MsGeek's Journal: Thoughts at 9:22am PST

I haven't had anything interesting to post here for the past few days, so I think I will just dump off some random thoughts to keep the momentum going. I suppose you can call this a GeekBack because I will be revisiting a few things I mentioned in previous posts, but I'm too lazy to change the icon. Sue me.

I got a 93 out of a possible 100 for my Linux informative speech in Speech 101. That's in A territory, I think. I was not too happy about the lack of enthusiasm from the Peanut Gallery, but oh well. At least the Prof thought it interesting...interesting enough to where she's asking me questions about Linux for PowerPC. She's a Mac fan who has a couple of Macs that aren't really MacOS X candidates.

BlueTomato, my Thinkpad, is now a dual-boot of Linux and Windows 2K Professional. Unfortunately I couldn't keep it 100% Linux pure, because Win4Lin didn't like the Knoppix kernel. I could have patched the kernel, but meh. Not enough time to do it up in SB, not enough inclination. I need some sort of Windows to run the courseware I need to run for school, and if I couldn't put Win4Lin and 98SE on there this needed to be done.

2K took to this thing like a duck takes to water...nothing to install except patches, Avast Antivirus, (it's free as in beer and pretty much catches everything Norton would) ZoneAlarm, AdAware and 7Zip. Oh yeah, and the Thinkpad Control Utility from IBM. I was able to finally find out that, yes, IBM leasing flashed the BIOS to the most recent microcode before they let this machine out of the shop. Good.

I am picking up an external floppy drive for BlueTomato on Monday...I broke down and got an eBay account again. I hate them, I hate their weenie privacy policy, I hate everything about them, but damn, they are the only game in town for things like laptop parts and so on. The person who's selling me the floppy drive is a local, so it was just easier to pay them and pick it up in person.

Now all I need is a Toshiba or Sanyo-made Thinkpad 600E CD-ROM and a 600E TV-out cable, and I will be made in the shade. The current CD-ROM has an LG mechanism, so that makes it the sacrificial one when I swap it with the Sony CD-RW mechanism. You take the drive itself out of the caddy and replace it with the one you want. I want an extra in case I screw it up.

Once I get those items, however, I will prolly just let this eBay account sit idle. Again, I don't like their privacy policy and I had a problem with them when I had my original account...by problem I mean problem along the same lines as being a "problem drinker" or a "problem gambler." I have a slew of old Macs in need of TLC and Dreamcast goodies I bought with money I shouldn't have spent from back when I had the old account.

Anyway, gonna jet now...gotta pack up BlueTomato and get to LAVC. [daria]Go Monarchs. Rah. Go. Go. Kick butt.[/daria]