2 Bit Hacker

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Matt and I arrived here in Lewiston, ME safe and sound, and are currently sitting a nice long table with a bunch of other geeks. We’ve been playing CounterStrike mostly, with a little UT2k3 and Natural Selection. I think we’re going to head to the hotel soon. Tomorrow, we’re heading to Matt’s relatives for a family get-together thing, then it’s back here for more LANage.

Going to charge the camera at the hotel room tonight, so I should have some pictures tomorrow.

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Yesterday, Matt came up to Manchester looking to buy himself a MemoryStick for his shiny new Clié. We started by heading to Circuit City, where I ended up buying a 128MB Lexar MemoryStick, and some screen protectors for my Clié, but Matt found nothing he wanted. At this point we made a horrible mistake, we went to Best Buy, at the Mall. Oh, it was easy enough to get to the Mall, and into the Mall, and wander around in the Mall. The trouble came when we wanted to leave. Cars backed up basically in both direction all the way around the parking lot. It probably took up at least 30 minutes just to leave the parking lot.

After that was over, I headed over to my parents’ house for dinner and some more gift exchanges. I was supposed to go over on Christmas Day, but didn’t because of the snow. I was also hoping Andrea would go with me, but she was busy. I seem to remember she didn’t go over to my parents’ for Christmas last year either. Oh well. My parents gave me a tool set in a nifty case, and my grandparents sent out a Far Side calendar, a shirt, and a new Star Trek tree ornament for me.

Today should be a good day though, for today I pack up my computer and head to Maine for the LAN party. It should be a fun time. I’ll be coming back on Sunday, probably closer to the evening.

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Well, it’s Christmas again, and here I am sitting alone in the apartment. I was over at Andrea’s house earlier today to exchange presents and eat lunch with her family. Lunch probably isn’t the right word, since it consisted of a pork rib roast and more side items than can fit comfortably on the plate. Andrea gave me 2 classical CD’s, The Fellowship of the Ring 4 DVD box, a Spiderman DVD, a Dune DVD, Bruce Campbell’s book, a scifi book, the new Castlevania game for GBA, and a nifty pen. Her parents got me some slippers.

Also, my dad sent me a microwave, which is still at work, I’m thinking I’ll bring it home tomorrow. This will replace the one that cooks really fast, but burns a hole in a bag of popcorn. Mary, my step-mother, sent me a cook book with a bunch of simple recipies involving stuff from cans. Each thing has like 3 ingredients, nice and simple.

I was supposed to go to my parents’ house in the afternoon, but because of the snow storm, we decided I shouldn’t go. Andrea went off to her aunt’s house, and I went back to the apartment.

That’s about it really. I’ve been mostly watching Bond films on TNN and playing CS since I got back. I finally hooked up the UPS that used to be on Hindenburg to my home PC, and redid some of the wiring behind my desk so I can plug everything in at once. Crawling around to charge my cellphone was beginning to be a bit of a pain.

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Well, I managed to do something fairly stupid today. I went to work without the AC adapter for my laptop. This gave me about an hour and a
half of battery time (I had used some power up on Friday working from a
customer’s parking lot.) On Friday, I had put the adapter in my coat
pocket when I brought it inside, and over the weekend I switched from my
coat to my jacket, which I wore to work this morning. So I have no
power. I feel rather stupid about the whole thing.

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Well, in addition to seeing Star Trek: Nemesis with Jon, Matt, and a couple F.o.R last night, I saw it again today with Nick. Opinions on it seem to vary from it being one of the best Trek movies ever to being about average. Personally, I think it’s one of the better ones, most definitly better than Insurrection and Generations, but I think First Contact is better. I can’t compare it to any of the non-Next Generation movies because I can’t recall any of them very clearly at the moment.

It was good to see Nick again. It’s been a while since I’ve seen him, probably back in early summer sometime. Sounds like he’s doing pretty well for himself. It’s going to suck rather a lot when he and Matt head back to school.

