WIFI: Javalinas in Tucson

April 30, 2004 by Eric Richardson

So I haven't been there, but Bonnie from Javalinas left me a comment saying that her shop now has wifi and looking for ways to promote that fact. I'm all for helping out places that have free wifi, so I figured I'd give it a mention here.

Now it's cool that Tucson places get in touch with me. I'm high on google for Tucson wifi, so that makes sense. But really, where are you LA wifi spots? I want places to go hang out and get work done.

running errands and getting ready to move

April 30, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I've been running a lot of errands the last two days, which is pretty exhausting. I especially tire of the ones that take me to campus, since that means having to either walk or get on the skateboard and head over there. Today I had to skate around campus for a bit carrying a wakeboard, which is a bit of a chore.

I wanted to get something printed at Kinkos, but didn't. I had the image as a tiff file, and they wanted $5 to convert it to a PDF. I wasn't about to pay them $5 for something I could do myself in a good 30 seconds. So I didn't print it. I will sometime. It's just a little sign for our waterski equipment locker. Other lockers have these cheesy little clipart signs, so I put this together to show off a little.

Tomorrow we do the move-in inspection for the new apartment downtown. I'm excited to get in there, but it'll be a two-week process moving out of here and into there. Complicating things is the fact that I've only got one refrigerator, so that's either going to be here or there, and wherever it is is going to be the better of the two places to be. Oh well. I probably won't move that until the 12th.

on the go

April 29, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Today was a busy day for me. I started off making the drive out to Woodland Hills to Sports Ltd. The waterski team needed to spend the rest of its money before the semester was out, so I ended up buying two skis and a wakeboard. Steve's a good guy and gave us a great deal, so I was happy with what we got out of it.

First on the list was getting a ski for the ladies. We haven't had a good girls' ski for the team, so for them I picked up a 63" HO (flash site, you'll have to navigate in on your own) Odyssey with the Venom high wraps. It's part of HO's comp/freeride series, so it's a little wider and a little more forgiving than their regular competition line.

Next on the list was a good 66" ski. Here I got a Truth with double Animal boots set up left foot forward. The Truth evolved from the CDX, which is a ski I loved, so I'm definitely excited to get out on this one.

I wasn't planning to get a wakeboard, since we bought two last year, but it came to mind that we could really use a board with a flatter bottom for trick at tournaments. Tricking at a tournament is really entirely different than just going out and wakeboarding, and because of that you have different priorities in how you want the board to be set up. For normal riding you want the board to have lots of grip on the water so that you can cut harder and get more speed heading into the wake. To get that grip you see a combination of channels, molded fins (part of the board itself), and screw-in fins. For waterski tournament tricking, though, since you only have 20 seconds, a lot of what you score with are surface tricks, just spinning the board on the water. While you can get fins to break loose to do surface tricks with them in, it's a lot harder working against them than it is not having them there. The board I bought, a Liquid Force Litmus has only very shallow channels in the bottom of the board. It has six fins, but all can be removed. The middle of the board also has a rounded edge that makes it a lot less likely to catch on the water when you're doing stuff on the surface. That makes it a great board for tricking, and also a great board for beginners, since that's most often how they fall.

Now to get reimbursed for all that...

and they hid this from me

April 27, 2004 by Eric Richardson

So today I wrote a 10 page paper in about three and a half hours. Unfortunately I only had three by the time I really got started, so I missed the class and have to turn it in to the professor's office. But that's neither here nor there.

To print the paper out I came to Annenberg, where I normally print things since they're cool and let you do it for free. Today, though, the lab was full, so they sent me down to the basement, to the Digital Lab. Why did I not know this was here? It's got souped up workstations with dual flatscreen monitors, attached DVCAM decks and firewire. I think normally you have to be in certain classes to get in, but I really need to find a way to get in here and transfer over a bunch of video I have sitting around on miniDV tapes.

Right now, though, I need to print a paper.

stupid technology

April 26, 2004 by Eric Richardson

My cold beat me up last week, but it's been reduced to an occasional cough now, so I think it's about done. The end of the semester is no time to be sick. 15 more days and I'll be done (well, at least until my summer class starts up mid-June).

When I bought my laptop I also got a Linksys WPC11 pcmcia card for wireless. It was cheap, and people seemed to say it worked with Linux. Of course then I got it, and it turned out to be a version 4 card, which actually doesn't work well with linux at all. I sent it to Linksys, they replaced it with a version 3 card, and all was well.

Until recently.

Recently the card started driving me crazy by fairly frequently losing sync with the network and claiming signal strength was 100%. It would have to be ejected, reinserted, and then the interface re ifup'ed before it would work again. And about every fourth or fifth time it did this it would lock the machine up hard.

Last Tuesday night, after the card had locked the machine for the half-dozenth time that day, I got fed up.

So I threw the card at a wall, and the problems stopped.

Granted, the card also now didn't work. So today I bought a new card, this time a... wait for it... Microsoft MN-520. $29.99 at Circuit City and based on the Prism2 chipset, so it has great Linux support.

My desktop also has a Microsoft wireless IntelliMouse. Hmmmm... My keyboard, though, is still firmly Silicon Graphics.