sometimes computers hate me, sometimes i hate computers

January 06, 2004 by Eric Richardson

My laptop is in agony. The hard drive might as well be toast. Nothing runs, just a lot of I/O errors. I appreciate that it died slowly, but I really would have preferred that it hadn't died at all. Tomorrow I get to brave snow-covered roads to drive over to Grand Rapids and see about getting the drive replaced. Then, joy of all joys, I get to go through the entire process of reinstalling everything. Just what I wanted to do during my last few days at home.

I think the drive might not even be spinning any more. The apps that have themselves all in memory are still up (which really is just the browser now). Everything else disappears when I touch it.

Now to post and kill this thing once and for all. Or at least until tommorrow, when I should get a new drive...

oh the fun that is the internet

January 05, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I don't know how long it's been since I've made changes to the look of this blog as I've made over the course of the last few days. Today another small addition. Entries older than the first day are now collapsed by default, and you have to expand them to see the full text. The idea is that this makes it easier to scan the entries and also allows me to have more posts on the page without making it a mile long and unwieldy.

User Interface work is always interesting because you never really know how people are going to come at what you're doing. The preconceptions and style they bring to browsing your site determine how they're going to use it, and you can't really predict that fully. Read on to get more of my UI thoughts. — Continue Reading...

one of those moments

January 05, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I just had one of those moments when you go, "Wow. Technology is pretty crazy." I've been toying with bluetooth stuff all day, and just now I took a shot at setting up bluexmms. I had my moment of awe while standing across the room adjusting the volume on my computer via my phone.

For those of you unfamiliar with the technology, basically what happens is the computer (via software like bluexmms) sends out a signal over the air that says "I am a phone accessory providing this functionality." The phone sees that and adds it to its Accessories menu. Once it's there you can then use it just as you might use any built-in functionality on the phone.

I've also figured out how to transfer images to my computer via bluetooth, something that is very handy.

fun is in the air...

January 05, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I just backed up all the contacts on my phone to my computer, via bluetooth in Linux. I bought a bluetooth USB adaptor the other day, and then used MultiSync to transfer the data off and back it up. Now I just need to figure out what I can do with it locally, and I need something for transferring files via bluetooth so that I can use Linux to get pictures off my phone.

JPL 1, Mars 0

January 03, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Spirit has landed. I was at a movie tonight, so I wasn't around to watch the live feed during the tense moments. JPL looks to be a happy place right about now. It's pretty crazy to think that a couple months ago I was standing in the observation area of the assembly building looking down on two packages getting wrapped up for a flight to Florida. One of those is now sitting on the surface of Mars. Mars! Even as I'm saying that, I don't know if I can really grasp the scale of it.