random observations (July 20, 2005)

stepped out to head to work and thought to myself, this would be a nice day. was 73 (according to my car), nice breeze blowing, could be a little lighter on the humidity, but certainly an improvement over the last few days where you step out and are hit with a wall of goo. but that was short lived as i started hearing sirens heading in my direction (hadn't left the driveway yet) only to watch a Mass HazMat truck go flying by my house. then i realized that it was going to be a lot warmer and no where near as nice as it was in my little world of the driveway.

sure enuff, 84 on the way to dunkin. 88 on rte93 and i didn't bother to check when i parked. i did get a good parking space, so i can't complain about that.

as i was driving in, speaking of complaining, today seemed like the day that new hampshire drivers decided that they wanted to prove that they could be worse drivers than drivers here. it seemed as tho all of the cars that i felt made stupid driving decisions (lane shifts, passing, etc) all had NH plates. now, this isn't to say that the vast majority of drivers in NH aren't safe and courteous drivers, but for this morning, those i saw painted a very poor picture of NH drivers.

well, i'm having to crack open pandora's box. i've resisted doing it, but it was going to happen sooner than later. i'd like later rather than sooner, but oh well. so i put out a brief questionnaire for management people here and have sent it out, so for the last 20 mins or so, i keep getting emails from people which at this moment i'm ignoring. i put a read receipt on it as i want to make sure people actually do look at it. reply, different matter, but we'll see. so far i've gotten a bunch of responses. no real suprises. but i have until next friday for responses so i'll just tally things so far and go from there.

ok, now THAT is cool. i think i mentioned last week i had to build a PC for testing the phone system and that i had failed miserably to get Win2000 installed on a laptop (better suited for the testing than a full PC). so i figured i'd give it another shot this afternoon using Bart's Boot Disk and much to my suprise and delight, i was able to boot the laptop, and it even detected automatically the on-board NIC. that i hadn't expected, so at this very moment, the Win2000 setup is removing the pre-existing setup files from the aborted runs and we'll see just how well it works. i've got to figure out how to get all the various laptop drivers onto it, but for the moment, this is a good sign that i might actually be able to get this to work. that would be nice as i can then image it, as well as make it available as a floating laptop for the IS department, or even *cringe* other departments. but for the moment, i'm just going to let it do its thing and see what happens.

so as i have Pink Floyd playing Wish You Were Here (Olso 8/29/94), i can hear some of the women in the office yelling. i'm not sure what it is, but i believe it's a self-defense class, but w/the windows to the conf. room covered, i can't look in. but i spose if i did, i'd get my ass handed to me so i'll just let them yell.

TK had a pretty shitty day. he's off for the next few days (trip to LI to visit the in-laws-family-gathering thing) so in typical fashion, he's trying to finish up his work and more gets piled on, plus he has to try and train LP and LC so that they can give him a hand. fortunately, compared to many people at work, both of them (esp LP) have good heads on their shoulders so things seem to go ok, but as he is discovering, they are finding things that he missed explaining. doh. fortunately, i gave him the afore mentioned VeePeeN thing so he can do work from home. not ideal, but he is able to do a lot more work at home due to a lack of idiot distractions. wonder if he remembered to pick up the duff on the way home or not.

this removal of pre-existing attempts at installing Win2k is taking a long time. i figured it wouldn't take quite so long, but it certainly is. i'm not gonna be able to finish this tonight. rats. how long does it take to delete files? just have to ask some of the users around here, they seem to be rather adept at it when they need something. oh well. something to do tomorrow. oh, now it's copying files. oooooo....that only took 40 mins to delete those files. i could have rebooted the laptop, deleted them manually and then restarted this process. oy.

the good news is i found an article the other day on how someone had installed Win2000 on a PC w/32MB RAM. and had it running well. sure, that's a little light, but it is cool to see that it really is a pretty good OS (given the source). but then, being able to run on a 486 w/4MB RAM, isn't that far a stretch for some other operating systems.

one of these days i'll have to dload Solaris. it's free. for the most part. maybe i can do something and get it integrated in here. hmmm....min requirements - 120mhz, 256MB and 2GB free. those are pretty minimal. esp the CPU. performance will be pretty poor, but if you need to throw something together pretty quickly, this ain't a bad option. ponder ponder ponder....

87% copied...88%. sluggish. i wonder if that's because i didn't let it use the smartdrive thing. hopefully once it finishes copying the files, i can turn the laptop off and finish it tomorrow. typically, Win2k copies the files over, reboots and then starts the install process. the same should hold true here. i guess i'll find out in a few minutes. 92% well, it did exactly what i hoped. it wanted to reboot. so i shut it down. heh.

had a very nice salad for dinner w/M. helps when the bulk of the prep-work is done the night before. walk afterwards. discussed how this summer's reality shows are revolving around tattooing. it's only 2 shows that i'm aware of, but it's a change. at least it's something more interesting in the reality genre.