Sunday, 28th of September, 2003
Picture - The morning of the final day of the Fall Getaway conference. I parked among the tents and slept in my car, where it was warmer and more quiet.
Saturday, 27th of September, 2003
Thursday, 25th of September, 2003
Wednesday, 24th of September, 2003
Thursday, 18th of September 2003
I found out a good way to improve reverse
lighting on my car today through Daniel Stern Lighting. They
carry a high quality German brand of lights, Narva Speziallampen, which are
nice, bright halogens that won't melt the lens.
I took a picture after replacing the right side light, the
left one is OEM. In the daytime, the difference is fairly noticable, but
it's not annoyingly bright. 
At night, it casts an amazing amount of light!
Monday, 15th of September, 2003
"The olive tree exploiting the Lexus is the story that came to light in the summer of 1999 about Adolf Hitler's racist manifesto Mein Kampf, which is banned in Germany by the German government. You cannot sell it in any German bookstore, or publish it in Germany. But Germans found they could order the book over the Internet from Amazon.com and it would come in the mail in a way that the German government was powerless to stop. Indeed, so many Germans ordered Mein Kampf from Amazon.com that in the summer of 1999 Hitler made Amazon.com's top-ten bestseller list for Germany." (p. 37)
"When I remember the most, though, was that we stayed overnight in nearby Sverdlovsk, at the OCtober Hotel, and when I got in the elevator I noticed that the buttons read: 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 2. Someone forgot the second-floor button and just tacked it on later. WHen you pressed the 2 button you went to the second floor - even though it was in the 10 spot. This was a hotel in the Soviet Union's most sophisticated military complex! Only in a divided, chopped up, slowed-down, regulated Cold War system could the Russians get away with an elevator with the floor buttons out of sequence." (p. 78-79)
"Gorbachev was trying to underscore to Baker how difficult it was for Russia to make the psychological transition to capitalism, after so many years of communism, and he did it with this yarn: A Russian peasant finds a lamp by the side of the road and rubs it. Out pops a genie. The genie tells the peasant he can have any wish.
The peasant tells the genie, "You know, I have only three cows, but my neighbor Igore has ten cows."
"So you want twenty cows?" the genie asks the peasant.
"No," says the peasant, "I want you to kill seven of Igor's cows.""
Friday, 12th of September, 2003
I also had to do a BIOS flash in order to get it to recognize the 40GB Maxtor hard drive I got for it - and then had all sorts of problems with Norton Ghost. Finally, I realized that both drives have to be the primary drives on the IDE channel for it to ghost properly. Hmmm...
Well when all is said and done, this computer now has a new CMOS battery (old one was dead), upgraded hard drive from 3.2GB to the 32GB maximum that the BIOS allows, and 160MB of RAM, up from 64. The motherboard seems to let me mix SIMMS and DIMMs fine for now, as long as you only use only one set of banks for each type, so 2 SIMMS and 1 DIMM.
Oh yeah, and I also repaired the wires that got fried when something shorted out - one of the power cables of the power supply shorted out and melted all the insulation off of it... yikes. That's the primary reason the computer ended up at my place to get fixed to begin with. Smoke pouring out of the system case is not a good thing...
"Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."
Tuesday, 2nd of September, 2003
