First post with my new HP DV7-4060…
Much better than the netbook I own or the Dell I borrowed from work. 🙂
I have all weekend to get it loaded and configured before the flight to LA Monday for E3…
Category: Retro Computing
My adventures with old hardware
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Vista…
The new laptop came with Vista, so once again I’m using Vista… Have I mentioned I despise Vista? There’s just so much of it to hate I’m not sure where to start…
Again, for those who might be unaware, I’m an old fart at this point and actually remember when the computer we all take for granted took its first few baby steps around the home. This gives me a fairly good perspective on the whole thing and Vista is not going in the right direction…
An Operating System (OS) exists to do one thing: Provide a compatibility layer between the user’s hardware and the user’s software. This means if I buy a computer I expect there to be a bit of software on it that will allow me to run the software I desire to run.
Vista does fill this requirement – mostly. Where it fails is that it attempts to do 1.1 million other things and does them all poorly or for evil purposes.
I need vista to basically glue all of my hardware together – make the hard drive usable, read the keyboard and mouse, operate the video card drivers and maybe even the sound card so that I can run the software I desire to run. That’s it. Simple right?
What I don’t need Vista to do is include a bunch of applications I’ll never use, lock me into certain applications like web browser or media player, or play net-nanny for me by making sure I use my data according to Microsoft’s rules (DRM).
Microsoft even decided to ‘lock out’ the hobbyist which has made them the number one OS in the world by requiring a $4-500 certificate to write drivers for Vista.
Basically every decision in Vista was driven by questions such as “if we force users to use our DRM Hollywood will give us more money”, “if we force users to use our browser we can control the web and make more money”, “if we make 7 versions of the OS and make the cheap one all but useless for the same cost as XP, we’ll make more money”, and my personal favorite “let’s charge all of the developers out there to write things for our OS, that will make us more money”.
But, even though Vista is the devil, I’m having to run it… All of the hardware is this laptop isn’t supported by XP and Microsoft won’t add support to XP – forcing me to use this bloatware OS. While I have the technical acumen to eventually get XP to run on this machine, I wonder if the time investment is worth it.
Maybe I’ll just see if I can ‘fix’ Vista by surgically removing the tumors and maybe applying a bit of liposuction to the bloat…
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New computer…
Well, I picked up a new computer yesterday. The 24″ iMac I had was awesome, but I spent so much time in “Bootcamp” (a Windows OS partition via OSX) that I eventually decided that I should just get another PC.
The PC this time is a Sony Vaio AW180 laptop – pretty much the best laptop in the world right now.
Though in 6 months it’ll be average and by next christmas it’ll need to be replaced… I just love technology.
Other than that, I’m still slaving away to keep a roof over my head and food in my belly, pretty much like all of you are I’m sure.
So there’s the update. I need to get back to installing and importing all of my junk on this new computer, so take care out there and I’ll be back again soon.
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The iGod is happy…
Yes… As of last night I too am a happy little pod-person.
I finally broke down and joined the teeming masses by purchasing my very own iPhone; the 16 gig variety even.
This replaces the generally ancient flip-phones I’ve had since my ‘starTAC’ made a perfect swan-dive from my hip into a puddle back in 1998 or so… Since then I was determined to use the cheapest phone possible with the fewest features possible as, for me at least, buying a very expensive phone was just asking for something bad to happen – which of course necessitated buying yet another very expensive phone.
Since that day I’ve generally used a cell phone costing less than $29… If I could get it free with service that was even better. And, interestingly enough, nothing ‘bad’ has ever happened to these cheap/free phones.
But I find I need a bit more these days than the generic cell phone offers – mostly because the features they offer are primarily aimed at kids: I don’t want the latest top-40 single as a ring tone, I don’t need MTV videos piped to the 1 inch screen in the phone, I have no use for texting plans that offer 5+ digit message counts, and I especially don’t need marketing tie-ins between my phone service and whatever the scientifically-derived “hip” thing of the hour is.
So, I could get a PDA I suppose, but only the terminally obsessive require a full blown PDA and while I’ve owned many over the years, I just don’t have enough ‘important’ data in my day-to-day existence to really use one. So I generally I wind up selling them off or giving them away a few months after I buy one.
There are ‘Blackberries’ too, but I don’t own nice enough clothes, enough stocks, work in sales or marketing, have a bluetooth tranceiver in each ear, or drive a Mercedes/BMW/Lexus – so I don’t think one would work for me.
