. Thankfully I have convinced MCI World com that I really don’t want to change long distance and I really do not want to speak to you ever again.

I never reaslised that different countries smell different until my last trip home to Scotland. On my return I flew from Glasgow into New York. On getting off the plane I could smell the US. I was reminded of this when I got to another airport today this time going to San Francisco. A smell struck me that reminded me of the first time I came to the US. I don’t know if it is a brand of cleaner or something they use to clean the carpet but it was there. The smell took me back 3 and a half years to JFK airport in New York. I had been up for over 24 hours I had already visited Glasgow airport London Heathrow that day and I was waiting for small prop plane to take me to Dulles International Aiport near Washington DC. Washington DC is in that nice season where is it hot enough that you want to open the car windows and not so hot that you have t keep them closed so you can run the AC. It was while driving that I detected another smell that I only associate with virginia in the summer, again I don’t know what the smell is only that I have never smelt it in Scotland or washington DC.
It has been a fun week. I found out that my vision is better than 20\20 which it amazing when I couldn’t see further than a foot in focus 3 years ago. I am one of those people that will discover in 20 years time that lasic eye correction wasn’t a good idea. For now I will enjoy not having to wear glasses, being able to walk in the rain, never having to remember to take out your contact lenses before you go to bed. Aaah

My parents moved house about 6 months ago. This was the last address a lot of people from University and secondary school would have had for me. While home for Xmas I sent a few christmas cards hoping that some of my forgotten friends would get back in touch. One did, I haven’t heard from her for 3 years we kind of parted on bad terms. Just imagine a flat with 4 very stressed out students sitting the most important exams of their 4 year university life. Lets just say it became interesting. It was nice to hear from her but I think must have said something since she has never replied back…..
I also got an email from a friend, well an email from one of her co workers inviting me to her birthday party.I lost touch with her after she switched jobs. She almost came to work for the same company I as me. I think the best description of a friend is someone you know well enougth that even after a year of not talking you can still phone up and talk for hours with, with no mention of the long gap.

Geek Stuff:
I am back to being at cutting edge of linux. I spent most of my spare time last week updating my 2 home computers to the latest version of the linux kernel 2.4.1. This sounded like a nice simple proposition when I decided to download the kernel and start the compile going. As it turns out you need to update about 6 other package before you can even start on upgrading the kernel. With a little prodding and poking I managed to get every updated only to get to the point of reboot and the machine not coming back. I grew up using Slackware linux which is a very simple no thrills linux install, but more recently I have been playing Redhat at work and Suse at home. The down fall of using these installs is they hide things and add little tricks to make easier for the user. The thing I missed was adding ram disk support to the kernel so it can load the usb driver so it can see the keyboard when starting up. I hadn’t configured this since I don’t have any USB devices or ports on the machine. After an other kernel recompile I now have this machine up and running.
When should you stop using a machine?
I have always thought that you should first about about what you want to do with the computer then buy a one that can do it. Chances are that the machine will still be able to do same things in 6 months or a year without having to be replace it with the latest and greatest version. I tend to go for mid to low end machines when I buy new ones. My first PC computer is still with me. I bought a 486 DX2 66 in 95 with 4 megs of ram and a 540 meg hard drive. Along with upgrading the kernel of the machine to 2.4.1 I also added a 60 gig hard drive. Yes you heard right I added a 60 gig Maxtor ata100 hard drive to the machine. The machine has slowly been upgrade over the years to now include 32 Megs of ram, an aditional 4 Gigs of disk space, 2 network cards and an ATA33 hard disk controller and finally my new 60 gig hard drive. This machine acts as my file server and holds all my emails plus MP3 versions of all the CDs that I own. So I guess I will stop using my 486 when it nolonger powers up even then I might be tempted to buy a new power supply first before sending my faithful computer to the recycling plant.