I managed to start cleaning up the computer room in the apartment a bit. Got my desk pretty well cleared off, and sorted through a pile of junk I had sitting around. Still need to figure out a better place for the NeXTstation. It’s good to have desk space again.

Other than that, I’m just looking forward to the FORLAN after Christmas. I’ve never been to a large LAN party before, it should be very cool indeed.

Been a bit since I’ve updated, and Matt was beginning to get on my case, so here we go. Works been going pretty well. Earlier this week we went back over to George Gordon in Merrimack to update the software on our box there. While we were there, I came up with a way to increase the response speed of commanding their machine though our web interface. We told our contact there that it would be a bit before we’d get the update to him though. The next day I went back in the morning on my way to work with the new code, and he was all surprised and impressed. It was pretty cool. It was only like 10 lines of code, but it did make everything much faster. Happy customers are a good thing.

Since then I’ve just been working on getting this new serial modem working in place of the USB modem. It kindof works at the moment, but the sound quality is terrible. I just need to get it working for data calls by Monday, when we’re taking it over to Goodrich Falls (fun place up north.) So I’ll probably be in working on Sunday.

Been hanging out with Matt a lot recently. It’s good to have at least one of my friends back in the area. Haven’t seen much of Andrea since Friday though. Since she moved back home she’s been busy with school work pretty much all of the time. I think next week is her last week this semester though. Tonight, Matt, Jon, a couple of people from F.o.R, and I are going to see Star Trek: Nemesis. Should be cool.

I’ve also been doing some work customizing Gentoo on my laptop. I’ve setup two virtual runlevels, one called ‘docked’ for when the laptop is sitting on my desk at work, connected to the LAN and an external LCD, and another called ‘wardrive’ for when I have it setup for wardriving. The second one took a bit of work, since I had to write customer init scripts for kismet, gpsd, and festival. Should work well, but I haven’t tested it out yet.

I also picked up UT2003 earlier this week, haven’t played much of it yet, but the graphics seems pretty cool. The online game finder seems to have some issues determining ping times however. It’ll say a server is pinging like 40, then I connect and get around 300. Bah!

That’s about it, I guess. I really should try to post more often.

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Well, it’s the first day back at work after a nice long holiday weekend. Overall I had a nice break. For Thanksgiving, I went over to Andrea’s
parents’ house for dinner, bringing with me some Chex Mix (I made it
myself!) It was a pretty standard Thanksgiving dinner, turkey, stuffing,
gravy, cranberry sauce and the like. It was all very tasty.

On Friday, I spent most of the day just hanging around playing CS and FFX. I finally got past the boss I was stuck on in FFX, and have made a lot of
progress in the past few days. Andrea convinced me to go out shopping with
her, which wasn’t so bad. I was surprised the mall wasn’t much busier, but
I guess since we went at night that most of the crowds had already gone away.

Saturday was much like Friday, except Matt and I went to see Die Another Day. I thought it was an okay movie, not the best Bond film ever, but not terrible.
I think is was better than the last one, but not as good as Goldeneye.
I do think they need to stop with the space lasers. Sorry, that was
probably a spoiler… oh well.

On Sunday, Andrea and I went to my mother’s house for a family breakfast. After that we all went up to Manchester to see a hockey game in the Verizon
Wireless Arena, it was the Manchester Monarchs vs. the someplace-or-other
Bulldogs (I think.) As you can probably tell, I’m really into hockey…
Manchester lost badly, but it was still fun to watch.

That’s about it for current events. In other news, I’ve been digging up some hardware for my HTPC project. I don’t really like calling it a Home
Theater box, since it’s really more of a Home Entertainment device, but it
seems to be the accepted acronym for what I want to do. So anyway, I am
thinking of getting an ASUS A7N266-VM
in a CoolerMaster ATC 610-GX1
with probably an AthlonXP 1800+ or so. For connectivity, I was thinking of
grabbing a wireless card to have it link back to my access point, and then
it could also serve as a bridge for my TiVo and PS2. It should be neat, the
whole thing comes to about $600 from NewEgg.