still fun with moving

May 08, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I helped a friend who's going to be living in the new apartment over the summer move his stuff in today.

I figured, oh, it's saturday, downtown won't be busy.

I was wrong.

But we made it to the apartment ok, and successfully used the loading zone right out front for getting his stuff up to the fourth floor. We met one of our neighbors, a friendly hispanic woman. I'm in love with the idea of living in a building that's not 100% college kids. I'm done with that, I want to be out in the real world. Now I'll be living in a building that's got a little bit of everything. The manager says it's about 10% students, and I've already seen old people, little kids, and people in between.

I moved the Personal IRIS over there today, and after not picking that thing up in about a year anm reminded just how heavy it is (122 pounds for though of you too lazy to click the link). I never did get that thing reliably connected to my network this year. In the page I linked above I talk about how I connected it up via a little fiber run since a fiber transceiver was all I had handy. Well, I still have that, but the fiber media convertor on the other side had a chip disconnect from its heat sink so it's out of service until I get that fixed up. I really just need to buy a ethernet transceiver off ebay. I guarantee it would be under $5.

Someday I still need to figure out how to get the rest of my SGI gear out here. Sitting at home I've still got two Indys (although I think a drive died in one) and a dual-chassis Origin 200. They aren't really useful for much these days but they're fun toys. The problem is that combined (with monitors for the Indys) they probably weigh a good 250 pounds. That's a lot to ship.

Live Music: Jim Bianco & Blues at the Viper Room

May 08, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Last night Kathy and I decided at the last second to head over to the Sunset Strip and catch some music at the Viper Room. Jim Bianco was up first, and was the reason we went. His shows are always a great time. I first saw Jim play back in November at the Hotel Cafe. And then I saw him again in December, and then again in January. You can see a pattern forming here. People have asked me what kind of music Jim plays, and I can't tell you. I'll just say it's good.

After Jim was Ellis Hooks. He said his band couldn't make it, so it was just him and an electric player. What the sound lacked in fullness, though, he made up for in energy and a great voice.

Headlining the night was Robert Bradley's Blackwater Surprise, who were actually from Michigan. Bradley may be blind, but he puts on a show. Two electric guitars, a bass, keys, a drummer, and an old black guy singin the blues. I don't know what else you can ask for.

Tonight we're headed to The Gig (flash site) to see Saucy Monky, which should be fun as always.

catching up

May 07, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Whew... Disappeared a little there. Busy and exhausted and it all adds up to me thinking about posting things here, but it never actually happening.

SBC turned on the dial-tone at the new apartment yesterday and today I called Speakeasy to put in an order to get DSL turned on. That should take about a week, which works out fine since Wednesday is when we'll be doing the actual heavy moving. Wherever the fridge is is where I'm living, so it'll be Wednesday when I actually take up residence downtown. I had ordered the phone service Wednesday, but forgot the number they told me, so last night I had to run over there with a phone to call myself and see what came up.

I sent in my application to Pasadena City College to take Spanish there over the summer. That should be interesting, seeing as my last real spanish classes were Freshman and Sophomore years of high school. I started to take it fall of my Freshman year here, but that didn't quite work out. So this summer I'll be taking Spanish 3 at PCC and playing furious catchup to work to pass it.

must need more sacrificing...

May 07, 2004 by Eric Richardson

The graphical boot never came back for me, so I'm not sure what I did to cause that. In general practice, though, I'd say 90% of my boots are after unclean shutdowns, since any other time I'm usually just leaving the machine suspended (to mem... to disk doesn't like me yet). I have done a clean shutdown and reboot with no graphical goodness, though, so I don't know what's up with that.

Yeah, the system-config-* scripts should pop up a password box, and they did, but they also crashed right after that. I think it was a combination of the SELinux stuff and a bug in the scripts. Upgrading to all the latest RPMS helped, but with the new kernel I just turned off SELinux.

fc2test3 comments

May 05, 2004 by Eric Richardson

1) The graphical startup screen should be the default, unless you have errors in your startup stuff. In the latter case, the graphical doodads go away so you can read and fix the errors. Fedora also defaults to text after an unclean shutdown. Should that happen, go to your local temple and sacrifice a baby lamb to become clean again.

2) The admin thingies should all pop-up a root password prompt. Sounds like something is wonky.