The Life of PhotoJim

Too good not to share:

Rotten office fridge cleanup sends seven workers to hospital... nice.

Alright, so it works. So what has happened to me? I still work at the same places. I've been to Europe (London; the Zurich-St. Gallen-Amriswil area of Switzerland; and Scotland). I've been to New York City. I've been to Vancouver, Seattle, and Missoula, Montana. I gave some insurance and condominium seminars in Vancouver, Regina, and Saskatoon. I bought an Alix 2d3 single board computer and am turning it into my new router, dubbo. I got an old rack mount Dell PowerEdge 2450 server (dual Pentium IIIs @ 1 GHz, 1 GiB RAM) to replace hobart as my server. It seems to be working very well. We got new cars, I a 2007 Honda Accord EX-L and Lori a 2009 Honda Fit Sport. Both have 5-speed manuals. I like driving stick. I got on Twitter, although I don't have many friends on there yet. And a few other things I'm sure.

I've been a neglectful blogger. My configuration broke during an upgrade. Apparently two years have passed. If you read this, then that means I fixed it... and you might just hear from me again.

are being discontinued.

I practically grew up on these magazines, which provided gaming information for the Dungeons & Dragons game. In fact, I still subscribe to Dungeon magazine.

I haven't had a lot of time to play D&D in the past few years, but I still want to. It's a lot of fun... great for the imagination. It sure is hard to find the time to play though - and even more importantly, hard to find people to play with that aren't 12. :) People my age have full and busy lives - and even though I don't have any children the time still seems to be in extremely short supply.

Ever wonder what it would be like if you smashed two galaxies together?

Now you can find out! Click here for the Galaxy Crash website. Scientifically valid, no less!

We spent the weekend in Minot, North Dakota. Some of those to whom I have mentioned this have asked why. Well, it isn't a bad place. For its size, it feels a lot bigger than it is. It's a little like Regina in that regard, except that it only has 40,000 people instead of 200,000 like Regina does. However, like Regina, it has one Best Buy store, so that gives you an idea of the trading area that it supports.

The Dakota Square Mall is a pretty decent mall. It has three department stores (Target, JC Penney and Herberger's) and a lot of little shops. I got a case for my Treo, and a nice spring/fall jacket.

The Best Buy visit was very fruitful because they had two Nintendo Wiis in stock! I've wanted one for ages. I bought one for myself and another for a friend with whom I had a pact to buy one if I found two (and he was to do the same). I won so he bought me lunch today. :)

For supper we went to Paradiso, a really good Mexican restaurant in Minot. It was excellent. I highly recommend it. Pints of Michelob Amber Bock were only $2.50 too. I may have had a couple. Honest, I am over 21.

The next day we had a quieter day. For lunch we went to a really cool diner, Kroll's Diner. It is probably the first geniune diner that I have ever visited. It had the entire feel of a 1950s American diner. I had the roast beef special and it was pretty good. Of course I had a soda (pop to we Canadians) and Lori and I shared a vanilla shake for dessert. Pretty yummy.

Small problem today. I installed NetBSD 3.1 on mooloolaba, my Sun Sparcstation 20, yesterday. I was trying to use pkg_add to add some binary packages that I like, such as irssi, bash, and screen. Alas, no luck. The ftp logins kept failing, even though I had properly assigned the variable PKG_PATH to the correct one.

It turns out that the problem was that this version of NetBSD is not doing anonymous logins properly, and that was causing the FTP logins to fail. Even manual logins would fail, requiring you to use the user and pass commands to log in. The solution: Create a ~/.netrc file containing:

default login anonymous password youremailaddress@spamsucks.org

Here are some pictures:

That is before the mods...

...and after. I took out the 4.3 GB SCSI-2 drive and installed a pair of 8.6 GB SCA SCSI-3 drives, which freed up the SCSI-2 connector so that I could finally connect the CD-ROM drive. (Sparcstations use proprietary CD-ROM drives - they are normal SCSI but the form factor is unique. They are quite short height-wise.) I also put in an Ultra-SCSI controller in a free SBUS slot (you can see it in the middle at the back). The SBUS card beside it is the HME "Happy Meal" Fast Ethernet controller; the built-in Ethernet is only 10BaseT and the HME is 100BaseTX. You can also see the topmost of the two Ross 180 MHz HyperSparc processors that I installed a few days ago. Underneath the HME NIC is the Low Cost Graphics cgsix framebuffer, which I am not currently using since mooloolaba runs headless.

For general interest, here are some pictures of my "tower of computers": hobart (PII web/email/file server; home of this blog) at left; on the pile, top to bottom: mooloolaba (Sparcstation 20), moora (UltraSparc 1/170E, home of one of the Metanetwork IRC servers; maroochydore, my VAXstation 4000/60, running OpenBSD 4.0; canberra, an ancient 486sx25 with 32 MB of RAM that is soon to be retired; and devonport, my firewall, a Pentium 133. The latter two machines and moora run Debian Linux.

I got a new cell phone this week: the Palm Treo 680.

This is a quad-band GSM phone (for Rogers Wireless or Fido. It also supports EDGE data speeds, which are quite a bit faster than GPRS. It's actually pretty zippy.

Initial impressions: I really like this phone. I still like PalmOS, but this phone has a much nicer screen than my Sony Clie PEG-TJ37, even though the screen is smaller. The quality of the phone is quite good. It has good-sounding audio (although slightly more obviously digital than my prior Motorola RAZR V3. I haven't given it a hard test under poor cellular conditions yet, but so far, so good.

My brother-in-law and a friend of mine both have the CDMA version of the Treo 650 and they both think that although it's a great PDA, it's a marginal phone. Steve Punter's review of the Treo 700wx seems to match their experience perfectly. However, the people I know with GSM Treos seem to be very happy with them. This might be a strong indicator that if you like Palm smartphones, you might prefer to use a GSM provider like Rogers, Fido, Cingular Wireless or T-Mobile USA rather than a CDMA provider. Of course, if you live outside Canada and the US, you are almost certainly going to be using GSM so the point is moot.

I'll report more later once I have more to say. So far, after 24 hours, I'm very happy with the phone.