Enter Steve Jobs (iGod) and his iPhone…
It’s a pretty nice phone all things considered. AT&T has good coverage and the Edge Network they offer doesn’t completely suck. The iPhone also has a lot of very nice features aimed squarely at the folks between points (A) (high schoolers) and (B) (people who have a summer/winter home in some other state).
The built in email system is very nice, the iPod functions are even better then the iPod, and having access to real internet web sites (not portal-based cell-phone microsites) is fantastic.
Now, there is one glaring error with the iPhone in my not-so-humble opinion – it’s a closed system, meaning you can’t run any software on it that it didn’t come with. And it was this error that prevented me from buying one when they came out.
But the other day the iGod finally wised up and decided to grace humanity with an SDK for the iPhone so that the world can write applications for it… So now I own one.
For those who list me in their phones my number is the same (ends with 2999) and I’m fairly sure I got everyone in my old phone transfered into the iPhone. So, nothing much should have changed.
So, with that, if anyone needs me I’ll be trying to think different enough to make all of the iFeatures in the iPhone iWork.
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My two weeks with Vista…
Well, a great many things have happened since I last posted and I’ve been very busy keeping the world safe for game software – so the postings have been few and far between.
This post I will detail my two-week adventure with Windows “Vista”…
Since the ‘release’ (I still call it ‘extended beta’) of Vista a few clients that we have at work have required some testing to make sure their application indeed does not work under Vista. Due to this I’ve had more than a passing encounter with the OS, but we still required someone at work to become intimately familiar with it so we could actually test with it… That person was me.
So I took home the install DVD and one of the 10 keys we have at work for Vista “Ultimate” and set about installing it. The reason for using the most expensive “Ultimate” version was to gain a familiarity with all of the available functions in Vista – and as I was volunteering to be the lab-rat, I wanted to have a reason to be the lab-rat.
I backed up everything on my home PC – a rather uber gaming system which consists of a dual-core AMD 6000+ cpu on an Nvidia nForce 590 SLI motherboard, SLI’d 8800 GTX video cards, 2 gigs of fast DDR2 ram, raided sata-II HDs, etc, etc… – and started the Vista install.
Installation of Vista was fairly straight forward and didn’t present any real issues. It had basic drivers for all of the motherboard components which made getting to the internet to get the latest drivers easier than I figured it would be.
After getting all of the drivers to the latest ‘release’ version – I don’t run beta drivers – and patching up the OS to the latest versions supplied by Microsoft, I got a chance to play around with the OS a bit…
“Aero”, the new ‘shiny’ Windows interface, is interesting but I’m undecided if the ability to see the window and desktop under the window you are working on in a hazy, frosted glass kind of way is really worth the performance hit.
Before I go any further I should qualify my opinion of a good OS – minimalist. The OS exists to run your applications, nothing more. The more the OS tries to do with fancy-pants graphics tricks, backgrounds, frames, mouse pointers, and widgets, the less CPU time is available for what you are there for, which is running some program you want to run.
So, having gotten everything running and after figuring out how to turn the handful of extraneous Aero “enhancements” off, I set about loading some games onto the machine to see how the new OS performed…
So far my experience with the OS had been ok; sure, Microsoft went and moved, renamed, or hid everything just to create reasons for people to attend classes and added a slew of new “wizards” which really turn me off (see the minimalist OS comment above). But overall it was a fairly good attempt at copying Apple’s OSX.
And this is where things took a turn down a dark alley.
I sat down and started re-loading ‘World of Warcraft’, a popular MMO that I play when time permits, and the OS started popping up all sorts dialogs asking for permission to do just about anything. This annoying tendency to interrupt anything you’re doing with a dialog got real old, real fast, but I soldiered on and got the game installed…
Too bad Vista wouldn’t allow the game to update or actually run.
So I stopped there and attempted to install a few other games with various levels of success before going back to WoW and fighting enough to make it run.
Ultimately I did get WoW to run under Vista, but it was about 10fps slower on average than XP sp2. In addition, with Vista consuming almost twice the memory at idle than XP sp2 there was less ram for my applications, which slowed them down even more.
So, I got my gaming addiction running but none of my gaming tools would work under Vista… My Razor Deathadder mouse, my Belkin Nostromo, even my Logitech G15 keyboard had issues with Vista and either didn’t work outright or were buggy enough that not working would have been preferable.
