Pointless geek shite
Changed the index back to showing 7 days rather than 3, since I haven't been tossing up 10 entries a day lately. Still too long? Loads over the course of a two-hour period on a dialup connection? Bitch now or forever hold your peace.
Also added annoying tracking code to the individual archives, since the disparity between the hit counts the actual server reported, and the ones Site Meter claimed, was getting absurd. This looks awful in Mozilla and NS7, as part of commented code shows for no particular reason. Guess I could file a bug report on that. . . or Opera is correcting my poor code, and that comment isn't actually a comment. . .
And when you're defragging a Windows partition prior to (maybe) resizing the thing, and it keeps restarting because "drive contents have changed" despite the fact that you're in safe mode and nothing else is running, that doesn't mean the kids at Redmond were so mind-bogglingly stupid to have the program use the swap file (because you only have 24MB of memory), notice that change, and start again, right? Because then I would have to have them killed.
I must just be doing something stupid. Like trusting the list of running programs that comes up when I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL.
Update:
<Geekrant>
Like most of the Old School, I remember when hard drives were an unimaginable luxury, and you ran everything off of floppy. Yes, children, including the Operating System. You wanted an app? Take the OS disk out and put the application floppy in. Saving your work? Yet Another Floppy Disk.
And no, we did not get errors constantly. They built the damn things to last back then.
All I needed was four disks to get Debian to the point where it could see the network. And it took more like 8, because half the things threw up errors with fdformat. Not a problem with random files, serious deal-breaker when writing full-disk images.
I think the ones that worked were all older disks that I copied the contents of. The last batch of floppies I actually bought, with the big "Lifetime Warranty" on the side of the box, were the worst of the lot.
Steve Jobs had the right idea. The things are useless.
Ironic, since the last batch I only got to move system files to my Antique SE/30 to begin with.
</Geekrant>
I lied. Geekrant continues.
The laptop is formatting the ~500 MB /usr partition now, after finishing the oddly-satisfying removal of the old root. For some reason, the install instructions don't just come out and say, "If you're trying to install on top of another version of Linux, forget it. Trash that sucker, then we'll talk."
Oh, and I'm a moron, and currently have Apache running open to the world, since the install demanded HTTP for transferring files. Any visitors will just see Red Hat's standard, "Hi, there's nothing here" page. Or the firewall and hosts.allow will block them. Don't know, don't want to find out.
Oh yeah, and my former life as an Amiga and Mac user keeps haunting me, as I put follow the prompts to put disks in and ignore the big HIT RETURN instructions on the screen, figuring that of course the computer knows the disk is in the drive. How stupid can it be?
Better to ask this of myself.
Comments
oh, i had that issue with the Windows not defragging -- it started after i installed the DSL, and the DSL would warn me i had to leave the program running, so there i was, un-defraggable. i got Executive Diskkeeper for defragging windows now, it's not so sensitive.
however right now there is something horribly wrong with my newly installed win2K. it's now the computer that takes seventeen minutes to boot. i hate microsoft. just hate it. why do i still have it? i'm weak.
Posted by: kd | August 31, 2002 10:25 PM
See, if I had to do real work on the computer, I'd probably be there in MS Hell with you. Or giving people documents converted to OpenOffice and back again, which does not go over well. Or didn't with Star Office, anyway.
The Windows partition is still there, and boots up. Not sure if this is a good thing, though. . .
Posted by: Aaron | September 1, 2002 4:10 PM
That's weird because I have to have a Linux box at work to get any real work done. When all else fails the noble PDF will save your ass. Send pdf and attached text file. People will get the hint eventually. The rich text format also works wonders if you're not a total bastard.
Posted by: goneaway | September 1, 2002 8:22 PM
i wouldn't say 'real work' -- i just like AceFTP and Edit + open when i'm making MT sites, which i do quite often. also i am partial to fireworks and photoshop.
also it's easier to install plugins and my kid uses that computer to play on nick.com.
i have excuses! lots of 'em! but for the most part, that's my old slow puter, which i hardly use, my new-ish good one is pure linux.
Posted by: kd | September 1, 2002 10:53 PM
I remember when a friend of mine got an Amiga...I loved that thing.
It was the best thing since sliced bread. Everybody else was rocking the commodore 64 and this cat had us playing many colored, high impact games with an Amiga.
It was no joke.
Posted by: Jason | September 2, 2002 10:57 AM
Amiga had some of the most innovative hardware design going. They were pretty much the first ones to handle video with a separate piece of hardware. Unfortunately (well, for Amiga anyhow) plain old Sanford and Son style beige boxes just got cheap and the hardware vendors got very skinny. Amigas had big claws and fangs compared to the C64 or the even more pathetic TRS-80.
Another piece of amazing hardware was the BeBox. I owned one but it eventually became too decrepit for any real use. Very cool machine (with LED CPU indicator and all) but like everyone else - trampled by the cheap hardware explosion. I wish I still had that box if only for the cruel price I could extract from some larval geek with a sense of history on Ebay.
Posted by: goneaway | September 2, 2002 12:58 PM
I have a working Amiga 2500 and a very dead 500 somewhere. Probably in the free storage locker which my mom insists on calling her house.
Don't think I ever even saw a picture of a BeBox. I just remember the 'migaheads raving. This was between owners, after Commodore, but before. . . wow. I've managed to forget that mess. Yay me.
kd, no idea why I keep the Windows install on this computer. Almost never boot into it, and it never fails to do something to annoy me when I do. . .
Posted by: Aaron | September 3, 2002 9:32 PM
what could you buy an Amiga for back in the day? I remember that the commodore 64 was relatively inexpensive which was why parents let their kids play on them but was the Amiga much more expensive?
Posted by: Jason | September 5, 2002 6:49 PM