Move along, nothing to read

Hmm,
It is long overdue for me to update my LJ. Now that I have a client built into my Mozilla (LiveLizard), I have no excuse.

This morning, I was not impressed with being woken at 10am. It turned out, that despite the laws of chance and probability, another HP-UNIX workstation had failed at the paper mill in Trail, BC. Yesterday their primary workstation failed. It was replaced with the backup system. This morning, at 6am, the backup station failed. Luckily they had another workstation to use that seems to be working presently.

Anyway, one of my father's sub-ordinates was tasked to put together a replacement workstation to ship them immediately, and he hit a major problem. There were no 2 gigabyte SCSI drives to be found anywhere. My father called me, to ask what SCSI hardware I had. Waking me up at 10am during the holidays is not really recommended, esp. as I am currently taking my vacation from employment. I was not impressed. I grudgingly dragged myself out of bed, had a shower, and dug in my piles of old hardware to see what could be put together. I located a number of SCSI drives: 2x 1GiB, 1x 780MiB, 3x 520MiB. And an ancient Panasonic external SCSI CD-ROM drive. I took the bus to MetroTown to get picked up by my father there. He works in the industrial complex at the bottom of Boundry, where no busses go, except for 2 of them at 5pm and 6pm. Thusly, I was stuck there all afternoon, behind the extreme firewall in place there. I couldn't get out of it to do any productive work. Not even web browsing is allowed from inside. They ended up using the 1GiB drives and the 780MiB drive together with LVM (Logical Volume Management) to get a single large space area. I'll have to see what I can get out of them for giving them SCSI hard drives and CD-ROM.

Around 5.30pm, I managed to get a lift home with one of the other guys that was leaving. Since I didn't want to wait for my father to come home. (He normally gets home 8-9pm, but this evening he came home at 11pm).

I didn't get to the bank like I wanted to, nor get to ordering some new computer hardware from Fly Computers. However, I have managed to find a motherboard that will be suitable to repair galaxychild's computer. The first one I found wasn't right as it did not support MMX, but this other one does.

This week has been so totally different from my previous weeks. For the first time in nearly 4 months, I haven't had anything significent (work/school) to get up for. It's been wonderful just to relax now. I've been so lax that I haven't updated my LiveJournal even, so I will give a synopsis of events yet again.

Friday, April 26

Got in in the morning, and met with one of the people that I showed the FakeSpace software to. She had a program that she had written for her thesis years ago, in C, that rendered to a movie, since it was a lot of math. It took me a little while, but I ported over her program to our FakeSpace system, updating some of the code along the way, and then make it fast enough to run real time, with 3D :-). She was sufficently impressed that she has offered me a job starting in mid-May. This job will be doing what I want, coding C++ graphics stuff 24 hours a week. Since this last job ended this Friday, a new one starting in two weeks is really good. However, it is only for 4 weeks, as after that she is going away to Rotterdam for a month. At which point my previous boss wants to hire me back more! :-) On my way home in the evening, I stopped at Fly Computers with Patrick, intended to buy some speakers, but they didn't have the ones I wanted. Instead, on my way out to dinner later in the evening, I bought some Yamaha speakers and a 5 port ethernet hub second hand from Patrick. The speakers work well.

Saturday, April 27

Marissa came to my house, with her computer. She was going to get the bus to be here around 10am, but instead, her father gave her a ride, and I was woken at 9am with her arriving. Too Early! I moved hard drives around in her computer, got USB in place, and installed Linux along with Windows. We went cycling in the afternoon, and had lots of fun ;-P. In the evening, she went to take a nap, and I cooked dinner (Sphagetti Bolganse) and desert (Tipsy/Brandy Tart) both from scratch. After dinner, I set up my computer with my speakers and the monitor facing the bed in my computer room, and I watched Hackers with Marissa. It's a great movie. After that, it was getting late, so I finally told my parents that I sleep in the same bed with Marissa, which I had never done here at home before, and then went to bed with her. It's nice having somebody to cuddle with in bed.

Sunday, April 28

Woke up nice and late with Marissa. Had lunch, worked on her computer some more. Played Jedi Knight 2 with Marissa in the afternoon. I had a headache after that, so I lay down for a nap (with Marissa) around 4pm. I woke up at 9pm, instead of the 7pm that I had intended to. Had pizza for dinner, which my brother had cooked, and then my father gave her a ride home.

