The Misadventures of Dan
Peer into the mind of Dan as he tries to build an MP3 Player for his PDA and searches for the next thing in his life be it an electrical engineering job or graduate school.
Friday, April 11, 2003
.:4:06:23 PM:.
Adventures with .NET
Before I had even started to be able to play with .NET troulbe already started to happen. First of all, after installing and deleting so much stuff, I thought it might be a good idea to defrag the hard drive-you know make it more compact. So I started the defrag at 2 in the morning... 7 am... still defragging, that's ok, I'll just see what happens when I come back. I get back at 12... big problems. Apparently when you install .NET it creates a user profile called 'Default' and gives it Debugging Rights. This is a new user class, previously I used two classes-normal and administrator-but I made the unfortunate mistake of having and using a profile called Default. So when I rebooted after the defrag, the entire registry shifted and changed! None of my programs worked anymore everything had 'expired'! Eventually after some rummaging around and looking at the profiles, I reset the profile back to its old state and now everything seems to be okey-dokey again.
.:1:21:50 AM:.
Try #2 (with emacs)
Hmm this is kind of different, with emacs you can use shortcut keys like control-c, 3 to put in the header 3 tags. Anyways back to my original post.
Two days, three lab reports, and one assignment. What a few days... The 570 lab report took forever. First of all the printers on the second floor of ETLC couldn't print and they're the only ones that can print from a Windows box. I thought I could go to the third floor of Mec E to go and print there-all was going fine unti lpage 30 when the printer jammed. We got the paper out but then the door wouldn't close! I thought I could be ressourceful and head to the main floor of Chem E-but after I finished printing I found out we printed the wrong parts. There goes six dollars worth of printing!! After we made the changes we went to Knowledge Common and put more money into my 'One Card' and printed again. After spending ten dollars we finally printed our report.
On the tech and home computer front... lots of changes. First of all, I found Dragon, a Chinese-flashcard program on PalmOpenSource.com. Very nifty program, not only does it test your visual memory by going both English to Chinese and Chinese to English it also tests your writing! They only have two hundred characters and they're all in Mandarin but its a very good program. Secondly after using up 2.3GB and four hours, four hours!!! of time I finally installed Visual Studio .NET because One, I wanted to see what the fuss was all about and Two, Terrarium looks pretty darn cool-I wanna play!! Since I got the free software-why not? What's another distraction during finals? Bring em on!!!
Thursday, April 10, 2003
.:11:40:08 PM:.
nooooo
Lost my post again... :( stupid back button-that's it I'm going to use Emacs pffft yeah right-I'm going to try and use it, but we'll see.
Tuesday, April 08, 2003
.:1:06:43 PM:.
6.5 miles later
I ran our first practice run with Joel and Mr. Kobewka on Sunday. It wasn't too bad I think we were able to finish the 6.5 miles in less than an hour, Joel is pushing to break the 7 min/mile barrier when I think I can only do 7.5 max for the race. I don't think I was running as fast as I could but I wasn't exactly running slow. Joel is pretty fast-faster than I sort of expected him to be, but some people are like that:Running for insane amounts of time at high speeds. I just like the running and the company-it sort of would be cool to run fast but its not necessary.
I've started to read Dante's Inferno-because its about time that I did and picked up 'The Summer Tree' based on a suggestion from Di. On looking up an appropriate link I was tempted to read beyond what I had already read in the book. I've never really read a summary notes sort of thing before, I always thought (and still do) that it just glosses over many of the things and it doesn't reflect how you really feel when you're reading it or it could be just me.
Lots of things to do today-not enough time to do it all-as usual.
Sunday, April 06, 2003
.:5:58:17 PM:.
Another webcomic
I found this one listed on megatokyo I liked reading the development between Onii and Haruna-call it just interesting.
Fellowship went pretty good, a lot of people were pretty tired by the time we got to discussing about the main topic:The significance of baptism to Christian and its impression (or at least that's what I thought the topic was about, Jesse just said "Baptism"). Anyways I was constantly thinking about two things, when I had to go and pick up Dad and when was I going to call Christine. Its nothing like what you think, I just had told her that we would be going out for coffee afterwards and since that wasn't likely I didn't want her to think otherwise. Anyways I ended up not really having my mind on the conversation (not all the time anyways) but I managed to call her-no answer-d'oh. So I was on my way to pick up Dad when all of the sudden the cell phone rings-it might be home. No! it was Christine! We talked for a few minutes and that was it. I think I may have sounded pretty tired-not sure.
.:12:50:34 AM:.
Why L33t will not work
So I was reading slashdot and I came across this article about a person trying to install an alternative (Linux) to her current Windows operating system. I can understand her frustration when she says it was not exactly the easiest thing to do. Reading the commentary that followed on slashdot just made me shake my head. Yes its true that some people will get their computer literate friends to install stuff-not everyone does but why do companies sell upgrades at "common" stores. I don't understand comments that basically say "oh you needed to read this online documentation before doing this or that" well that's sort of difficult to do without an OS wouldn't you think? If everything is on the CD then you would obviously need your CD drive to work and your screen to display stuff in order to be able to read it. Or better yet "since she was using such an outdated OS-blah blah blah" well guess what? Not everyone has the time and inclination to continually update their systems-why do you think computer viruses spread across so quickly? I personally don't recommend new people to install linux on their systems, I encourage people to try and find a system so that they can try it out before they make the "big commitment".
