theducks | Hmm

I do lots of geeky stuff, and most of the time, I do very little else. I hope you all don't mind reading about it.

So yesterday, the 17 inch LCD arrived to replace a 18inch we had on loan until this one got here.. I had the 18inch on my desk for 2 days and loathed giving it up.. this one, I had out of the box for 5 minutes and put it back in to be shipped back.. it was THAT bad.. not a defect, just a piece of crap product. Also, it only has VGA, not DVI, which we specifically asked for, so it's manifestly not what we ordered, so no worries returning it.. so we're buying the loaner we have for AU$470 more.. eh, it's worth it.. it's a REALLY nice monitor. Also yesterday, no more news on the 17inch powerbooks, so I left another message for Tibor about it. Had a pub lunch, got back and supervised a Comdek tech change a dead HDD.. put in a fault log for another three machines with almost dead video cards. The dead cards are NVidia TNT2/16MBs .. unfortunately they don't make them anymore.. so they're getting replaced with NVidia GeForce4MX/64MB cards.. which won't actually be going in those machines. Heh! Our office machines have GeForce2MX and TNT2 video cards.. so we'll swap them into the labs (mmm same driver) and snaffle the GeForce4MX's for our office machines ;) Eeeexcellent.

Today.. got in early, installed Office 2000 for someone.. I said I'd done it yesterday, but I was confused about what job the person was referring to, so I did it ASAP this morning (out of the office before 9! say it ain't so). He's a nice Russian guy, had a bit of a chat with him while I was waiting for it to install. Got a call from EdSys about the 17/18inch LCDs and they agreed with our idea, so they're invoicng us seperately. Did some network patches etc. Got a report of a student running KaZza and WinMX.. got logs, emailed to the guy's boss, who will deal with it. Firewalled the entire lab's machines to nowhere. Tom-the-boss was working from home today.. he called in and touched base. Gave him a bit of an update.. nothing urgent.

Got a call from Tibor at Apple.. no news from Apple Australia's logistics person, and bad news in that Tibor is getting made redundant :( Poor Tibor. I've known him from Apple since about 1993 .. I'm sure he'll get another job in the mac industry, but still, it's a pain. Today was his last day, Garner takes over his role next week.. which means Garner is basically downgraded from a technical position to a sales position, which I'm sure will piss him off a lot. He's really a technical person. I've known him pretty well since 1992, thru his brother Marcus who I was friends with in high school, and remember how much he always liked technical stuff. I hope he still gets to do a lot of that. Anyway, Garner is in the eastern states for training until next week, and Tibor won't be at apple when he gets back, so i'll have to bring Garner up to speed on the situation with these Powerbooks.

Had a bit of a play around with Toaster, our hydra of a machine, which we use for possibly-destructive testing of Linux stuff. Patched the kernel to use the built in speaker as a sound output device, which was pretty easy, especially since the maker of this patch had just updated it to patch cleanly onto the kernel source I'm using. Recompiled.. didn't work.. look thru patch closely, realise I have to set some define options in the config file to compile it and OSS support. Set options, recompile.. again. On a pentium 266.. it takes 15 minutes. This time it works.. downloaded mpg123-oss and played an MP3 thru it.. and it worked.. scary. Actually, I'm not sure what's more scary, the fact it was being played thru the internal speaker, or the fact the MP3 was William Shatner - Hey Mr Tambourine Man. It's a toss up :) Installed Festival, a nifty-ish text-to-speech program for Linux. I say niftyish, because like anything else useful, it's useability is clobbered by the fact you need to use a pseudo-lisp format of defining what it says. Annoying. Oh well. I want to use it to give status alerts from the machine like "Your CD has finished burning". Unfortunately, the speaker was mounted on the bottom of the case, so the noise went straight into the carpet. Opened the case and removed the speaker from the case and unplugged it from the motherboard and pulled the cable clear of the system entirely.. oh, and while it was turned on. Alex doesn't recommend removing parts from powered on computers, but it is a nice adrenaline rush ;) Went over to the electronic workshop with two speakers and joined the cables from both, so one was longer and I could put it somewhere else. I hadn't soldered actual wired for ages, so it was a bit of learning to solder again, in front of two people who spend all day, every day, doing it. M'hey, did ok I guess tho :) Plugged it back in, again while the machine was turned on, and amazingly it worked ;)

Read email to all staff at UWA telling them that all official travel to china, hong kong, sinapore and ontario is cancelled, and anyone who's been there should stay home for 10 days after their departure. One of the workshop guys had been to Singapore.. I kept as far away from him as I could anyway, and he doesn't seem sick, so should be right. Called up the travel agent to ask him what would happen if I needed to cancel my ticket, and apparently Star Alliance isn't charging cancellation fees until further notice. I guess they figure that if people don't want to go, they won't go, and if they charge them, they'll remember that next time they fly. Not that I'm thinking of cancelling right now, employer and department of foreign affairs warnings don't worry me too much, they seem mostly precautionary, but if the worst happens, I just want to know where I'll end up financially.

Cameron the travel agent (who I got my 2002 tickets thru) answered the phone.. he's off to Egypt next week, with a 1 night stopover in Singapore, and he's not worried, and I've heard from people with friends in Hong Kong that generally speaking they're not worried either. Ahh well. The problem is, 10 days after I stop off in Singapore, and then spend 8 hours on a plane with some Singaporeans on the way to Narita in Tokyo, I will be in Vancouver. Hopefully I will either be staying with or seeing the Vertesis.. Les is the directory of emergency medicine for the Vancouver Hospital System.. if the worst happened and I got SARS, I might then infect him.. which could be bad. Likewise the other relative in Vancouver, ie BC's premier, getting it would also be bad. Hundreds of thousands of people pass thru Singapore each day tho and don't seem to have got it in transit, so I'm really not worried. There are three more SARS cases in Australia confirmed.. and they're three Canadian kids who are over here visiting their grandparents :( Poor kids.

It might sound like I'm paranoid about SARS - I'm not. I just specialise in worst case scenarios that really are "It can get no worse than this case" ;) Like my co-worker talking about someone's dog getting out from his backyard and saying "the worst that could happen is it gets picked up by the ranger and taken to the pound". I then corrected him.. the worst that can happen is it tries to cross the road, gets hit by a car, flys up onto the windsheild, goes thru it, kills the driver, the driver swerves the vehicle in his death throws into the path of an oncoming truck, which then crashes in another 20 vehicles which then catch on fire, which then causes media helicopters to overfly the scene, two of them crash, falling into a school playground killing lots of children. "Umm well yes, ok, I do stand corrected".

Tomorrow I have my cousin Tim's birthday party at brunch time, then

dexywexy's party at night.. ooer fancy dress up dinner! I'll also finally get to meet

pennae too! We only just missed each other tonight have dinner at a McDonalds in Perth too. Penny just got a GBA SP! *covets slightly* :)

And now it's far too late! Night!