My family's cat, Butterscotch, turned 18 in May (Derby weekend) and just went through his second surgery this year for tumors on his neck. The vet isn't quite sure about the tumors so they're being sent out to be biopsied (sp?) tonight. He's being released tomorrow back to my parents. My mom wasn't sure if they were going to be giving him any sort of new meds or painkillers though.

I know he'll live to be 21, then he can drink with the rest of us :D

I can't wait for classes to begin again. You'd think that after 9 years of college I'd be sick of it...but NAY! I do believe I am a professional student following in the footsteps of my Aunt Frannie, who graduated from Duke in the 40s and has been a full time student since (4-5 PHd's, a dozen or so masters and god knows how many bachelor degrees).

So my classes:
OMIS675 Techical Application of Electronic Business - Ecommerce in .Net
OMIS651 Business Systems Analysis and Decisons - how to write programs for non-CS majors
FINA320 Principles of Finance (eew)
MGMT333 Principles of Management (eew)

Not a terribly hard schedule, and it leaves a slew of time for work in the lab, do my own projects (if proper motivation is applied) and study for the GMAT and testing out of the Principles of Marketing class in the spring.

Since switching to the business department I have realized how utterly clueless many business majors are about technology. They have the most pimped-out building on campus (8 labs, wireless networking, smart classrooms) yet a full 50% of them don't know how to double space a word document. Sure, they can audit my taxes and streamline my production line, but without being able to use the tools to analyze data how are we helping anyone? (just now, half the class I'm monitoring didn't know which drive was the floppy...why we're still using floppies is beyond me)

I was chosen to be the only student member of the Technology Funding Committee for this year. It consists of 2 faculty members, 2 Student Associations members and 1 student (me). I'm not quite sure what it will involve, but I'm sure as hell going to lobby against the new managed-print system we are using (and wasted a ton of money on, seeing as how it doesn't work with MVS, UNIX or remote printing, crashes daily (hourly), is overly complicated and doesn't have nearly as many features as it should/could/must)

That's all...carry on.

My computers are being little bitches.

We bought a 200GB hard drive a year ago (give or take) and I chopped it up into 2 NTFS partitions (the logical thing to do). I had one partition for storage stuff and one for miscellaneous stuff to be sorted, tested, etc. Simple enough.

When I bought the new wireless card I decided to pull the drive out reformat the main hdd for that machine, taking the 200GB out for safety (I tend to screw things up like that). So I put it in the server for safe keeping. Well, the partition with all my documents, movies, music, etc decided to loose it's master boot record.

Fuck.

After poking around with chkdsk and looking up error messages from various other software, I found that Active@ File Recovery will be able to recover about 90% of my data! Huzzah! The only problem is that I will have to shell out the $30 to restore any files above 32kb...damnit. I don't really have the money to be doing that, but I also don't want to lose 100GB of data.

Any thoughts from the peanut gallery? Other tools? Fire?

In the past week I've not only moved across the street, I've "upgraded" my network to be half wireless (AP in the living room). For some reason, the entire thing seems quite a bit slower than my old 10/100 hub...even for the hard-wired cables. Maybe I just need to reinstall my OS again...that's always a solution for my machines :)

Finished my little DB for the lab, now my work for the fall will drop from 2 hours a week to 10 minutes a week with no paperwork at all.

I have yet to take the GMAT, still can't pay for it...damn people making me pay for a test to tell me that I'm cool enough to be in grad school...hell, I have 215 credits, I should be teaching the classes!

Finally broke down and bought a GameCube. I swear that Mario Kart:Double Dash is video crack. I knew that I was addicted when I played for 4 straight hours with Nate (old roommate) and wanted to play more after a dinner break in which we watched someone else play. Since x-mas I must have played 2000+ rounds of the game...fucking crack I tell ya!

Decided not to build a PVR...not only because I's po' (so po' that I can't afford the other two letters) but because I really don't have time to watch TV anymore...Jeopardy, that's about it.

Back to surfing...or a crossword puzzle :)

Wow, I completely let this thing go.
I've got a few projects lined up for the summer, hopefully at least half of them are completed before the fall session starts.

1) Take the GMAT
2) Finish my lab DB app
3) Build a new computer that will actually play NWN
4) Set up a linux box (pvr?)
5) Play/beat all the Zelda games
6) Get/make a better router/webserver (this one sucks)

Not too much on the plate, but I do play a hell of a lot of Mario Kart Double Dash...we'll see how much actually gets completed

I am down to one computer. The server. This sucks.

