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January 2, 2003 HAPPY NEW YEAR! It is 2003, yet another year has come and gone! Time sure flies once you get out of school... The days turn into weeks into months into seasons into years. Today was the first working day of this year, and I am exhausted. I spent my New Years with Shauntelle at Bo's dad's house, the third year in a row I've celebrated it there. After the festivities had drawn to a close, nearing the hour of four o'clock, Shauntelle and I drove back to her sister's place where we crashed. Later on that day, (after we'de slept for several hours) we spent the afternoon with both her sisters and their families, conversing and lounging in the living room, before they headed off to her sister's place and I went home. Oddly enough though, even as I was exhausted from the night before, I still ended up staying up till nearly two in the morning due in part to both an upset stomach from the McDonalds I'de eaten earlier that day and the can of Pepsi I'de consumed too late in the evening... So in my hours of unrest I started working once again on Project X, my latest full length dance mix CD. The result was an inspired effort to combine two great songs together, and the result was a beautiful merge. You can hear a sample of that night's efforts here: Project X Sample January 4, 2003 Well today I decided to tackle my 'old' laptop hard drive, the one that failed a few weeks ago with thousands of pictures, numerous diary & journal entries, several work-related projects and various other bits of data that I had not backed up nor had desired to lose. And although at one point it was looking hopeful as I was able to read all of the files off my data partition from it, I was not able to copy any of them off it because I could not get the network running from dos in time. Once the cover was off the mechanical portion of the drive, the dust from the air quickly settled onto the topmost of the two disks inside, immediately causing data loss on the first disk. Fortunately, my data was all on the other three sides of the disks below it, and I was able to boot to DOS once and view the contents of my folder on the hard drive. Of course, from dos I was not able to fire up the network right away, and once I had the necessary network files copied to floppy disk, the hard drive had ceased to function properly as the dust and airborne contaminants further spread throughout the disks inside the drive. I knew it was a death sentence for the drive as soon as I removed it's cover, but knowing I had no other chance to get the information out of the drive, it was a chance I had to take. Sadly, if I had known yesterday what I knew now, I could have fixed the drive in under two minutes and not lost a single bit of information from it. Unfortunately, this information may only be useful to me the next time I come across a hard drive that is not functioning correctly. As for the data on this drive, I'm afraid it is permanently lost now. I suppose the phrase, "Live and learn" would apply here. Sometimes the greatest loss of material things results in the greatest gain of insight and wisdom. 
January 6, 2003 What a day I had. You know, one thing about Linux, it is so massive and so powerful and so complicated, that no matter what you do on it, you'll always be learning things. That was definately the case today and last night when I spent MANY hours trying to compile a new kernel for my laptop. I went through the configuration steps and even checked the resulting configuration script -- could find nothing wrong. I looked at several HOW-TO's on the internet, followed the steps, everything seemed to be correct, everything would compile and install, but once I tried to boot the new kernel, I kept getting kernel panic messages. Tried to look up the error on the 'net, not much useful information surfaced... Went back to the kernel archives, (www.kernel.org) checked the version numbers, and here if (DUH!) I had downloaded a really old version of the 2.4 kernel! I was trying to compile 2.4.9 when the latest version is 2.4.20! It was even older than the kernel that comes pre-compiled with Red Hat 8.0, which is the distribution set I've installed. Let me say though, they've done an AWESOME job with the desktop -- making everything very accessible, not to mention very nice to look at... Immediately I found that it had built in support for my digital camera (which now downloads pictures to linux TWICE as fast as it downloads the pictures to Windows...) It supports my Palm organizer, has all the advanced network diagnostic tools built in (so I can use my laptop to help troubleshoot other people's networks) TONNES of applications, I can't wait to try OpenOffice... (I would imagine it's comparable to Microcrap Office) The only problem I've had so far on the laptop (besides ignorance) is that it will not play sound. I've got a CS4610 sound chip in this thing and it seems to have all sorts of trouble working it. Anhyow, I've got to get ready to go meet Dean Mantai for coffee... But as you may have noticed, I've been updating my journal a LOT more so far this year. I should have made that a resolution -- I'm already keeping it!  Actually, another thing I've