Software that didn’t work right included Nero which I used to burn cds and dvds, WinRAR which is how I open all of my backed up or archived files, VLC which I use for watching movies, and even iTunes had issues under Vista… This left me with Windows Media Player 11 for music and movies but even it was buggy under Vista and either the sound for music was bad or the computer would reboot when I tried to play a divx video.
So I put up with this for about two weeks before loosing my cool one night and simply just formatting the machine and re-loading XP… Two hours later and all was well with the world once again, sunlight streamed through the clouds and the birds began to sing.
And that was my two weeks with Vista…
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09:F9:11:02:9D:74:E3:5B:D8:41:56:C5:63:56:88:C0
What a simple little thing; a 128 bit integer – nothing more than a string of letters and numbers. It could be anything, from the output of my cat on the keyboard to the code that unlocks the encryption on any AACS protected media…
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Vista and YOU, part 2…
As I will undoubtedly have to install this on *something* in the near future, if only for the inevitable tech support issues, I figured it’d be good to get it as cheap as possible… Which means getting an OEM copy from either Microcenter or online.
First off, the exact wording of the OEM agreement: Microsoft licenses OEM software to “system builders,” which are defined as “an original equipment manufacturer, or an assembler, reassembler, or installer of software on computer systems”. I think everyone who reads my journal qualifies.
But, there are some additional rules one should know:
OEM software cannot be returned once opened. There are no exceptions. You open it, you’ve bought it.
OEM software is also tied to the motherboard it is first installed on. Unlike the retail versions of Windows which can be transferred to a new computer, OEM versions are not transferable. What about upgrading hardware? Microsoft says that anything is fair game, except the motherboard. Replacing the motherboard in a computer results in a “new personal computer,” which Microsoft considers to be synonymous with a transfer. It’s not permitted with an OEM edition of Windows.
OEM software has no technical support. Not that the tech support Mumbai offers is real support…
So, if you must shoot up with some Vista, get the OEM from newegg or Microcenter, it’ll save ya about $200.
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Vista and YOU, part 1…
Vista is coming, Vista is coming!
Well, being the good little technology whore that I am, I wanted to see how my laptop, which is pretty much the supreme being of laptops, stacked up against Vista’s system requirements. So I checked out the Microsoft web site cleverly set up for this purpose…
The Microsoft web site devoted to this question takes the ludicrously arrogant stance of informing potential buyers whether or not ‘they’ are ready for Vista, rather than the other way round.
To find out how well Vista might run on my machine, I installed and ran “Microsoft’s Vista Update Advisor Utility” and gave it a whirl.
I know that my laptop has all the raw resources needed to run *any* OS well: an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, an nVidia go7800, and over 100GB of storage. The system is more than adequate; still, one worries about device drivers, backward compatibility with older applications, and the like, and I really wanted to make sure none of my games were impacted by Redmond’s latest.
So imagine my surprise when the Advisor reported that several devices might not be compatible with Vista. And just look at how mainstream these “questionable” items are: nVidia go7800; Creative X-Fi Audio Processor; Intel 82566DC Gigabit Network Connection; Intel ICH8 Family USB Universal Host Controller; Intel ICH8 Family USB2 Enhanced Host Controller, etc, etc…
I was also warned that some of my software might not be compatible. There was nothing on the list that would concern me personally or interfere with my gaming, but I was quite surprised to find Windows Messenger included in the list. Surely, one should expect Microsoft’s own products to work tolerably well with Vista.
Now, for me, if Vista fails to run properly on my machine, that’s just fine; I’ll be delighted to report it in excruciating detail. But if I were a consumer, I would certainly think twice about Vista after consulting the Upgrade Advisor. It’s given me a very poor first impression of the operating system.
Undoubtedly, the Advisor’s chief purpose is to put consumers at ease about this overhyped and confusing product, but in its present state of development, it can only add to the confusion and increase doubts.
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On the road again…
I’m always the gypsy…
That’s a good thing because in my opinion people in general need to be less into their “things” and more into their “life”. Get out there and see the world!
For example, I moved from Avon to Denver yesterday and all of my worldly possessions fit nicely into two cardboard boxes which fit in the back seat of my Toyota, a very full garment bag which sits on top of the boxes, a plastic filing cabinet full of computer stuff (the $7 one from Sprawl-Mart) which goes in the trunk along with my suitcases, which are currently holding my 30-something pounds of artwork, supplies, and books.
