2 Bit Hacker

Well, I’ve been having a good time with my long weekend. I bought a DirecTiVo box on Wednesday night from Circuit City for $50. They’re normally $100, but this one had been returned to the store. There really aren’t that many shows I like to watch on TV, but it seems I’m never home for the ones I do want to see, so this should work out pretty well. I’m already rather happy with it, since it’s recording Invader Zim as I sit at work and type this.

For Thanksgiving, I went to my mom’s house for turkey dinner. It was just my mom, Ralph and I, so it was pretty cool. I’m not entirely thrilled by big family get-togethers. It was a great meal, with turkey, stuffing, canned cranberry sauce (the best kind), mashed potatoes, lima beans, my mom’s home made rolls (very tasty), and probably some stuff I’m forgetting. It was great. Ralph was sick though, which kindof sucked.

After dinner there, I went over to Andrea’s parents’ house, where I watched Andrea play some freaky game that involved cards and grabbing little squeaking dolphins. I have no clue what was going on. After a while we wandered over to her apartment and hung out for a while. It was fun.

Friday I didn’t really do much of anything. Just loafed around the apartment and watched TV and fiddled wit h the TiVo box.

Saturday, I went to Jason’s house for a bit. We watched The Nightmare Before Christmas, which I had not seen before. I thought it was pretty cool. After that, I went to meet Andrea at Uno’s by the mall after she got out of work. Then I just kindof wandered home and went to bed.

And today, I’m sitting at work typing this, getting ready to go back home to get Simon’s birthday present, then wander to my parent’s house for cider and stuff, then it’s off to Jason’s house to deliver the present. Then I’ll probably meet up with Andrea when she gets out of work.

It’s been a good relaxing weekend I think. I havn’t done any of the things that I kindof wanted to do, like clean the apartment, but I don’t really care that much. I did talk to my Dad, and it sounds like he’s going to be coming out this way around Christmas with some furniture for me, which will be cool. I guess I’ll have to clean before then.

Hmm… I need to do my gift shopping too. And soon.

It’s back to work after another wondrously exciting weekend in the life of Chip. On Saturday, Fun Night was disappointing once again. Derrick had gone to a realms event during the day, and was basically useless for playing D&D. So we broke early and I went to jtn’s house for a bit.

Most of Sunday I spent with Andrea. I met her after she got out of work for lunch at Applebee’s, then we drove around for a while. We got her some corner shelving things from Home Depot, and wandered down to Lowell to see Monsters, Inc., which is actually a really good movie. I’d highly recommend it if you liked movies like Toy Story. And it has one of Pixar’s better shorts in the beginning, the one with the birds. After that, we went to evil K-Mart, then to her apartment, then I wandered to Wal-Mart for grocery shopping (around midnight, the only time to shop) then went home and went to sleep. Wondrous sleep.

Oh yeah, and I woke up and got to work on time this morning. yay!

Well, let’s see. Last Friday was Andrea’s birthday. I took the day off from work to hang out with her. We went and got her new driver’s license, and got lunch, and drove around Manchester for most of the day. I got to see all the schools she went to, and where she used to live, and where her grandparents used to live. It was kindof odd for me, seeing all these things so close together. In order to visit the same sights for me, you’d have to travel to Mass., Georgia, New Hampshire, Ohio, and part of England. It must be odd spending your whole life in one place. Weirdness. We also went and saw Domestic Disturbance, which was an okay movie, nothing terribly good, but nothing terrible bad either. We had dinner with her parents and grandparents at a semi-fancy place in Manchester, which was tasty, and I ate too much. Then we just spent the evening hanging out at her house.

Saturday, I went to game night with jtn and Derrick, as usual. It went well.

Sunday, I had to get some software ready for a demo for Monday. We’re trying to get a voice modem to work under NetBSD to be able to checkup on software status by calling the computer, but it isn’t working out to well. I managed to get call-out working on Sunday, but I still can’t get it to answer calls correctly. I’ve been working on it all week, and I’ve finally decided it will be easier to write some custom software than to try and make vgetty work right. Kindof interesting work, but fairly frustrating too.

Nothing terribly notable for the week, been spending more time with Andrea, which is good. I hope to get my custom vgetty solution, which I call sgetty, working soon. I’m getting ready to buy a new computer for myself, which will be nice. I won’t be the slowest machine at LAN parties anymore. yay!

Also, I’m probably going to end up buying a NeXT station from kancer. I think I’ll probably use it as an MP3 player and terminal box, as something that runs quieter than my main PC. It should be neat.

Been poking around ye olde web today, looking at some interesting stuff about people modifying their PC cases. I’m beginning to think it might be something cool to get into. I think I’d like to try and mod a couple of analog gauges onto the front of the aluminum chassis that I want to get. jtn pointed me toward egauges, which has some nice looking gauges that I thought would be cool. I was thinking something along the lines of a temp gauge, a voltmeter, and maybe a tach. No clue how to get the tach hooked up to anything though. It would be cool to monitor fan speed or something. If anyone has some info/ideas, it would be appreciated.

Anyway, it’s just a though. Need to find out what’s a good way to cut through aluminum in order to do any decent mods. The stealth drives seem like a cool idea too.

Yay! I got a Dreamcast in the mail today! It came with 6 games, 2 controllers, 2 memory things, keyboard, mouse, VGA adapter, and other stuff. I can hardly wait to get home and hook it up! Hopefully I’ll get the couch from Jason this weekend, and I’ll be able to make a nice little gaming area in my room. Just need to get a better TV (perhaps a 20” Sony WEGA?)

Lots of stuff happened since my last post, but nothing to terribly impressive. Jason and I went down to see Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust last Thursday. It was the last night it was playing in Cambridge. I think it’s a great film, the animation is great, and the story is cool. Gothic space rockets are odd looking though. We also saw 13 Ghosts on the Saturday before that (Derrick ditched game night again, suprise.) It was pretty neat, but not terribly scary.

Andrea and I spent some time together on Saturday before Game Night, and we spent most of Saturday together. We had dinner at her grandparents’ house, tasty chili and cornbread (I love cornbread, it’s so very tasty.) After that we went to her apartment and played a couple hands of Uno and a game of Trivial Pursuit. I thought I sucked at Trivial Pursuit, but I ended up winning.

Work is going pretty well. The USB modem appears to be working fine, with both FreeBSD and NetBSD. Now I just need to get speech synthesis working right. Had some trouble getting the USB camera to work under NetBSD though, but it turned out it was just because isocronous transfers wern’t available in the version of the ugen driver I had. All fixed now.

Andrea’s birthday is this Friday, and I hope I’ll be able to get at least half the day off to be with her. It’s looking like we’ll have a demo at work that same day though.