noticed while looking through my journal, is that often times I've become
confused while writing new entries, if they should appear at the top of the
month's entries or the bottom. Consequently, some months have their dates out
of order (I think December 2000 was really bad for this!) I suppose I will have
to fix that at one point or another, going through each one and sequencing them
in a reasonable fashion. I'm convinced that I will never run out of things to
do on a computer. Now with this excellent linux installation on my laptop,
I have a whole new realm to discover in computing! Plus, I find that it is a lot
more practical in a lot of cases to include pictures here in my journal. That
way, I can take snapshots from my life and include them in a story, indead of
trying to fit them into an album of other disjoined images, each with an
incomplete description below it. I would have loved to have taken a picture of
the sunset today, it was absolutely incredible! We had a beautiful Chinook
arch hang over the city, giving us a record breaking high temperature today of
16 degrees! I have no doubt that we will pay for it in August or some other
normally-warm month... But it was a welcomed change to drive home from work
today with the window rolled down and my arm in the breeze. But this time I
do really have to go... It's now quarter to seven and I'm supposed to meet him
there at seven... Leaving me just enough time go grab a hat on my way to the
door. January 8, 2003 This is day three now, of my sound driver battle with linux's 2.4.20 kernel and my Thinkpad 600E. No matter WHAT I've tried, nothing so far has worked. On the brighter side, I just cashed a cheque from my lawyer for just short of twelve thousand dollars, which should be enough to pay off both my bike and my Seadoo. If it does not cover the complete amount of both, I will pay off the Seadoo entirely and pay off what I can of the bike. In any event, it has taken a huge weight off my shoulders, as I start this new year with the potential to be debt free. Combine that with an 11% raise effective January 1, 2003... This year is definately off to a great start. Well it is presently 11:24 pm and I am recompiling the kernel yet again. This time, however, I was doing some reading through the kernel documentation and I came across some (hopefully) relevant information to my cause. It seems that although it does have a driver for the CS46xx chipset (mine is a CS4610), many places I've read suggest using a different driver, the CS4236 one. I've read the documentation on this particular driver and it sounds like it might work instead. If I can get sound to work, this will be one AWESOME laptop, and I can't wait to start customizing it and getting myself "Moved In" as it were. Red Hat 8.0 has SOOO many features it's unbelievable! But enough technical mumbo-jumbo... Last night Shauntelle and I went out to Peter's Drive-In and it was so nice outside that we sat on the picnic tables in the parking lot. How's that for January 7 weather!?! It was simply unbelievable. It wasn't a warm summer's evening, of course. But with a sweater and jeans we were able to sit for a good half hour before returning to the warmth and protection (from the wind) of my van. Honestly, that van was the best dollar I ever spent... Sure it only gets 11.2 miles to the gallon, (5 kilometers to the litre) and as some might describe it, "A Piece," it's still my van and I love it. Of course, it's really no surprise since we've had Ford E-1xx series vans in my family since before I was born. My dad still has a blue Ford E-100 van that he bought brand new back in Toronto. It's been parked now for quite a few years and replaced by several of it's Econoline counterparts, but my dad often speaks of a photograph he has somewhere of me as a little baby standing on the driver's seat and looking out the window at him. I've seen the picture myself, though long ago. The closest thing I have is one of my puppy sitting in my van... Although I dread and fear that it was one of the thousands of pictures that seems to be lost in my old laptop hard drive... Though there is still a chance of retrieving that data! I have not given up all hope just yet. Though I tell you as I tell myself, it is a VERY slim chance. January 10, 2003 Last night I was working on a friend's computer, and came across a very interesting problem. She mentioned that she could not run Kazaa, and asked me to try and fix it. Well I went to open it, and while it started to open, all of a sudden the window just disappeared. Tried it again, same thing. Well she had some different programs on there, some of which had just been uninstalled so I thought it might cure the situation to reinstall Kazaa. The installation went fine, but once it was reinstalled, a registration screen came up for a second and then disappeared. I opened it again, the registration window showed up, and then disappeared. I