To do this move requires about an hour of packing, meaning I get up late Saturday morning (10am) and hit the road by noon.
I figure I got this way because I was in the Navy almost immediately after High School and you spend most of your time in the Navy living out of a sea-bag. Not that this is a bad thing, you just learn to appreciate the smallest, highest quality electronic gizmos you can afford… There is *no* spare room on a submarine so I’ve always had the top of the line Walkman or other portable music gizmo, audiophile headphones, and whatnot.
So, as you can see, I’m really digging this trend towards extremely powerful laptops. I used to have to move this big PC, 19+ inch monitor, sack of wires, sack of interface devices, several peripherals, etc. every time my wanderlust kicked in. Now I stick the laptop and it’s power supply into my briefcase and the few external things into a bag and I’m on the road… I like it.
Well, that and being able to check my email from any subdivision as there are always 4-5 open 802.11 routers in any large group of homes these days.
So, anyways, the point of this post is that I’m living in Denver now, or at least till my wanderlust kicks in again and I move somewhere else in Colorado.
🙂
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DSL
Having just spent another hour with a senior lineman here at the Chateau I finally have working DSL.
It turns out, after some troubleshooting I did with an oscilloscope and showing the nice Qwest guy that, in fact, nothing was on the line beyond 4k, that there was indeed something screwy with the install. He went and discovered that the first installer decided to put a low-pass on the feed from the post into the house…
This of course prevents DSL from working.
So, once we got all that settled out and the lineman figured he’d asked enough questions about DMT as it applies to the channelization of DSL, I was asked if I wanted a job over at the Vail CO… I have to think about this.
It’d be a neat job, but it’s not exactly part-time and days off happen in the middle of the week.
Other than that the only news is that our neighbor’s cottonwoods are going ape (It looks like a blizzard outside right now and my screens are caked with white fluff) and therefore my allergies are following suit.
Well, back to work…
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The number you have reached…
Well, I’m back in Avon for another week of trying to talk Qwest through fixing the DSL here, doing tech support for Larry and Vivian, and finishing the database for Larry’s online store… Whee!
As I walked in Larry was going on about the DSL, so I fiddled with it for about a half an hour… There’s nothing on our end that is messed and once again I got them to run a loop test and verify that there is something wrong in the wiring between our post and the switch… So I don’t know what the goober who was here Saturday fixed, but it wasn’t the DSL. See, the guys they keep sending me don’t even know what DMT is, let alone how it works or why they have to keep telling people to use filters (the fact that these are low pass filters to keep everything above 4k out of the POTS phone just makes their eyes roll back in their head…) These guys think a DSLAM is some sort of punk dance move…
Really…
I’m having ISDN flashbacks here… Back in ’95 I was running ISDN for a news feed for my BBS, “Silicon Psychosis” and I spent a week teaching USWest folks in three states how to make it all go. What’s really funny is I payed for their education as that ISDN line was expensive, even while it wasn’t working. Now that I think about it, the T1 I had in Virginia back in ’98/’99 required both myself and Peg to teach them how to set it up… Peg showed the tech how to use the TBird he had with him and I had to hold a seminar on B8ZS timing just to get both ends synched up… All while paying around $2000 a month for the line.
Perhaps I should become a telephone man…
Naw.
Anyways, out of frustration at being pounced as I walked in the door, I told Larry that it’s out of my hands and went to go see Shrek 2…
It was worth the $8.50 as I needed a good laugh and some escapist entertainment.
I’ll be writing up this weekend’s adventure(s) either later on tonight or tomorrow between impossible tasks.
Anywho, I’m off to watch the second disc of “Two Towers”… I’m just not in a creative mood tonight.
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My plan to escape…
Ok, I’m having the rear axle bearings replaced on the Honda in preparation for what is being billed as “Geek-Trek 2004” later this month: My drive back to Colorado.
See, I have what is probably the second coolest laptop on Earth now that Apple released the 1.5Ghz Powerbooks today, and it has really cool 802.11G wifi built in. I also have a nice digital camera which interfaces to the laptop very easily. What does this mean to you, the innocent reader? Well, I’ll be journalling, posting photos, making voice commentary and posting my GPS position on a neat map during this trip.
