2 Bit Hacker

Well, it’s been a rather busy week, let’s see if I can remember it all…


Last Friday Tim and I went down into Boston, didn’t see anything I really wanted to buy at Tokyo Kid or the book store, so we just kindof wandered around the city for a bit before heading back. On Saturday, Delia and I went geocaching, hitting one cache in New Boston and another in Milford. This doubled my number of found caches, and I hope to get out and hit some more soon. We also picked up her computer from her aunt’s house, which turned out to be horribly slow. I felt it was my duty as a geek to use up some of my spare parts to build a better one. I ended up using the board I pulled out of Magus last week, so it worked out pretty well. Glad to see the old board still getting used, rather than collecting dust on a shelf someplace. I’ve had that board since high school, I think.

Tuesday evening I went with Dan, Tim, and Amanda to the Kucinich post-NH-primary party (almost alliteration, aarg!) which was pretty cool. I even got to shake his hand. Delia ending up finding me there, and we hung out for a while afterwards.

Wednesday… hmm… I don’t remember it clearly. I think I may have had a headache. I seem to recall building up the new system for Delia, and I may have hung out with Tim for a bit.

Thursday night I went over to give Delia her new (old) computer and rip some a part or two out of her old system, get Windows installed, and generally get it all happy. It took longer than I expected, but I got a back massage out of it, which was cool. She also introduced me to these grape gummy things from the asian market. So very tasty. I have two left, trying to make them last. Oh, she also let me borrow her Squee! book, which is cool, since I’ve never read it. Yay!

Many events of the week have lost their place in time. I seem to recall a couple games of Uno, a few rounds of Jenga, a couple of turns at Mastermind. Somewhere along the way this got taken. I’m thinking of submitting it to ThinkGeek as an action shot. I seem to recall a couple of late night grocery shopping trips, which is cool, because I didn’t realize we had a 24/7 grocery store.

In other news, work has been rather annoying as of late. The project I’ve been working on is beginning to go online, so we’re finding a lot of the little annoying bugs. At least I didn’t have to go up north again today, I manage to get Mark to let me stay in the office and work on the system via modem. I’ll be happy once this place is up and running.

Oh, and in geek news, in addition to putting together that other system, I’ve also got Interceptor, my SPARCstation 10, up and running NetBSD 1.6.1. I’ve got a couple of issues to work out, since it likes to crash when I insert a wireless card. I hope to replace my Netgear router with it soon.

Well, that’s about all I can remember at this point. I know I’ve left out a ton of stuff, but my brain is drawing a blank on a lot of it.

This week is starting to look up. After spending all of Sunday night working on some software, then driving up past North Conway to install it, things have calmed down at work a bit. I’ve got a couple of broken boxes to repair, but they seem to be coming along pretty well. And Mark said I could have Friday off, which is nice. I think I may grab some friends and head into Boston for the day.

Last night I met two people IRL that I’d been talking to on AIM for a bit. First, Tim, Amanda and I met up with Krystle (hope I spelled it right) for dinner, then we all went back to my apartment to watch 28 Days Later. Krystle seems like a pretty cool person, fairly quiet though, though I imagine it’s somewhat uncomfortable to be new person in the group. She and Tim seem to be getting along quite well. After driving people back to Milford, Delia (doornail) caught me on AIM and invited me out for coffee. That was fun, though I was pretty tired at that point. Neither of us actually drank any coffee. Ended up staying out way too late. Looking forward to geocaching on Saturday with her.

Oh, and in geek news, Magus, my server at IronCastle, is now running off a VIA mini-ITX board, replacing it’s aging ASUS P5A with it’s K6-2 350. The kind patrons of GoodRoms Heaven donated some cash so I could buy a larger drive for it, which wasn’t recognized by the old board’s BIOS. But it’s all happy now. Freed up a bunch of cards that were in that box in the process, like my old DVD decoder card, SCSI adapter, and a frame grabber. I’ll probably put those into the Linux box I’m building for home, just to play with. That reminds me, I still need a name for that box.