realized at this point that this was no coincidence, some program or script in the computer was searching for any active Kazaa windows and actively shutting them down. Well I updated Norton and did a full system scan. Nothing turned up. I killed processes I didn't recodnize and tried opening Kazaa again, same thing. I even killed some system processes, but most of the time the computer would shut down when I did this and I had to restart. Thinking that whatever script was doing this might be embedded into another program like Explorer, for example, and may not be removable, my advice to her was to just use a different file sharing program, or -- if she really needed Kazaa, to reinstall Windows. But then just before I left, another idea occured to me. If the script is looking for a process called Kazaa and shutting it down, what if Kazaa were running as something else? I went into the program files folder and renamed kazaa.exe to john.exe and opened it. What do you know, it stayed running! So I have no idea what was causing it to shut down, something was definately, actively, shutting it down. But at least now she can use it. On another note, I was able to get sound working on my laptop. It was not easy, I stayed up till three in the morning a few nights ago, but I now have a sound-enabled Thinkpad! When I posted my question on the Redhat support mailing list, I recieved an email from another guy who has the same problem, and I'm sure there are other people encountering this too. What I will probably end up doing is creating a web page that details step-by-step how to set up the sound for a CS4611 chip inside the Thinkpad 600E's (and several other 600 Thinkpads.) He wrote me and asked me to pass along any information I had on this, so I told him how I did it. However, like many people he's not thrilled about having to recompile the kernel, so I'm going to try to see if it's possible to install sound without having to play with the kernel too much. Boy that was satisfying though... Now that the sound works, I may not even have to boot Windows on the laptop anymore. It should be able to do everything I need and more from Red Hat 8.0 6:38 pm - Boy am I glad it's a weekend. I've got the sound tweaked a bit better now on my laptop and it's working awesome. I will have to write up a full document on how to do it because I know there are a number of other people out there in the same situation as I was, owning an awesome computer with an awesome operating system on it and not having any sound. January 11, 2003 I'm finally starting to get my laptop settled in as far as personal preferences go. I've got the sound working again, but I wouldn't want to have to do it all over... It has internet connectivity right now, but I'm still working on accessing the nfs shares on my other Linux servers. Normally it'de be one of the first things to set up, but because the file system on my laptop is ext3 and the servers all use ext2, mount bailed out with an error about not being able to mount the shares... I'm sure there's a way to fix that. Just don't know what it is yet. Also I'll be running Samba on the laptop so that I can talk directly to the other Windoze computers in the network. I only have one other Linux server which has SMB support so the rest of them all have to work through it when connecting to any Windoze shares... I figured it was important on the laptop since I will probably be using it at other people's houses from time to time and may need to use it to back up files, etc. Today I also helped Clayton (Bo's brother) move his web site from Geocities over to my server. He'll be using my server to host his site once we get everything set up... So that's good. But otherwise I've had a pretty slow day, just working away at my projects... But on that note, I will sign off for now in order that I might "Get back in it." January 12, 2003 Well I can't say that I'm too disappointed in our mild winter so far this year, but I just know we'll end up paying for it sometime in August again like last year, when it snowed on the August Long Weekend. So far this year, we've had about maybe what, two weeks of winter conditions? By winter conditions I mean snow on the ground, icy roads, window scraping, wearing gloves outside... All that fun stuff. But in the mean time, here's what it boils down to (no pun intended.) I've been working more or less STEADY for the past week on setting up Red Hat Linux version 8.0 on my laptop and getting everything to work. It has definately not been a walk in the park either, let me tell you! I've recompiled the kernel on it well over 20 times so far, been having all sorts of fun with the sound on it... I was able to get it to work actually, and now I've got several guys asking me to write a HOW-TO on the matter... Yet another thing to do... Speaking of "to do", my To-Do list these days is growing longer than it is getting crossed off... I don't think I've felt so busy in a LONG time! But busy is good, I don't mind it, it's better than being bored... January 24, 2003  Here's my puppy sleeping in his barrel