This will also be a very Zen Road Trip as I plan to take my time and explore a bit of America in the 1500 miles between here and there. No hurry, no worry… I’ll probably take a lot of older, pre-Eisenhower routes to get from here to there as well simply because you can’t really see “America” from the 12 lanes of I-70.
I’m sure I’ll encounter lots of neat stuff!
So, in around two weeks, be sure to check out “Geek-Trek 2004”.
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Movies and Macs
Just got back from seeing “Hellboy”… It’s a pretty fun romp with all of the prerequisites for a good SciFi flick including some really nice special effects
We, Zeze and I, went to a new theater up in Woodbridge at the Potomac Mills Mall which was really nice. It’s actually unusual to find a theater anymore that has both a nice screen and a working sound system… Of course the reason we were there is a tale in and of itself…
See, last night I set up my laptop and got this white line though the screen which is usually indicative of a blown transistor… Something that is expensive to fix requiring the replacement of the screen.
After backing up all of my data and booting off of the OSX install CD, the line went away and stayed gone for the rest of the night. (odd)
So, thinking that my mystery line might have been caused by OS corruption, I reloaded everything… Today at work it popped back up for a few seconds and vanished again. Ok, so it’s time to get the laptop swapped out…
Of course it does this exactly four days after the CompUSA warranty ends, but Apple has a great warranty system and it’s not a big deal… Except that I have to send the laptop to Cupertino California for 3-4 weeks…
Well, Apple also has these big stores all over the US and there just happen to be two of them here in Virginia; so off we go to the mall-city of Tyson’s Corner.
Now, you hear me go on and on about the number of people living here these days, but nothing I say can prepare a person for the sheer numbers of folks you will run into both on the highway and in a mall. Getting from here to Tyson’s Corner took nearly two hours of creeping though bumper to bumper traffic, then once we made it to the mall it was bumper to bumper people.
Well, the folks at the Apple Store weren’t exactly sure what the problem is either as it’s sporadic at best, and simply refused to manifest itself again in the presence of a technician, but they logged it and recommended that I remove the 512 megs of RAM that I added. I’m also going to snap a photo of the problem for them…
And – presto:
So I guess I’ll close up for the night, I’m heading over to the local theater to see “Home on the Range” tomorrow.
Hmm, it’s midnight now so I suppose I’ll head off to bed. G’Night out there…
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Et verbum custodiat tibi vobiscum sicut erat in Principio!
Well, today was supposed to be another day off, but it looks like Zeze and I will be going in to do some network fiddling for a few hours today.
This is the whole reason that being in the IT department can really suck at times; large scale things can only be worked on when no one is on the network, therefore you have to come in on days no one else does. Of course being as you are there when no one else is, it’s all “out of sight, out of mind”, and doesn’t count for any extra brownie points with management.
Fortunately for us Dan is *always* at the shop and he knows the hours we put in to keep everything running.
(goes to get a cup of coffee)
In the transportation department it looks like I’ll be ending up with a 1987 Honda Accord which is amazingly similar to the old “phreakmohonda” of legend. It’s got about a zillion miles on it, but the price is good… free.
The Honda is just to hold me over until Dan gets something better in at the shop. But I’m not picky. I figure it’ll get me around to some of the old longlines stuff here in Virginia just fine. Besides, Dan has these new rice-doctors down in building 3… Maybe I’ll get them to drop some 300 horse twin-turbo type R motor in it and scare people with my lack of ground effects, spoilers, and $10000 paint scheme. 🙂
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Web servers…
I just got my new apple-based account (rihahn) set up, and it comes with web hosting stuff. So all of the images you see here as well as web site stuff, picture collections, and other webbly things will be coming off of .mac in the future.
Stay tuned for some web-magic in the next few weeks as well as some new anthro-art.
Let’s see if I can get things re-ignited around here…
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Maaaack!
Art… Ever tried to do art with new tools? It’s tough to unlearn your old tricks and pick up the new ones…
Well, this is what I’m going though right now. See, not only has the machine I run photoshop on changed, but so has everything else. Photoshop CS is a *lot* more precise than Photoshop 7 in just about every function so a lot of the things I used to rely on to fuzz an edge or blend things don’t work that way anymore. All of the tools are … different … now too. For example, the airbrush is gone. It’s been replaced by the regular brush which has airbrush functions (about a dozen of them to play with)…
I’ve also got Zeze’s Wacom hooked up which is taking some getting used to again as I’ve been without one for over a year… No more nipple-mice! yay!
