Move along, nothing to read

Sorry for the lack of visual-ness to my livejournal everybody, Shaw totally screwed up. Firstly the internet went down for a little while, and due to an unresolved bug in my server, I get a severe interrupt level OOPS from the linux kernel, and have to reboot the entire system. So I rebooted once, and shaw seemed to be working. I submitted my assignment that I (mis)wrote for BGE. The better part of the last page was just somewhat of a rant.

Now I got up this morning, to find Shaw down again. I rebooted my server, only to get the weirdest error message I have ever seen. I had to leave right then, so now I am at school, without any connection to home, and my home internet is entirely down. In a few hours, after this math class, I will try to phone my mother, and talk her through checking a few things for me.

This is a really neat quiz I found. http://www.jamesgang.com/jamesgang/room/.

The Window: Your Attitude
Your choice of the forest reveals a person who is lush, verdant and fertile. You are complex. At times serene and tranquil, you provide an atmosphere of relaxation and retreat which is a very powerful magnet. But you are not perfect. You habitually needle people. In your youth you swayed to the hot, pulsing beat of "Light my Fire" (despite the danger it posed to yourself, friends and family). Frequent anti-fire lectures by Smokey the Bear fell on deaf ears. With greater maturity you can now see the forest for the trees. Success for you now may be better defined as a branch office and an oak desktop. Conversely you may be hiding a secret desire to dress as a girl and sing the Monty Python song, "I'm a lumberjack." Whatever -- you know the ultimate truth "No tree grows to the sky."

The Music: Your Lover
Your love ranges from the passion of Beethoven to the delicate beauty of Pachebal. Your relationship is based on an enduring trust and classical balance that helps you both rise to the highest level of understanding.

The Pictures: Your Relationships
Revealing an adventurous, possibly madcap person who scavenges friends and relations from the scrap-metal heap of life and then through superior insight helps them to realize their fine talents so they too may soar above the clouds in riveting pirouettes of grace and death-defying stunts.

The Garbage: Your Problems
Your problems are small but they do exist. You run in fear from big problems foisting them over to your larger parent. But not all problems can be avoided and the garbage has to go somewhere. Sometimes you overflow in extreme moments with stubborn refusal to accept more problems than you can handle. In the deepest corner of your being you believe, as do your parents, that problems should not be hidden from sight but are better handled in a transparent, translucent and open manner.

The Clock: Your Future
Your future is squarely that of a modern conservative, with a throwback to Roman times. Your skeletal architectural gun metal honed body may cause others to see you as rigid and unbending but in your heart you remember the wild toga parties of your youth and smile.

Today was interesting. Firstly I woke up late, like 6.50am. Considering I have normally left by then, that was bad. I left by 7pm, after rushing myself ready. Took the usual transit, but there was a bit of snow coming down out there, so it was nasty cold outside.

Managed to make it to school in time still. Had my math class. One of the questions on the weekly test, number 2, was quite impossible to do. Everybody did all the rest, then came back to it, and we were all still working on it when the end of time came. We then requested the answer from the instructor, who spent 30 minutes trying to work it out on the board, failing dismally, then he finally admitted there must be a problem with it when the calculator cannot work out the answer.

After Math I went down to COMDEX. It was a fair disappointment this year. Even the Microsoft booth is getting a lot smaller now that it has been before. I bought a beef teriyaki for lunch from a store in Pacific Centre, and it was some of the worst teriyaki I've had.

Headed back to TechBC, since I had my NMI class this afternoon. A little while before the start of the class, James, who was in my schedule last semester, he came in to the classroom since I was there early, and asked if I had a little time to spare. I replied in the affirmative, and he said he wanted me to meet some people. Went outside the classroom, and talked with them. They are seeing about starting up a company together, and are looking for a programmer and system admin, so James offered them me, and I'll probably end up joining them towards summer when my TechBC job ends, if it does not end sooner.

After NMI, I snapped some pictures of my hand for the next NMI project, and then went to Research to get some work done, since I had left early on Tuesday, and hadn't got all my hours in this week yet. We had acquired an SGI Visual Workstation 320 in research, and it came totally disfunctional. I've got it mostly booting up Linux from a boot disk and CD now, but I can't get it to install yet. The hardware is incredibly custom on the system. Dual P3/550mhz chips. In the words on an SGI engineer: "The system's similarity to any x86 system ends at the pins on the CPUs.". He meant it too, the system runs a 64-bit PCI SCSI controller amongst other odds and ends. Total memory is 512Mb, but that is shared between the graphics systems and the core systems. No AT or PS2 connectors on it, only USB, Firewire, video in and out and a few other bits and pieces. The closest it has to conventional stuff is the standard pair of serial ports and a parallel port, but even those act somewhat differently.

While working on the system, I was talking to Patrick a lot, we moved between the research area and his office as we needed various items generally. Just before 9pm rolled around, we helped one of the terminated staff members to take her stuff out to her car with a pair of equipment dollies. Upon trying to go back in, we found we were somewhat stuck, so we had to go around a long way to get back in. Got back in, grabbed our stuff, and left. We went to Kieran's place go pick up a network card, hung out there for a bit, went back to TechBC with Kieran so he could borrow a laptop, then Kieran and Patrick raced some back to Burnaby, but we slowed down for a bit because we spotted a cop.

Patrick was saying, that for chilling out and escaping, there are two things he does. One is just go driving, fast to nowhere. Out to Cypress or Chilliwack or something, but it must be really fast. 150kph is standard for those long drives. I haven't been on one with him, but I think it might be neat sometime towards the end of the semester. The other thing he does is just "geek out", in his own words. Just spend time dabbling with computer hardware, getting things going, and totally ignoring people.

I should get some posting done for HTTC and PE now, so I'm going to do that.