at my parent's house. (Well he's not actually sleeping here in the picture, but this is where he sleeps when it's cold outside.) He's so cute! I love my puppy. I thought he looked so cute there that I crawled into his barrel with him and slept for a while myself as he curled up beside me. I have some sad news about him though, as he is getting quite old for a puppy, we think he may be developing cataracts in his eyes. There is nothing we can do to stop it, but usually it doesn't make them completely blind, they just may not be able to see details. He's still very active though, he runs around and gets all excited whenever I show up, or whenever someone says "Walk"... He's such a good puppy. I love my puppy. Actually, speaking of animals, we've been giving George some catnip lately, and boy is that ever funny. George is also an older pet, in fact I think he's about the same age as BJ. Normally very laid back, quiet, and calm, a few pinches of catnip transform him into a silly, playful, feisty kitten again. He rolls around in it, chases his tail, bats at the air, does all kinds of silly kitty things. It's really quite amusing. In other news, last night Luke and I went to Beach Night at Grace Baptist. It was great fun, we played volleyball in the sand for several hours before going outside to the hot tub where we soaked our hair in the tub and then let icicles grow on our hair. It was quite interesting but caused us tremendous headaches! This was the first time I've been back to Grace, I think since my motorcycle accident. (I was on my way to Grace to play volleyball the night I was struck by a car running a red light.) There were a few familiar faces, as well as a lot of new ones. But all in all it was an awesome night and I'm really glad I went. My plans for this weekend are pretty loose right now, I've got a PS2 to fix for Bo's little brother Dexton who apparantly dropped it while trying to clean the laser and ripped some wires off... I have some other errands to run and some shopping to do but so far that's all I've got planned for the next two days. I don't think I've had a whole weekend to myself in quite a long time! This should be interesting. January 30, 2003  Boy it's hard to believe it's January sometimes, especially on days like this one where it's 12 degrees above zero! I have to say though, that it sure feels good standing in the warm light of the sun... Especially at a time of year when we're usually under a foot of snow with dreary gray clouds that hang overhead and never seem to leave, trapping us in a colorless world of cold, crisp air and slick streets. Not so this year, or so it seems. However I must admit that I fall for this trap every year, around this time things seem to warm up for a week or two and I start thinking about riding my bike again and sometimes even riding the Seadoo (the other night I had a bath with my toy version... It takes one double-A battery and actully jets itself around the tub! It's not fast of course, but it does really work...) And then come February we get two feet of snow and it stays around -30 until May... But having said that, I have already began to plan my summer, at least in some small ways. I want to do at least two decent length trips on the bike this summer, one to Nanaimo, BC, and the other to Saskatchewan. Several weeks ago a good friend of mine stopped by to visit me, and when I insisted on paying for her meal she made me promise that I would come visit her on her own turf so that she could pay for my meal for a change. I plan on keeping that promise this summer. Hot, dry summers are horrible on farmers and various other people whose livelihood is dependant on a certain amount of moisture in the year, but they do make great riding weather. I was looking over my finances tonight and realized that in the month of January this year, I've spent over $300 on gas! Another reason I can't wait for summer -- cheap transportation! It will be good. Don't get me wrong, I love my van. But it is an expensive vehicle to operate. Actually I wouldn't mind some good snow here, at least a few feet of it. It won't feel like winter is officially here until we get a good dump of snow that actually stays for a few weeks. It was kind of like last summer, I remember alwas feeling like I was still waiting for summer to come. There was that two week period where it was HOT, almost unbearably hot, and I was fortunate enough to have had those same two weeks as my yearly holiday with the family at Pine Lake. Is that good timing or what? But the rest of the time it got warm but it still felt like summer was just around the corner and then we hit fall. I can honestly say that our weather IS changing around here... I'm not sure if it's for better or worse. Anyway, enough of my rambling. Here's a part of a song that I've fallen in love with over the past several days. If you can identify it (Sign the guestbook and tell me who sings it and what it's called) and I'll um, give you special mention. (I have no prizes to give out, sorry.)
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