Dave turns on the stove & starts some spaghetti. It’s going to be a long night.
End product: Picture of spaghetti with picture of spaghetti. Metaspaghetti? Idk. Too late at night to know for sure.
(Warning: large linked image)
It seems my time-management skills fail me after 1am…
I am not, in fact, dead.
We’ll just say that in my current priorities this blog is, on a scale of 1 to Important, somewhere around – √π
Sorry. How about this weekend? I’ll try.
Well, it only took 3 attempts, but DHL and I finally connected today to deliver my new PowerBook battery. This one replaces the recalled one my computer is currently discharging into a safe-for-shipment state.
An interesting note about the recall shipment process: the new battery arrived via DHL. In the box was a FedEx prepaid shipping label, and directions that indicated I should use the FedEx sticker in the US, while Canadian recall participants would be provided with a UPS sticker. Who would have thought you could get all three (DHL, FedEx, UPS) in one transaction? Impressive.
From the letter accompanying my replacement battery:
Tips for faster discharge: Play a DVD movie, a CD in iTunes (turn on the Visualizer), or the Chess game (set to play computer vs. computer).
Haha, awesome: Apple just instructed me to play computer vs. computer chess as part of a battery recall.
As a matter of fact, I think I shall… as well as enjoying as much of Inside Man as I can watch in the remaining 12 minutes of this battery’s life.
Au revoir, my somewhat-abused-and-less-than-loved-for-being-ridiculously-hot Sony-manufactured debacle of a battery.
Dave and I pooled our USB extension cords this evening to wire my laser printer to the Myth box by the TV. The result? Approx 20′ of über-USB!
The picture below pretty much says it all. The Myth box is located left of the TV, and the printer is located at the right of the image, at the near end of the couch. The über-USB cable wraps all the way around the room behind the couch, under the window, and behind the TV, for approx 20 feet total. Awesome!
[Large linked file warning: 1.22MB]
From left to right across that picture, the green circles highlight:
How nerdy are we?
So at the Engineering Bash I tried to turn on the fountain. It flooded in about 60 seconds. I jumped to a hasty conclusion that the summer maintenance folks had failed to clean the filters properly, and accused them of such, publicly. Only to have one of those said summer maintenance folks inform me, in person, that he was in fact on cleaning duty this summer and can vouch for it having been done. I was left looking like a jerk, grasping at straws for other explanations, and having to walk away embarrassed.
Today, Tim and I took a look “under the hood” of the fountain to see if we could figure out what, after the assurance of clean filters, could possibly be causing the flooding problem. Here is what we found:
Oh wait: That looks an awful lot like completely clogged filters, leading directly to the flooding we experienced.
15 minutes with a shop vac later, the problem was resolved and the fountain runs fine. So I looked like a jerk for naught, and apparently the maintenance guy and myself have a different perspective on the precise definition of “frequently cleaned.”
I was trying to clean my laptop screen today with my “Klear Screen” cleaning solution (bought two years ago from Scott’s recommendation, works awesome. www.klearscreen.com), and I could not seem to polish off this one particular smudge.
Let me back up. The cleaning process is:
Use once a week for best results (Hm, I’ve used it about half a dozen times in 2 years…)
So I was stuck in step 4, because I couldn’t seem to polish off this one spot. Upon closer inspection, that spot was my mouse cursor. Oops.
Just a quick shout-out for the UW Campus Map, which is pretty awesome. I don’t know when this latest version went live, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t look like this at the end of last year.
In other news, Wells Fargo will be building a new ATM in the campus area, at (if I remember right) approx 500 University Ave. Good thing, too, or I would probably have switched banks to avoid having to drive 15 minutes to an ATM.
Also, we got internet & digital cable hooked up in our apartment on Tuesday. Now I’m thinking about buying an HDTV, as we can get HD content to match our current lineup for only $3 more per month. Anyone have advice on HDTVs?
Well, I have made it to Madison for another school year.
At the moment, though, I don’t have internet access in my apartment. Supposedly the cable guy is coming to set us up tomorrow at 1pm, though Tim expects him to cancel. And so I find myself at ecb, in the Enlight office. (Which has fortunately been getting cooler while I sit here… it was extremely hot when I got here. Perhaps we should not have boxed a server up in a room with no circulation.)
Other interesting news:
Hm… somebody in Enlight made an oops.
A lot has happened since the 15th of August, a mere week and two days ago.
In brief:
It turned out pretty nice:
Going by local (Pacific) time, it’s 5:54am. I haven’t actually bothered to find out if this is a fact or not, but this is my earliest blog post ever. From work. Before 6am.
I dropped my parents off at the airport for their 7am flight home about 30 minutes ago, and just came straight to work, where I plan to sleep for an hour or two on our couch. Driving up to Microsoft from SeaTac Airport was pretty awesome: the sky changed from pitch black to the first colors of sunrise as I was driving.
Work is going very well: I have one more bug to finish up before the end of my internship, and I have been making good progress on it, now that I can actually get the hardware to demonstrate the bug I’m trying to fix. (That was a frustrating 2-week ordeal.) The process of fixing it will take a giant leap forward today, enough to give me credit for the bug on performance numbers, and hopefully by the end of my internship on Friday, it will be all solved!
And now I will sleep, since I got up at 4:15.