“It’s like a helium Nazi war machine”

Please note that all blog posts before 8 April 2007 were automatically imported from LiveJournal.  To see the comments and any LiveJournal-specific extras such as polls and user icons, please find the source posting at http://brianenigma.livejournal.com/2003/06/

This morning, the power went out–WHILE I WAS TAKING A SHOWER. This actually is not as bad as it seems, considering it was light out and the water heater uses gas and not electricity. I have actually taken showers in much worse conditions: freezing cold icewater (cold beyond belief), at home with no lights at dusk (freaky), at home at night with the bathroom light bulb replaced with a red one (am I starring in a remake of Psycho?).

And now, random bits of information over the past few days that were not quite important enough to each warrant a post, but are now piling up to be a lot of randomness:

If you are not a member of found_objects, be sure to check the crosspost picture from BC's van.

Misha's [ex-]girlfriend is a superhacker.

I do not know if it is this USB floppy drive, my laptop, or the operating system–bit a standard 1.44M floppy drive should *NOT* take seven minutes to copy to the hard drive. I have a shoebox (well, actually the size of a boot box) of floppies that I am in the processing of transferring to a CD. At this rate, I will be done in a week or two.

In sorting through these floppies, I found a program I wrote that was called MrHappy.exe. There is no source code and the Unix “strings” commands does not yield anything useful. I think it might have been a virus or trojan horse, but I cannot tell. And I am *NOT* about to run it–even in a Windows emulator. I also found a failed attempt at a video game that Two's Complement and I tried to write. It was called “Bario Brothers.” It was written in QuickBasic, and we never got past the title screen.

Also, while sorting through these floppies, the little metal slider dislodged itself in the drive. I had to take it apart, remove the slider, then put it back together. Then, take it apart, fix the bit I screwed up, then put it back together again.

Faster floppy coppy: Take an old Intel machine with a floppy and CD. Boot Knoppix, so we can run Linux without actually installing it. Start SSH daemon. Remove monitor, mouse, keyboard, and move computer close to laptop and box of floppies. scp and automount become your new best friends. This seems to work much faster than the USB floppy drive.

“A load of 15 is a pretty heavy application, and 300 is insane–like several heavy processes fighting for CPU time like a sumo wrestler mosh pit.” -Me, trying to describe why we do not run lots of extra processing on the source control server.

If you start to type “cvs update,” but your right hand is off by a key, you actually start to type “cvs yoda.”

Posted in: Dear Diary

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