Too Much Time Spent in Front of The Computer

Countdown to Temporary Freedom

plexus — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 05:14:46 +0000

Two more days, 14 working hours, so close to the end of the third quarter… The teachers are all stressed about getting grades in so it’s no fun when one cracks under stress. I have on in particular that at times can be like a trip-wire landmine. –Tread carefully lads, one misstep and Boom! –

I took a total of three tests today, not a record, but certainly not something I want to repeat any time real soon.

Spring Break beckons, but I have to get some sleep for the next two nights.

One of them is now. Good night.

Idea: Part II

plexus — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 02:09:33 +0000

While it may have been an ‘OK’ idea it’s certainly out of my range of abilities at the moment. It would have been nice if ECMAscript supported more direct ways to get bits and pieces of useful information about what the user has highlighted and perhaps even given me an idea where the the user wants the highlighted section to go. But alas, no go for me.

Time for some C# fun.

Idea

plexus — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 05:10:10 +0000

I have been giving web-oriented development some consideration lately, one facet that I’ve wanted to attempt to fill, or create, is online document revision. Bring in a text document, a rough draft, and then put it online for peer-revision, send an e-mail to the people you can trust with grammatical issues and have them go to the address provided in the e-mail where they can read the paper, mark corrections, etc.

I’m not sure how well this would fly, but I thought it was worth a shot, so I struck out on a war path to try and find a way to make it work.

If not peer-revision, at least note-taking! It should work out something like this…

The user makes a comment about a particular area of text in the document.
The comment has an association with the text position.
The comment and text position are stored in a cookie resident on the user’s computer.
The user can then opt for a local copy which can be fed into the system at a later date, superimposed onto the original document.

I doubt it’s a good idea, too much javascript… Shiver. Shiver.

Night.

Everything Has its Place

plexus — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 16:59:02 +0000

I cleared off a shelf in my closet today for the sole purpose of holding a 1U Intel SR1200 chassis with an SCB2 mainboard. Ah… Too bad I don’t have that second processor, it would really fly then! I’m not too concerned about it getting too hot, left it on for 6 hours and only a small patch of air directly above and behind the power supply was slightly warmer than the ambient temperature in the closet. Having the server in the closet sure beats having it out in my room. The five or six fans that sit in front of the memory and processors are very noisy. Comparatively, it’s like bringing a restaurant during the lunch hour into my room.

The shelf is nice and clean now, the door frame to the closet is a little beat up now, but it’s nothing too bad, one or two little nicks. Oddly enough, I stumbled upon an advisory from Intel about how certain chassis

“have been identified to have potentially sharp edges that may not meet UL1439 standard” –Intel Corporation

No, duh.

It’s getting late, I’m still getting over a virus, it’s time to say goodnight to the wide world of… _Fill in the Blank_

PHP + Homework = Fun

plexus — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 18:17:36 +0000

It was once said that sloth is the mother of invention. It is also known that procrastination is an epidemic at the high school level (and possibly others as well). A friend of mine decided that it would be a good idea to write a PHP script to do his homework for him.

The assignment was rather simple: Put the picture of a famous African American on a notecard and provide a summary of why that person is important. He decides to write a PHP script to gather ‘the first sentence and the picture’ off the articles in the category “African Americans” on the Wikipedia. The category consists of ~500 different articles, and that’s exactly how many he turned in.

The guy’s a little kooky, but you just have to love him for that!

Branching out

plexus — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 05:18:09 +0000

I doubted long ago that it would come to this, but I need to get out of the house more often. Alas, I can no longer make peace with myself indoors, I need freedom beyond these walls. The more I begin to ponder reaching out, branching out into the real world, the more I begin to feel as though my electronic devices are getting ready for a rebellion. It all started with my laptop.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine gave me his old wireless router (I’m cheap, what can I say?) and I proceeded to set up a small wireless network that included only my laptop. The ACLs were set, WEP enabled, everything nice and semi-secure. After the honeymoon I neglected to turn on my laptop for a few days. Lo and behold, the battery is dead. I hadn’t turned it on during that time so why was it that the battery just up and dies? Meh, no biggie, happened before, just need to recharge it, recalibrate the “gas gauge”, just a two/three hour wait time.

By the time it was all said and done the battery lasted over four hours and still wasn’t ready to give up the ghost.

I’d like a new laptop right about now though… This sort of sporatic charging is what the batteries tend to do when they’re about to croak, at least that’s what one person said. To be honest, I haven’t had to deal with a laptop before this one so I really don’t quite know what to expect.

Now, more laptop fun. Aside from the dead battery I soon discover that Windows 2000 no longer detects my wireless card. I reinstall the drivers, remove the card a couple of times, reset the CMOS, nothing, it’s like the computer just won’t recognize the card’s even there!

After about fifteen minutes of fiddling I gave up, put the laptop back in its case, and started to work on a project that I had been postponing until the last minute.

In my infinite wisdom I decided to save all of my original documents with OpenOffice and then exported them to PDF. I kept the PDFs, I deleted the originals. What was I thinking??? I haven’t the slightest clue…

See, I knew it. They’re out to get me, and when I least expect it one evening they’ll quickly, stealthfully strangle me to death when I have my back turned.

I’ll end it here,

I need to get out more often.