Brian's World

Days will pass your words to me

I hope everyone had a happy 4th of July. Happy Birthday America! I watched the fireworks on my local PBS station to celebrate since South Hadley’s fireworks were canceled on both the scheduled date and the rain date. The announcer on PBS was a bit excited, but I can’t dock anyone for being excited about the United States of America’s birthday. Who knows when/if South Hadley will reschedule them to.

Today I’m writing to you from my new computer. Its pretty decent. An Intel Core 2 Duo 1.83 GHz with 1GB memory. Nothing to brag about by any means, but its sufficient for my needs. If you’re wondering, it does happen to be the cheapest mac mini that you can buy in stores… but I think of that more like a coincidence. It runs OS X 10.5.4 and XP Pro SP3. Installing XP was a pain. I planned on using an upgrade copy I had from a machine that I’ve junked, but of course the mac mini lacks a physical eject button so I was unable to insert my windows 95 cd to qualify for the update. Then I remembered another computer I had a liscense for that I was no longer using so I found that full install cd. So far no big problems that I’ve noticed, but I’ve stuck pretty much to web browsing on both operating systems. I got my external hard drives up and running, and by luck I found the private key I used to encrypt them all so my data is saved! Now I have to find a temporary home for it so while I reformat the drives and dump them into a NAS box I’ll be setting up (likely running OpenFiler).

Putting a damper on this whole thing was StudentDev @ RPI. The server went offline over 48 hours ago and no one has been onsite to reboot it yet. I’ve been tempted to make the drive up there, but knowing my luck I would get there to find the Union locked or something. Yes, that means my viewtracker widget, facebook application, message board, and development sites are all offline. If I felt the server wouldn’t come up in a day or two I would work to restore backups, but I don’t think anything major it wrong. I’m hoping for like a power failure or something.

I think this weekend enlighted me slightly into the development of myself contrasted with people around me. I think I’ve reached a fairly stable state of my life right now. I’m mostly comfortable with most of the things I do. I find myself pretty content most of the time. This is a little bit different when constrasted with the evolving lives of others around me. I’m not sure if I should ask if I’ll be “left in the dust”, as I’ve architectured the enviroment to avoid that, but Im unsure what evolutions I’ll have to make to maintain that level of contentness I’m currently at. Think of it kind of like a limiting reagent problem in chemistry or maybe some equilibrium thing. While I’m at equilibrium right now, there are other forces that may preassure me to adjust my position to maintain equilibrium. Not the same level, but the same balance.

Tomorrow I’m back to work. I’m not sure what kind of week it will be, but we’ll see. I should spend some time tonight working on a few outlines for a few objectives. I guess I’ll go start working on that. I will be doing that while trying to fall asleep in my bed. Which is technically in my brothers room, but his bed is in the spare bedroom, though he actually sleeps in my room on my bed because he fits diagonally.

Goodnight moon.