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Journal FortKnox's Journal: Why I'm not a good techie 14

Journal by FortKnox
I got the parts to my machine the hour in which I left last week (see previous JE). So I spent 20 hours in a car. It wasn't a terrible weekend, but I sure didn't enjoy the trip. To make things worse, I was driving about 30 minutes away from the columbus '270 sniper'.

Anywho, I got home last night and started assembling. Got everything in, fired up WinXP, let it install overnight. Had a night with "Joey the Vomiteer" (had to clean everything twice. Yeah, he's much better this morning. May have been motion sickness?). Woke up semi-early, started hammering on the new machine. Doesn't recognize the network card. Found the drivers online. Cursed that it was 5MB. I have the old machine I can hookup to the cablemodem to d/l the drivers... but I'm a terrible techie...

I have no CD burner.

I bought one a while back, and it died within 2 weeks. So I need to go buy myself a little keychain usb HD to move the drivers over.

At least I can install Deus Ex:IW while I wait :-)
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Why I'm not a good techie

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  • you'll be happy you have it. I have one I got for X-mas, and it's very handy whenever you want a quick sneakernet.
    • I second that motion. I recently bought a 256 MB stick at Staples for about $70. It's a knockoff brand, making it the cheapest of the 256'ers, but it works great.
  • We used to use PKZip to split large files across multiple floppy disks.

    And we were happy to have it! :)
    • bah, back in my day, we split the big files manually with a hex editor, put the files on floppies and reassembled them on the other computer.

      My great-grand-pappy tells me of stores when they used to have to print out the programs in binary and retype the whole thing in the destination computer. All 1s and 0s I's tells ya.

      -Ab
      • Print the data out? Boy, in my day we used paper tape, and typed in the 1s and 0s using a telegraph! And liked it!
        • Typed? Hah! We used to toggle the data in using the keyswitches on the front panel. From memory.

          Actually, Seymour Cray used to do things like that. He once toggled in bootstrap code to some mainframe from memory - quite an impressive feat, IMHO. Steve Woznizk also used to do something similar, though he had a full keyboard - he would type the code for BASIC into the original Apple I (all from his memory) before they had a functioning tape interface.
    • I seriously thought about disk spanning. The only problem is I don't know if I have enough 1.44 disks in a good enough condition to do this in (usually, if the files too big to email or whatever, I throw it on my server and d/l it on the other machine).

    • We used to use PKZip to split large files across multiple floppy disks.

      And we were happy to have it! :)

      WIMP! Just take a few pieces of lamp cord and jury-rig an RS-232 cable, then use ProComm or something like it to transfer the file via Kermit or Xmodem or Ymodem or Zmodem or whatever you want to use.

      Of course, your copy of ProComm is probably on a 5.25 inch floppy :(

      I bought a USBIDE connector [veriplus.com]. Whenever I need to move a file I just grab anything from my old hard drive collection. It isn't as

  • It became special a few months ago. If you want to be able to read the CDs it burns, you have to take the damned device with you. It must burn super protected CDs or something- as in no other CD drive can read the thing.
  • I got my USB key a year or so ago - couldn't live without it now. Damn thing is just too useful. It's only 128MB, but the prices have plummeted sinbce I got it, so I might get myself a 256 or 512MB one soon. Most of the tasks I used CD-Rs for have now been replaced with the USB drive - ie transferring files to/from work or between computers without a network connection. One of the most useful toys EVAR.
    • spot on. we bought a 1G key for a researcher working on the rovers. instead of futzing around with the network at jpl, usb keys were decided to be the way to go. 1G is still a little pricey (the one we got was ~$300), but i think 256 is the sweet spot in the market. 128 is almost too small. ~$60 for 256 is sweet.

      honestly, i think that usb keys are the first invention worth a damn for computing.
  • i live less than 20 minutes away from that sniper's striking zone. i'm still pretty convinced that it's some idiot who's slowed down now, scared that the cops are after him. even if i'm wrong on the second part, i'm certain it's an idiot.

    good luck on the new machine.
  • Not having a CD-Burner isnt that bad. I have one, but rarley use it. the data I want changes too often for static CD's to be of any use. Pretty soon I'll be getting my IPOD for more space than you can shake a mug of hot coffe at.

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