The living room computer - Than (my bro) was surfing on eBay the other day when the bastard just died. It wouldn't boot into any OS (XP or Suse 9.1) and when I tried reinstalling both OS's (dual and single boots for both) they wouldn't boot into the OS anymore after the initial reboot. No clue what's going on...it just up and died.

The bedroom computer - The cooling fan is a bastard on it, always has been...seems there's always a problem with it buzzing too loudly. Anyway, woke up this morning to hear less noise than usual...looked inside the case (cause it's open :) ) and the CPU cooling fan/heatsink had detached from the chip!!! The fan/heatsink is held down by a metal brace that spans the cpu and attaches to the socket molding via two brackets...one of the brackets broke making it impossible to reattach the fan in it's present state. So I'll have to get some high-temp epoxy and glue the sync/fan directly to the cpu...not cool.

I'm going to try to change out some parts so that I can get at least one system to work that's not the server (which is slow and I'd have to move around a whole bunch of wires). Then I get to figure a way to get all the hdd's hooked up so I can actually run stuff...fuck...

I guess it gives me a project to do.

Started a grad level DB class a few weeks back and honestly, I've never worked with a DB before in my life. I don't know if I'm just missing something which is supposed to make this stuff difficult or if I just "get it" but it really seems like a complete waste of my time (to take the class).

Upon talking to by DB-admin friend about my little project (yet to be started b/c I'm a lazy bum and Mario Kart owns me) he suggested a DB for it...but he's a psycho like that...but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. The data is all standardized and just needs some form of organization...and what better way than to *not* code a full app myself, but make a completely functional DB app....final project maybe?

Behold the Grand Duchy of Joperdom! I'm having a lot of fun with this thing...although I wish that more options would be given for the daily questions.

Okay, I've had a lot of issues with linux (in quite a number of flavors) in the past and finally got a full cd set of Suse for x-mas. Previously nothing liked my hardware. Only on a single maching did it work, and that is the living room (communal) machine, so I figured it should probably have XP since everyone knows it, I know how to fix it *cough* reinstall *cough* This copy, and it's ease of install (for me) and completely liking all my hardware from the get go has me intrigued.

There've always been programs that to do image manipulation, music composition, and 3D modeling. Plus all your standard document/spreadsheet/db stuff and all the programming goodies to last me a lifetime. The problem was that I never actually spent the time to sit down and learn how to do everything that come to me so easily in windows.

Now though, since I've been away from any sort of Linux-esque software for almost 2 years, I see a host of new programs that show potential and an environment that I would really love to program in. I've gotten a bad taste in my mouth for something I used to love while coding ASM in school. I have some ideas in mind for some simple programs (mentioned here) and some more floating around in my head to get me started on my way back in. Not to mention QuickD .

Let's hope I actually stay motivated enough to get all this stuff through to completion...I am the most notorious of procrastinators.

At work I'm trying to get a Xantech 590 programmable controller to do what it was supposed to...learn IR commands for anything you want it to. But the stupid thing didn't come with an IR receiver, soooo.....I couldn't do it. How else am I supposed to tell it that it's controlling a Proxima??? Grrr....definately not cool. Now we have to buy one of the little buggers to run the Proxima's because people keep stealing the remotes (for the laser pointer)...bastards.

I've determined that since I run so many chat clients on multiple computers, I need a little utility to merge all the log files...and one to merge them all together now client/user/date or some such madness. For the past 3 years I've done nothing but Cobol and OS/390 assembly...definately not the tools to do this. I need to find something that is relatively easy to learn and runs completely stable on windows (not necessarily in windows). Any thoughts?

Well, I think I'm going to start putting stuff up here...mainly because I read /. all the time but really don't post. Actually, I don't read many of the comments either. But I do enjoy reading the headlines and journals...thus, in addition to my LJ I'm going to start putting my tech stuff here...since next to no one there cares about anything remotely techy.

So I'm working on this project (game) with some friends in Java and XML, the only problem is only one of us knows Java, and only one of us knows XML. In theory I understand both of them, but have never actually worked on anything substantial in either (ie I've never worked in either).

So, since I'm the artist I get to do all the graphics. And since I have a guitar, then obviously I'm doing the music. The only problem is.....I can't draw. This sucks when you have to come up with things like...oh...whole freaking environments! I've gotten quite a few textures...all easy filler, but the actual bulk of the game is giving me some problems.

Anyone (who actually reads this) have any suggestions for how to make good graphics that look semi-realistic for a little game called QuickD?

I think the real question is....who's going to read this anyway?

I have a journal that I actually update HERE but I could be tempted to put some crap up here if I ever get bored enough...lord knows I'm on /. more than anything