Well this year was a very quiet Christmas. I just stayed home. Mom went to Kansas to be with Dad and my brother James. My other brother Andrew made it home to be with his family in Hawaii, I thought that was nice, because I think he might be anywhere at anytime for his job. Well, anyway, things are okay, I was able to pick up work now and again. School is starting soon. Thats it, I will probably write something when I actually have a more fluid thought.
Been a while since I put anything up here, I had computer problems myself. BUT, I caused them. My computer is a little complicated, and I am not an expert. It happens. I had 3 operating systems, two Microsoft, and one Linux. 4 hard drives with info from the 2 operating systems sharing a spot on two hard drives that are “mirrored” as one drive. Sounds a little complicated. Well, the software that allowed the mirroring only lived in Microsoft land, and when I saved to the mirror through Linux, it sent information backward, and messed everything up. Well, live and learn. I am still endorsing the mirror because it saves a duplicate copy automatically, and if I was a normal user with only one operating system, it would have been perfect. Here is an rough sketch of what I am talking about. Anyway, school is starting next month, things are sort of slow till then
Well, I talked to Drexel and they will accept everything I do at DCCC, like they said in the beginning. SO I am taking 5 classes starting again this January 14 at DCCC. I only have a few more classes after that to get my Associates degree. Anyway, at least I am moving in the right direct direction.
Well, my friend Glenn needed a new computer and wanted to try to build one on a budget. He had the monitor, mouse, keyboard, and an operating system disk from the replaced computer. So, my friend Lloyd and I designed the new box, with all the features that Glenn needed but kept quality up, and costs down. Anyway, the total cost for the build was $420
Details:
In Win Mid Tower ATX Case with 350 Watt power supply
Samsung floppy drive
MSI GeForce 7300LE 256MB Dedicated Video Card
Rosewill 3 port Firewire Card
Rosewill internal card reader, that mounts in the spare floppy drive port.
ASUS AM2 NVIDIA AMD motherboard, that supports 64 bit and Dual Core
AMD Athlon 64 4000+ 2.6GHz Processor with cooling fan
2 Gigabytes of DDR2-800 RAM from A-Data
Seagate Barracuda 250 Gig SATA Hard Drive
Sony + – Dual Layer DVD/CD Burner
Things went okay, we had some issues with a dead Ethernet socket on the motherboard, but was fixed with a 10 dollar 10/100 Ethernet card. Luckily Lloyd had a spare.
System is up and running, and its very fast. Faster than my computer. Pictures can seen by the links below.
Computer 1
Computer 2
Computer 3
Computer 4
I miss my German teacher, or, I miss my English student. Its amazing how you can grow attached so someone over a short period of time. But then again, I have known people for less, but sometimes time has a way of flying by and standing still at the same time. (P.S. It’s funny how I read German teacher, and I think of a guy with a white lab coat with a compass and slide rule in his pocket, but, let me assure you, this German teacher is a little softer and much more cute. ha ha)
Well, I have been doing some computer work lately, I removed Vista Ultimate from my computer temporarily, because I have learned to use it well, and its twitchiness annoyed me to the point of going back to XP Pro, which due to my multiple hard drives I didn’t have to uninstall at any time. I can go to any computer and run Vista, so until it gets better, I will use others. Recently, I installed Ubuntu (Linux) on my spare drive. It is a very powerful program with an amazing amount and variety of programs that can run on it. All you have to do is tell it, “I want that” from a list (thousands on the list), and it goes and gets it, installs it, checks for updates, and starts without having to restart your computer. Everywhere from Amateur Radio, Genealogy, to movie makers. All free and open to the public. While I appreciate how fast and powerful it is, I am not sure its ready for the “Average Joe”, I had trouble with it, one reason was I have a AMD64 processor, that proved to be little tricky to get 32 bit programs to work but I solved it. Most people will not have the 64 bit problem, but the language is very confusing, often in code. It seems that the programmers named it, rather than a marketing dept. I think that Linux has come a long way in a short period of time. I think soon it will be ready for everyone, and I think that will be a good day. But I would endorse anyone to get a “live” Ubuntu disk and give it a try, it will run strait off the CD-ROM without having to install on the hard drive, when your done, quit and remove disk to go back to windows. Give it a try, you might like it. Here is a couple examples.
screenshot1.jpg
screenshot2.jpg
screenshot3.JPG This didnt want to take a pic as a cube, so I had to catch it while it was morphing into my desktop. The gears rotate while it is in the cube state. Cube is used to chose which desktop to use. Turn the cube and let go, and whatever face is on the cube becomes your desktop. Each desktop can have different things running at the same time.
It seems that most of the people that I know are having computer problems. Was able to sort of fix one, the other was trash. It was old and beat, so it was time for that one. The other was a Sony Vaio one year old laptop, windows failure. But anyway, its been a rough weekend. Only thing I know, is that thank god for Linux, I was able to go into a computer that wouldn’t even start with windows, go in with a FREE “live” Linux CD and go inside of the windows files and pull out a lot of stuff. You would think windows would make a “holy shit” disk like that but I guess they want everyone to buy a new operating system disk, and buy back up software.