The screen on this laptop is also taking some getting used to as it’s color matched and brightness compensated so all of my shading is more true…
Then you have the Mac OSX operating system as well as the Mac itself, which are insanely fast and pretty much designed to run Photoshop at impressive speeds. There was absolutely no lag in my airbrush strokes… Very nice.
All of this conspired to let me do real shading at 100×100 pixels rather than faking a four color process and cell-shading. See the new Ri’Hahn icon for an example. He was sketched out on the Wacom, colored and shaded in about 15 minutes…
Well, Zeze is awake now so my peaceful “art zone” will shortly be invaded and we’ll be off and running.
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Wanna go for a drive?
Flint looks around, “Ummm, where exactly are we?”
Well, I made it back to Virginia after swearing that I’d never set foot back on this side of the Mississippi River again.
The new laptop, which replaced the desktop computer that Wolf is now using, is pretty slick: A top-of-the-line Apple G4 Powerbook; the huge one with the 17-inch screen and the 1.33Ghz processor. It rocks.
And it really is huge… You could entertain all of first class on an airplane with this thing,
So far it has exceeded all of my expectations both hardware and OS wise, but unfortunately there isn’t much of a standard yet for software companies and that makes installing each piece of software an adventure.
Speaking of OS, OS-X is really, really cool if you’re a nerd at heart as its BSD flavored unix with a very useable interface placed on it.
Ok, enough about the laptop.
Let’s see, what else? Oh, the debacle regarding my driver’s license is pretty harrowing…
See, seven years ago in Alexandria Virginia (the association center of the universe) I was driving a borrowed car and got pulled over by a bored officer that was guarding a school cross walk because the inspection on the car was expired. During this it was discovered that my Colorado driver’s license had also expired by three days and that I was technically driving without a license, so Mr. Irate “I’ve been busted to guarding a crosswalk” doesn’t bother with a warning, seeing as I’d just moved to Virginia a mere week prior, and writes me up for “Driving without an operator’s license.”
Ok, three days later I’m in possession of a brand new seven year Virginia driver’s license and a week later I take a vacation day and go to court to pay the fine. Everything seems ok right? Wrong…
About three months later I get pulled over in Rhoadesville because I have a friend’s kids in the car and they’re going ape in the back seat. The officer was just making sure everything was ok, and I come up as having a bench warrant for the violation in Alexandria… He’s pretty cool about it all, stating that they see this sort of thing from Alexandria all the time. He let’s me drop off the kids and drive over to the Rhoadesville police station where we try to sort this out. Apparently Alexandria wants me sent immediately to the station up there (for a traffic violation) and the Rhoadesville officer thinks this is ridiculous and lets me go with my promise that I’ll show up for a new court date.
Two weeks later I’m back at the Alexandria court house, taking an unpaid day off, to figure out why I’ve been saddled with a $300 fine for “failure to appear” when I have a receipt showing that I had already paid the $200 “NOL” fine. They determine that they cannot verify the signature on the receipt I have and that I need to pay both the $300 FTA charge and the $200 NOL charge again. So I pay the fines again, get all the receipts, and get back to Rhoadesville to get back to work.
Several months later I get a letter in the mail stating that my license has been suspended due to unpaid fines in Alexandria. This was right before I moved to Baltimore and I decided to ignore it for the immediate future as I had bigger things to worry about. Some length of time later I moved to Connecticut and it was there that I contacted Alexandria in regards to my license. I’m told by the Alexandria police that they cannot find anything regarding me in their database and that I should contact the District Attorney’s office “just in case”.
The DA’s office tells me that I still had an outstanding $200 fine for NOL and a $300 fine for FTA and that to take care of it I needed to come to the Alexandria courthouse. So once again I take time off from work and drive from Connecticut to Virginia.
I eventually end up in front of the judge and he starts to look over the paperwork in regards to these charges. He has to call the DA to the stand to try and decipher the ball of worms that my paperwork has become. Eventually he tells me that they’ll have to figure out what happened and re-schedules for a date two weeks in the future… For me that date is just as classes resume at the school I teach at and there is no way I can take those days off. I’m told that it’s basically “my problem” and I can call the day of my court appointment and tell them that I can’t make it, and just take whatever ruling the judge comes up with.
I call, they decide they can’t tell me anything over the phone, I get pissed off, and decide to just ignore the situation till I get back to Colorado. See, Colorado couldn’t care less what Virginia thinks.