Monday, April 29

Woke up 8am, had a shower, fixed Tai's computers, dashed out to Surrey to meet with Mick and Norm for a business meeting about our new company that we are trying to start. Nothing much else happened.

Tuesday, April 30

Slept most of the day, played Jedi Knight 2 some. Went out in the evening to take Marissa to dinner. We ate at Urban Monk again, since the food was so good the last time I was there. Marissa had the Marinara tofu that Yvonne had previously, and I have Soyloin Steak. The steak tasted great, but there is a lot of work to be done on the texture side still. After that, we walked over to Cows on Robson for icecream. Then walked Marissa to the QE theatre for the Opera, which I couldn't see this time, as no tickets could be arranged for me. Next season i'll see about having my own tickets.

Wednesday, May 1

Went out Surrey way again, this time to go to Marissa's high school, North Surrey Secondary. While on transit, I noticed that Surrey would fit a description from star wars very well. It's a hive of scum and villiany, just like Mos Eisley. Her high school was ok, but the architecture is not as nice as Burnaby North. It is too repetitive and dull, almost depressing.

Thursday, May 2

I went to my father's work, intended to fix monitors and power supplies. The monitors are in such a state that they are not worth fixing, and should just be tossed. I've found a batch of suitable monitors that work to replace them with. Great for server monitors that only support 640x480. Went out for lunch with my father, his secretary and one of the south african co-workers, to the pub that they normally go for lunch. Had a decent Teriyaki chicken burger. It's a nice place there. On my way home, I picked up a 20gb drive and some RAM from Jon.

Friday, May 3

Woke up nice and late again. Played Jedi Knight 2 some. Worked on hardware. Jon's 20gb drive doesn't work. I'll try to see about fixing it some time, not now. The hard drive on my brother's computer failed, so I'm busying installing windows on a backup system for him to use. He has a project due monday, that was assigned 3 weeks ago, and he hasn't started on it yet.

Ok, two days now I haven't updated, so I might as well.

Wednesday, I work on getting Nvidia display drivers into Linux, only to find that there is absoltely no support for video input. Bah! That sucks. Marissa (amethest) and her father came to see the FakeSpace system. I showed them, and set up the Bubbles demo with the MTC TacTex pressure pad. Worked on phpMyAdmin some during the day. Paid Patrick with lunch for helping me with one thing in it. I got a ride home with Patrick in the evening, and he had a GPS map unit on him, so I took down co-ordinates for my house: 49°15'52.02" N 124°58'33.78" W. That is accurate to about 7.5m. They exist in my DNS LOC record as well now.

Thursday, I got a ride to TechBC with Patrick in the morning. I was supposed to be doing a tutorial on the FakeSpace equipment for several people. Marissa came and paid me a surprise visit :-). One person shows up 5 minutes. The second person shows up 30 minutes late. So I don't end up doing the demonstration, since it's not worthwhile. I sent out an email about it, and then went out for lunch with Gordon, since he had offered to buy me lunch given that tommorow is my last day. I went back to try and redo the tutorial at 2pm. More people showed up this time, but neither of the two people that wanted it in the first place! I did it anyway, and saw a really nice demonstration of something Jagdeep is working on. MPEG4 video conferencing. Uses only 4kbps for a really nice quality, image size and 15 frames per second. Came home, and tidied up computer junk that was in my computer area.

I had a meeting with Norm and Mick, about our business idea for a web development/hosting/programming company, and had lunch, before going back to work.

In research presently, Tom has me working with a pair of USB webcams, trying to do some funky video stuff. We wanted to get four webcams working together originally, but we can only get two going together so far. I need to see if I can find another pair of identical cameras to use. Then we will get stereoscopic webcam vision on the FakeSpace system once I write a little program for it. Hopefully the other researcher is going to stay at TechBC as well, and I can see about getting another job in Research!

On my way home today, I stopped firstly at FutureShop Metrotown to buy a blank DVD-R. They had Verbatim DVD-R's on special, for $14.99+tax each. Then I got a 130 bus up to Hastings, got a Slushie, bought a DVD-ROM drive and some USB D-brackets at Fly Computers.

Then, I went to Mac's on Holdom and Hastings, and finished the process of returning the cellphone that I found yesterday. The owner's parents were happy to have recovered it. Their son, who is 17, and attends the high school at Canada Way, has lost four cellphones including this one. I guess this is my good deed (mitzvah) for a while, since I don't actively seek to do anything good for somebody most of the time. I generally just go, and if I feel like it, do some random act of kindness.