January - 2005

Archive for January, 2005

eBay people - lay off the shipping charge, will ya?!

Sunday, 16 January 2005

I’m definitely not the first one to say this, but I am starting to absolutely hate people who put things up for sale on eBay and then charge OUTRAGEOUS shipping charges. Sometimes these charges are more than DOUBLE of what the item/product is worth(!!!)

Very annoying. Very very annoying. Ugh.

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Bootable USB drive follies

Monday, 17 January 2005

A few months back I bought a Sandisk Cruzer Mini 256MB “pen drive”. I use it off and on for transporting files and stuff when I don’t feel like burning a CD-ROM. These little things are really handy.

Recently I was doing some research to find out if a bootable USB drive was possible. The answer: Yes it is, but it’s not easy.

Long story short: I was able to boot from a USB pen drive and got a Windows 95 prompt. Couldn’t believe it. It really does work. Then I got brave and tried to load Windows 98 completely on a pen drive to see if the operating system would actually work on it. It almost did but kept crashing right before the install completed.

After FDISK’ing the flash drive a few times I completely corrupted the data on it and I thought I hosed it for good. Windows XP would not read the pen drive any longer. I was bummed out about that.

As a last ditch effort I booted up my ~~Stinkpad~~ Thinkpad which has Windows 98 on it thinking I could reformat the drive from there, and voila - I was able to reformat the pen drive. Yay. (grin) I can still use it.

Lesson learned: If you’re gonna FDISK a pen drive, make sure you have a computer with Windows 95 or 98 around somewhere, you may need it if you hose your pen drive. It might be the only way to get it working again. :-)

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Bellowing fumes in the Dominican Republic

Monday, 17 January 2005

If you think you’re having a bad day, check out this e-mail I got a little while ago.

Some parts removed for privacy’s sake (obviously) :-) My commented out parts are marked by [private].

I’m sending you this message from my fiancee’s father’s office. I’ve been leaving voice messages to [private]. I’m unable to leave the country!!!! I’m stuck here with no money, no place to stay and I almost didn’t get my clothes, fortunately my fiancee is here. The plane was emitting toxic fumes from within the cockpit, after two failed attempts to leave, the captain declared that the plane was unflyable. They kept us in the plane for two hours with no A/C and no water or food. Then we spent an additional 3 hours in the lobby awaiting for a decision from American Airlines on what they’re going to do.
After they decided to cancelled the flight, they provided an option to leave with the same plane (after repairs), at 2 AM. That was not an option for me, since 260 people have been left stranded and the flight crew did not want to fly on that plane (if the captain and the flight crew did not want to fly on that plane, I’m not doing it either). So..all flights are booked this week till Saturday and I’m stuck. I’m cc’ng [private], but please inform [private] and [private]. My contractor’s name is [private] at [private]. I’m thinking that since today’s a holiday maybe nobody is at the office but if immigration needs confirmation of employment or if I need anymore assitance I’m placing [private] as one of my main contacts, her cell phone [private] doesn’t seem to be connected. I’m unable to make too many calls from here and sporadically I can receive calls to the cell phone. My fiancee home number is [private] and my parent can be contacted at [private]. I’m letting you know all this, since I’m hoping to return to a job when I finally leave the country. – Agape,
Reinaldo

Here’s hoping that Reinaldo, my co-worker who is trying to bring his fiancee (legally of course) from the DR to the US (and the guy who wrote the mail above,) gets home successfully.

If you think your day is going sour, read the above again. Then read it again.

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Two-finger two-step

Tuesday, 18 January 2005

My sister, who is currently in another country while she goes to school, finally got on Yahoo Messenger. My pop is on it also. This took them both about.. oh I dunno.. five years(?!?!?!!!) to get on this. Lord knows I tried to get them on it sooner. Anyway..

I warned my sis that pop is a really slow typer. He does the two-finger two-step thing.

Here’s a typical example of my pop tying:

Plick..

Pluck..

Plick..

“Oops, wrong key.”

Plick.. plick.. pluck.. (backspacing over the mistake because he does not look at the screen while he types)

Pluck…

Plick…

Plick..

Pluck..

You get the idea.

I love my pop.. but he’s a re-e-e-e-eally slow typer. (grin) This is not to indicate that my pop overall is “slow”. If you spoke to him he’s actually quite the fountain of knowledge and extremely smart. The typing is the only thing that’s on the slow side.

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Blew up

Tuesday, 18 January 2005

Today for the first time at werk in my 10 months of being here I blew up. Got really angry at a customer, put the phone on mute and just shouted:

“WILL YOU SHUT THE HELL UP?!?!”

The user I had on the phone would simply not shut up. I could hardly assist her because she kept yappin’ her trap constantly.

My outburst was so darn loud half the department heard it - including my manager. (oopsie) Note: It is extremely rare that I do that. Very, very rare.

It took me 25 minutes to close the call. My normal close rate is 6 minutes or less.

Ah well, life goes on.

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Anamorphic Star Wars glee!

Tuesday, 18 January 2005

I –finally– got my “Definitive Collection” Star Wars DVD’s today. These are copies ripped from the original LaserDisc “Definitive Collection” set.

One word: Awesome

And I like ‘em way better than the new ones. So happy I got them.

I also get to listen to new ‘directors commentary’. It’s way different from anything else I’ve heard because it’s a lot more “techy”. Very, ver cool.

Ima happy guy. (grin)

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This is what happens when you change e-mail addresses

Tuesday, 18 January 2005

I have a few e-mail addresses I use. One primary (on this site, see contact area,) and for other sites I have to “sign up” for something I use the others.

I had to change my e-mail address on a message board on another site, and now my account got disabled - just because the address changed.

Usually, you’ll get some kind of confirmation notice when you change an address. I didn’t.

BLAH.

[-- edit --]

Got the confirmation mail. Took a really long time to get it, though. What can I say, I’m impatient. ;-)

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Knoppix on my PC

Thursday, 20 January 2005

Decided to try out Knoppix just to see if a “Live on CD” Linux would really work.

Well, it really does. :-)

My only stumble initially was to get an LCD display to display properly. I found I could get the native resolution just by typing fb1280×1024 and the proper res showed up. Cool beans. No fuss, no muss.

Everything detected quite nicely and my USB devices showed up without a problem (however, you do have to remember to mount/unmount).

Nice to know I have an alternative OS I just boot from a CD-ROM!!! Neato mosquito.

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Knoppix on the Stinkpad.. err.. Thinkpad

Thursday, 20 January 2005

Being that Knoppix runs pretty good on my primary box, I’m trying it out on the ~~Stinkpad~~ Thinkpad.

Knoppix unfortunately has no documentation bundled (that I could find) that tells you how to install it to a hard drive. After doing some looking around, I found that if you boot to KDE, launch a prompt, type “su” (for SuperUser) and then type “knx2hd”, the process begins.

However,

You do have to know how to partition a drive correctly if you don’t meet the minimum req’s (512MB of RAM and 2GB free, I fell short in the RAM department). I found this to be pretty easy to do. As I write this, Knoppix is being installed on the Thinkpad 390. Will it work only having 128MB of RAM and a 3GB drive? Dunno. Guess we’ll find out. (grin)

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