Well, here I am back in Virginia and I’ve decided to get back into the fight for my driver’s license before it expires at the end of February:
Monday I went over to the DMV here and was told that I had an unpaid fine of $288.14 and that I couldn’t get my driver’s license renewed till I paid it. So I called Alexandria, used a credit card, and paid it.
Yesterday I went back to the DMV and was told that I needed a receipt for the payment before I could get my driver’s license.
Today, Wednesday, I drove up to Alexandria (a 45 minute drive btw) and got a receipt for the payment I made Monday and took that receipt to a DMV office in Alexandria. Once I got though the line there I was told that Because the Social Security Office has my SSN associated with “Bill” and my driver’s license says “William” that I had to drive back to Fredericksburg to the Social Security Office here and have them update my information.
I get back here and get the Social Security folks to update my entry in the national SSN database and I’m told that it’ll take 10-14 days for it to happen. I tell them that I need it before the end of the month and the nice lady there expedites it for me as well as giving me a typed and signed form to take across the street to the Fredericksburg DMV.
I run back over to the DMV office where I’m told that the new software that hooks the DMV, Police, SSN, and other government databases together simply will not allow them to go forward with my driver’s license until the SSN database is updated…
So I’ll have to go back over to the DMV Friday and hope that things have been updated.
This is what it takes to get a driver’s license in Virginia. And people live here voluntarily.
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Memories
Here’s view from where I’m sitting at this exact moment, taken with the new Casio EX-Z4:
My trusty computer surrounded by the detritus of a rather strange life. My bed and the sliding door to the outside is behind me. 
The view from my desk in my room out into the living room and dining room. There’s a chest of drawers with my TV and the web server on it to my right, and just past those is the door to my bathroom. 
My personal entrance and balcony looking out to the driveway and Deer Blvd. The bathroom is to the left, my bed to the right. -
Here I am…
Ok, things got so bad with the renters that I’m now holed up at Rick and Tina’s place, spending the night in the “hippie room”.
It turns out that the renters called the rental agency and complained that the house was dirty, after Tina spent 10 hours over there cleaning it up and getting it ready. Well the rental agency, not having a single complaint about Chateau D’Isaster for the last few years, called Vivian. Vivian called Tina and Tina went ballistic. She marched over to the house to find out what the issue was and got to see first hand what the renters had done to the place in one evening. Tina called Vivian back with the info (including the fact that folks were in the basement) and Vivian went ballistic. Vivian called the rental agency saying that she wanted those -people- out of her house immediately and apparently the rental agency called the renters and they’ll be gone tomorrow.
Sheesh!
All this for $2500 a night… It’s not worth it.
I napped from 4pm till 6pm in an effort to catch up from last night…
I managed to coble Tina and Rick’s old P-166 together, find 16 megs of ram that works, resurrect an old 239 meg Connor, load win95, and add an old external Viva 14.4 modem (it’s got a rabbit icon that lights up for “high speed”) to get online with. It’s slow, but it’s also retro enough to fit in around here. It’s really got me wanting to call a BBS just so I can watch ANSI scroll up the screen again…
And with that I think I’ll stare at the ceiling for a little while and feel the Earth turn…
-
God is real, unless specifically declared integer…
Ok, I finally had an hour or so to waste and got around to playing with Second Life a little bit last night. Yeah, it will replace mucks in pretty short order.
Within about 30 minutes I had built some pretty complex objects to play with. I’m still missing the Boolean subtract function one normally associates with OpenGL based graphics, but I’m working my way around that.
I just finished printing the 130 page scripting manual so I can work that over while I’m at the shop today. The scripting language is fairly powerful and therefore suitably complex, but it uses C++ syntax and therefore shouldn’t present too much of a problem.
I guess starting tonight I’ll begin work on my avatar. See, in Second Life you can create what your avatar looks like via the built in modeling system and the scripting system. For example Aryntha looks like an anthropomorphic Dragon in the game…
Of course what I want to do will be very complex for a newbie to the system, but I think I can do it.
I’ll have to see if I can get an object script to write and read a local text file as well. Because if I can get it to do that, then I can externally parse the file for whatever data I want, process it, and pass it back to the in-world object. This offers limitless possibilities. 🙂
Other than my adventures in Second Life, there’s nothing much to report today. I have some major life-altering things coming up on the horizon, but I’ll report on those later.
Have a great day out there folks!
