Things that now, at least, she'll never know (cause time has passed already)... -The many times she was supposed to be here, I cleaned. Like for several days straight, washing, scrubbing with bleach, getting covered in all kinds of icky stuff. -Because of her, I'm cooking more again. For a while every night, now maybe one night a week. Much improvement over once in a blue moon. -For a while, at least, I was smoking much less. -For a while, I was being much better about picking up after my nasty self. -I was stocking the fridge with Dr. Pepper. I don't like it much at all, ended up drinking it all just to get rid of it. -There might be mint chocolate chip ice cream left in the freezer (or I might have made shakes out of it, crunch crunch) -No dishes left in the sink. -Once in a while, I smile. [ 9/27/2002 08:56:31 PM ] [ ]
Thursday, September 26, 2002
Meetings suck. The past two days, I've spent nearly 90% of my work days in various meetings. What I didn't know in the first meeting yesterday was that it was triggering my learning disability. It wasn't until an hour or so into it that I realized what was going on with me. It didn't help that much of what was going on had nothing to do with me. It helped a little that I could tune it out, open up my powerbook, and direct myself to do something else, and lose myself in it. A wireless connection in the office would have helped, but I managed, a little. I needed to get out. And I couldn't. Today was day two of meetings, and I didn't fare much better. At this point I think that some of my problems are worse - or just different - than they were when I was in school. I definitely need to work on better strategies for coping with it. The meetings were not productive for me, to say the least. I couldn't concentrate on what was going on, and I couldn't exactly step outside for a few minutes. I suppose I need more help than I realize. [ 9/26/2002 11:07:19 PM ] [ ]
Tuesday, September 24, 2002
Last night I got the new NVRAM chip installed in the IPX with success after a lot of pulling and tugging on a greatly oversized chip (about 4 times as high as other chips). Got the NVRAM settings, MAC address, and host ID set, booted off of NetBSD 1.5.2 floppies, and it's not liking the hard drive that's in there now, an old Quantum Fireball TM12S012. It's reporting it as another model in the series and can't get a correct block size from it (this was a hard drive I've had problems with in the past anyway). So I ordered a 2gb IBM from [megamacs], some of the only people to have 50 pin scsi drives anymore. So in a few days I have to try that. The procedure in NetBSD for setting up a a disk is rather daunting and ugly, I may put the drive in an external case and format it from another machine first to simplify things.
And, of course, all of those thoughts you see above were interrupted by a fire alarm at work. Ug. [ 9/24/2002 08:45:08 PM ] [ ]
Sunday, September 22, 2002
Well, after my frustrations with the Sparc Classic running OpenBSD (could not get it to boot off my external CD-R drive, etc), I picked up 2 more lunchbox Sparcs at PC Liquidator for $9.99 each (whatabahgain!), an IPX and an IPC.
After much playing around and making boot floppies for both NetBSD 1.5.2 and 1.6 (1.6 is what I need), I discovered that the new machines both have dead NVRAM chips. NVRAM is the battery-powered RAM that holds essential system settings - on a Mac, the PRAM (equivalent to NVRAM) holds things such as the screen size and bit depth, the active serial port address, etc. On a Sun, it contains the ethernet MAC address and the machine's host ID, both of which are necessary for a proper boot and for installing an OS. The [Sun NVRAM/hostid FAQ] was very helpful in figuring all of this out, and Friday I ordered new NVRAM chips from [mouser electronics] to put into the IPX and IPC. I will probably end up using the IPX as the AP/router and setting up a floppy drive in the Classic using parts from the IPC - the IPC is pretty useless, uses unusual RAM, etc. When I got the 2 new machines, they were sans hard drives and I bought 2 full height IBM scsi drives that came from another set of suns at the store. Only after bringing them home did I find out that these drives don't fit the lunchboxes- they fit, but not with the power and scsi connectors attached. And this was after fit-checking in the store. So now I'm waiting for the NVRAM chips to come. Luckily I realized I had 2 1gb scsi drives sitting unused in my PowerTower, they had been unreliable so I shelved them a year or two ago. They should be able to fill in until I get some drives for the suns that fit. Other than the NVRAM related problems, the IPX was able to boot from a NetBSD 1.5.2 floppy, but the 1.6 floppies are causing problems for everyone.
The fact that on Suns, all of the ethernet devices in a machine have one MAC address, stored in NVRAM, is pretty odd. I can set it to anything I want. Wierd. I had to jump through endless hoops, but now I have null modem connections from the old PB or the PowerTower to the sparcs, which is rather necessary for installing bsd! [ 9/22/2002 06:22:17 PM ] [ ]
