Checksum Arcanius

After a quick stop in Idaho for Cason Dotson’s Wedding reception, my parents and I drove to Glacier National Park. Despite weather that didn’t cooperate very well and a famous highway that was closed in the middle, the scenery was still spectacular and the time was well spent. Definitely a park to return to in the future.

I drove down to Eugene, Oregon today to visit my sister and nephew. In addition, I am helping to bring my sister’s computer back to life and set my nephew up with my Dad’s old laptop. Setting up the laptop with Windows XP was some kind of adventure. I needed to upgrade the BIOS, but that required a diskette, which I no longer have the ability to create easily. Fortunately, the laptop itself knows how to create diskettes — but it has to have an operating system installed to do so. So I ended up installing FreeDOS on the laptop in order to create the disk to update the laptop’s own BIOS. With that done, I was able to install Windows XP, which on a PII at 300 MHz with 128 MB of RAM, ended up being an all-night ordeal. However, he now has the computer and he’s enjoyoing it immensely, so I guess it was all worth it.

As for my sister’s computer, she or my nephew seems to have downloaded some sort of nasty virus or spyware that does a fairly good job of masquerading as an official Microsoft Windows antivirus program. As her computer is a Pentium III, this is also quite an adventure.

By “adventure” I mean of course a lot of watching progress bars and being patient.

I did some night photography with Dan tonight. Here is the happy result of about an hour under the Wilburton Tressel in Bellevue, combined into HDR with Photoshop:

A lot can change in one day at work.

After going for a run around Greenlake and feeling thoroughly gassed, Bobby and I watched Primer, one of my favorite movies of all time. Every time I watch it, I understand more and more. This visual timeline that Theo pointed me to certainly helped this time, but I also picked up on a lot of cues early in the movie that I didn’t notice the first three or four times through. Movies that can continue to produce newness after even a couple of viewings are rare; Primer in this regard is a true Gem.

Today I had the opportunity to attend the BYU vs UW football game at Husky Stadium. Having attended both universities, I was pretty excited to go out and be able to cheer no matter what happened. For the event, I wore my UW shorts, UW Class of 2008 Shirt, and my BYU hat. Given that I was in the general student seating (Dawg Pack), it was easier to cheer for the Huskies than the Cougars, but I found myself happy with pretty much every touchdown.

The game wound up being wonderfullly entertaining, ending on a blocked kick after a somewhat contoversial, but in my opinion correct (by the rules) unsportsmanlike conduct penalty. Whether the rule is a good one or not, I would have to say no, but I cannot fault the referees for enforcing the rules. Overall, I thought the game was very fairly called, and its hard to get more exciting than a touchdown with two seconds left to (almost) tie the game.

Note: Bobby was unhappy with the ending.

I, however, thought that the Huskies made a number of improvements since last week, and I no longer think that the season is a lost cause. I think the game against Oklahoma next week will be competitive, and there is hope for a bowl this season. Time will tell.

With a little help from my friends, I was able to get Nexus into a new case last night, with some new hard drives, a new motherboard, processor, 1280 megs of RAM, etc. The process was remarkably smooth once we found a power supply that could reach the motherboard from the Antec Three Hundred’s power supply tray at the bottom of the case. The CPU fan is a little loud, but tucked under my desk I was unable to hear it last night. I may still even get a quieter fan for the CPU, and two quiet 120mm fans to help keep the hard drives extra ventilated. I probably need to throw in one more SATA adapter to allow a full compliment of hard drives, and then Nexus will be set for probably the next five years.

The major hiccup during the upgrading of Nexus was a dead graphics card; however, the Radeon 9700 Pro from the currently languishing Kaleidoscope fit the bill and got the project back on track. However, it got me to thinking about what Kaleidoscope’s future will be, and this morning I figured it out. Kaleidoscope will become a Media Center PC. All it needs is a suitable AGP card with Media support (component video + HDMI, perhaps?). Since AGP is so out of fashion, I should be able to find a decent card for cheap, and with a few cables It’ll be ready to go. The surround sound addition will also be nice. The weakest link will certainly be the size and picture quality of the TV.