Seems like all I’ve been doing recently is working. It’s not entirely true, since I have been doing other things, like going to a mini LAN party at JLC on Friday night, but for the most part I’ve just been at work trying to get things ready for the pumping station installation up in Lower Bartlett. We’re supposed to go do it tomorrow, and I think we’re finally in good shape for it. Hope it doesn’t get as cold as it was last week again.

Other than that, not a lot going on. The diet seems to be coming along fairly well. I feel good about it, and I hope I can keep up with it. I need to start getting more exercise as well, but with the weather as bad as it’s been, I don’t really feel compelled to start taking walks. Hopefully as things warm up that will get better. I really want to go geocaching again.

Oh, Dan got me a MouseRug for Christmas, the Old World Map one. These things are great. I didn’t really think much of them before, but now that I have one, I really like them. The texture is really nice, much nicer than a plain cloth covered mousepad. Gamers would probably argue that it’s not as smooth as the fancier gaming pads, but I think it’ll do quite nicely. I want to get another one for home soon.

54.76190476190476% nerd blood flows through my veins. That makes me “Dangerously nerdy…no make that dangeresque.” Hooray!

This is by far the best nerd/geek test I’ve seen yet. Thanks to doornail for sending it my way.

This is beginning to annoy me. The hard drive in Vincent has decided to start making a high pitched whining noise whenever it’s spinning. At first it would quiet down after a few minutes, but now it just drones on and on, driving me insane. I think the drive is still under warranty, so I can probably just get it replaced, but that’d leave be with a dead computer for the better part of a month. I think I’ll use this as an excuse to pick up a new Hitachi SATA drive.

Oh yeah, I’ve been invited into the Fists of Ra, the clan that I’ve been hanging out with online for the past couple years, and who hosts the LAN parties I’ve been to. Speaking of which, there’s a LAN planned for March. Seems so far away, but I can hardly wait. There hasn’t been a LAN since summer last year, so I’m really looking forward to this one. Now I just need to find a nice geek girl to go with me…

Another year down. 2004 is upon us. Looking back on 2003, a lot of things changed, some good, some bad. For the first time, I’m living on my own, no parents, no roommates, no girlfriend. Did a bit of travelling, down to Georgia to visit Matt at school over spring break, up to Maine to visit my mom and Ralph at their new home, out to Texas for Matt and Lauren’s wedding, moved Hindenburg to Indiana, and went to Michigan for Christmas with my dad and Mary.

I feel like I didn’t personally accomplish much this past year though. I don’t think I did anything major at work, the HTPC is still under construction, I did nothing for the MobilePC. Pretty much the only geek thing I did was the lj-crosspost plugin for MT, and that still needs work done to it. Half the apartment is still a wreck, I still have pictures to hang up and things to organize.

I guess in general I’m just kindof depressed. Work has been stressful for the past month, and it’s really getting me down. Andrea doesn’t seem interested in even talking to me anymore. I feel very much alone these days.

Maybe it’s time to pick up and move. Matt’s been trying to get me to relocate to Texas. Jason was talking about getting me a job in Indiana. Maybe it’s time to get out of NH, move to a new place, meet new people, do new things. My lease on the apartment runs out in a couple of months, if I work really hard I could probably wrap up most of my SimPro work, enough that I don’t need to be full time anymore. I’ve got some money saved up. Maybe it’s time to go.

As for resolutions for the new year, losing weight finds itself at the top of the list, as always. I really need to do that, I think I would be a lot happier in general if I wasn’t so huge. I also want to stick to working normal hours, 8 to 5. I enjoy the extra time it seems to give me in the evening, and it feels good to get up and to work like a normal person. It’s just that going to sleep at a resonable time has always been an issue. I also want to make an effort to be more social. I feel like I’m always the guy in the corner that’s not really involved in whatever’s going on. I need to make myself a part of the events around me. I need to be confident enough to just speak my mind and not care about what people will think.