Journal imroy's Journal: A little update 1
Ugh
I've been meaning to write an update JE for a while. But I'm the master procrastinator. Life has been seeming to be piling up on me lately and I just feel paralised by it all. I've got a bunch of things to update you all on. I'll outline a few of them here and I'll try to follow up later with full JE's.
- I've survived my two uni courses and managed to get pass and credit marks. I was genuinely surprised, I was convinced I was going to fail one. Mum and Dad were pleased, especially because of the money they spent to get me in. Which Mum reminded me of on a regular basis. Yeah, thanks for that mum.
- Despite that, I'm dropping out. Or that is, I'm not continuing to complete the course. I've finally come to the conclusion that IT is not for me. I'm a computer geek, but my (strong!) personal opinions always have, and always will clash with what I'm told to do. And more specifically, living with my parents sucks. Going to classes, assignments, and exams is not easy with my family constantly distracting me and draining my motivation.
- I've recently tried to restart a web prescence from fresh. Late last year the family got a DSL line (only 256/64), complete with a static IP address and no restrictions on "servers". I've got a domain registered with dyndns.org for now, and setup squid in http-accelerator mode on the linux gateway machine. I haven't done much on "my" stuff yet, but I have created two dynamic little mini-sites. At the risk of slashdotting our ADSL link and my K6 server, I'll provide links here. The first is an interface to several digital temperature sensors I have around the house. The family liked that over summer, using it to know what it's like outside. The second is a Genealogical database taken from the family tree Mum has been working on for over ten years. I'm not sure where I'm going with it. For now I think I'll focus on the "Photos" feature. If you click on the "Oldest photo" link you'll see a baby photo of myself. I've tried to make the interface as inter-linked as possible.
- I've just done an upgrade of the motherboard and CPU on my Linux workstation. From an Athlon 750 (almost 4 years old?) to an Athlon XP PR2400+. Not bad. Mum and my youngest brother Scott also upgraded to the same motherboard (Gigabyte GA-7VT600-F) and PR2600+'s. The downside is that I had to get rid of my beloved Matrox G400 Max because it doesn't support the 1.5V supply of AGP 3.0 (at least mine doesn't). I haven't been able to get DRI work with the Radeon 9000 Pro that Scott gave me. Just 2D for now. Either I figure out the problem (my suspicions are currently with the AGP/GART driver in the 2.6.x kernel) or I find a good ol' G550 on eBay.
- With all the new hardware flying, we were finally able to give my next youngest brother Andrew an upgrade with the bits left over. He got Scotts' Athlon PR1900+ with 384M of SDR RAM. A huge step up from the recycled Pentium-166 he and his wife has been using for several years. He's a big X-Plane fan and has been hogging Scotts computer to play it on recent visits. We installed an *ahem* copy of XP on it and then I spent several hours loading all sorts of stuff on it. Media Player Classic, lots of codecs, latest drivers, bunch of stuff from The OpenCD, latest Mozilla, Winamp 5, Ad-Aware, PopFile, Xaos, and quite a few gigs of wallpapers, ripped music and downloaded movies. That was just two days ago and from what I hear, he's pleased.
Ok, that's probably a good start on answering the question of what I've been up to the last 6 months. I'll see about posting more complete JE's on some of these topics soon.
Money++ (Score:2)