journal for 2002-09-23

work

I had a long day at work, today. I got in just after 0700 and got home around 1920. I would’ve been out earlier, but setting up my new laptop took forever and the production database flaked out. I guess the laptop didn’t really contribute to my long stay; if the db had remained sane, I probably would’ve left it for tomorrow.

So, yeah, I was issued a new laptop. I’m probably the only person in the company to have a desktop and a laptop, because I asked if I could have our crappiest laptop, which would’ve otherwise just gone into storage. I run Slackware on it, so I don’t need a P4/4GHz, or whatever Windows XP is requiring these days. Recently, with some of the layoffs, a few better laptops entered the realm of “storage material.” I’ve got a Latitude CPi R now, 400MHz. It had a hard drive about twice as big as my previous system, so I thought I’d install Win2k for a dual boot. Ugh!

Getting the old drive duped onto the second half of the new drive was easy, if mildly tedious. The annoyance was getting a bootloader installed. I had no way to boot to the drive from a floppy or CD, since it was ReiserFS’d and my only boot CD was Slackware 8.0, which doesn’t do ReiserFS. I tried a lot of different methods of installing LILO and GRUB from my linux machine at work, but nothing worked. Finally, I gave up and brought it home. I have a Slack 8.1 disc here, and that made everything easy as pie. It’s dualbooting properly, now. It’s frustrating how slow Windows can be on an relatively fast processor like a 400MHz P2!

animal crossing

Since I was late at work, I missed the Fall Sports Fair. I asked Gloria to log in and get me the medal, and now I feel kind of lame about that. I should’ve just lived without it! Oh well! It probably gets me points with the HRA.

I sent mdxi some tatami flooring, and Eric sent me a corrected code for oranges. I hope my trees start bearing fruit before I take off!

Written on September 23, 2002