Ramblings by Chase

Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows.
- David T. Wolf [1]

Especially funny since I have a co-worker that thinks very much along those lines. To top it all off, his name is eerily similar.

It has been far too long since my last ‘real’ update. For that, I apologize in advance. It has been a crazy few months since the last post. Let me see if I can work my way through some of the more memorable events. I will probably break this post up into several, or you may never see the whole thing.

November saw another birthday. Nothing special, or as my grandmother would say “It’s just another day”. Sometime around that point I bought an Xbox 360. I never thought I would give Microsoft money like that, but there were a couple of games that I wanted to be able to play that were only going to be released on the 360 or the PS3. Sony wanted too much for the PS3, so hello Microsoft.

I picked up a few games initially (Orange Box, Halo 3, Gears of War, and Oblivion) and eventually got a few others (Army of Two, Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed, and C&C 3). Many enjoyable hours playing those game were had by all. Portal (part of The Orange Box) in particular was waaaay too much fun.

It wasn’t all peachy at first with the 360. The first one, yes I said first, died within a couple of days. It quit reading DVDs, both games and movies, which basically makes it useless. I opened a support case with Microsoft until I realized the amount of downtime I was going to have to deal with (more than a month). That’s when I decided to just exchange/return the stupid thing.

Walmart, where I bought the first one, did not have any others when I tried to exchange it, so I just returned it. I took the cash and went down the road to Best Buy and paid 2 cents more. I have not had any trouble with the new one since that point.

More to follow before too long.

So, I’ve finally run into my first real issue with Fedora Core 6. Don’t get me wrong, it has done me well for quite some time now, but it finally cried ‘Gotcha!’ the other day. In the course of a standard ‘yum update’, which, since it’s so simple, I tend to do pretty often, my ALSA packages got upgraded to 1.0.14-0.1.rc1.fc6. Not really paying attention too closely, a side effect of it normally being pretty painless, I went about my business for several more hours. This being a laptop, it got shutdown before heading to bed … and then started back up as I realized I’d like to watch some cartoons (Looney Tunes DVDs are great) while laying in bed trying to unwind.

Here’s where the story gets ugly … I didn’t have any sound when the machine came back up. No sound! How am I supposed to watch a DVD without sound? It seems that the few applications I have that still have OSS support will function if I manually set them to OSS and not ALSA, but those apps are in the minority by far these days.

So, it’s been a couple of days and there haven’t been any ‘whoops’ updates to ALSA, nor does there appear to be a flurry of activity on the Web. That leaves me in a bit of a quandry. I don’t know enough about yum, even after digesting the man pages, to try and roll back to an old version to see if that fixes it, nor do I really know enough about ALSA (once upon a time I did, but a lot has changed since then).

What really confuses me is that Fedora has a few utilities for managing sound and sound cards. Some of the ‘can you hear this sound’ checks pass just fine (when selecting a card for instance), but the user level properties that let me select ‘Auto Detect’, or a specific device all fail (unless I select OSS, but even then my apps can’t play sound).

Anyone out there know enough to help? I’m on an IBM Thinkpad R50e that uses the snd_intel8×0 module normally (and it’s currently loaded). Help?!?

It’s been a very long while since I’ve taken the time to write anything here as you are probably well aware. I have a little time to kill before a meeting this afternoon, so here goes nothing.

Since the last ‘personal’ entry I have is really back in the summer there’s a lot to fill in. First off, I got a new kitten on October 11th, 2006. I’ve named him Spot after the various spots of white fur that are in his coat. He’s a very good natured cat and gets along very well with Mocha.

I started letting him out on my balcony after a week or two, and not but about 3 weeks after I got him, he got stung by a wasp right above his left eye. He developed a little foam at the mouth and his eye was watering like mad, but after less than a minute the foam was gone and once I wiped out his eye he seemed fine. I took him to the vet anyway since he was so young and I was a little worried about long-term effects. The vet gave him a shot for the sting and a couple of his baby shots all at the same time. He’s doing great these days with absolutely no apparent ill effects.

I’ve had a birthday and we all celebrated Christmas, Thanksgiving, and a New Year since the last entry here. It was good all around. Erica bought me a bunch of DVDs to add to my collection and the family as a whole bought a new TV (very nice). Too bad I’m not around to use it.

I’ve been eying up the Nintendo Wii for some time, but I’m inclined to let it come down in price some first. That probably means a couple of years, so I may not hold off that long, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t going to happen in the very near future. It sounds more promising every day as I read reviews and see new games appear. Play over the Internet will be nice as games begin supporting it.

Speaking of game consoles, I’ve been using my Gamecube a lot lately playing the Splinter Cell series of games. I’ve played, and beaten, all four at this point (including all the co-op missions in the last two). I even went back in Splinter Cell: Double Agent and played it on Elite level (the highest, no ammo, insane AI, etc) all the way through with not too much in the way of difficulty. It turns out that my general strategy, and that of a coworker and friend David Smeeton, is to use the gun very little anyways, so not having it available wasn’t that big of a crutch. Now it’s time to find similar games in the Stealth Action genre.

It’s getting a little lonely around here since Jimbo and Colin both have moved on to greener pastures. Jimbo’s back in Chicago for a while with his parents and Colin is at Rockwell Collins in Iowa. We all still call or chat online a fair bit, but it’s not quite the same.

I’m working on some very cool stuff for TJOC this year. We are going to try to do the bulk of the Diagnostic O written test before camp starts this year by pushing the test out onto the web. I’m currently building all the infrastructure for that right now. It’s taking a while due to the fact that we have such a diverse set of question types. Once we get past the rush to use it for camp this year, we plan to add some tests to the pool for instructors or students to practice with. The plan also includes getting a few real study/training resources avilable on the TJOC website.

My car turned a year old about three weeks ago and I did my first real damage to it at about that point. It’s not really bad or even noticible if you don’t know what you are looking for, but I backed into a pole and scratched the bumper a little as well as indenting it ever so slightly in one spot. Like I said, not bad, but still rather annoying since I’ve really tried to be careful.

Well, I need to run for now. If anyone can think of some area I skipped (other than work for now) that you’d like to hear about or hear more on something I did hit on, just leave me a note here or drop me an email.

I have something more substantial coming down the pipe as far as entries are concerned, but I thought I’d share this while I was thinking about it. During Thanksgiving my father and I redid the way that my FT-8800R (thanks dad!) is mounted in the car, along with cable routing. I took some pictures throughout the process and have the posted on Flickr! with a bunch of tags like ft8800r, install, radio … here’s a quick link that should grab them (and maybe a few others, who knows). See if you can spot where we had a problem that stumped us for an hour or so.

Anyone listening? Hello?

If you are, and you know a nice way to create a local Ubuntu mirror via rsync, drop me a note here or via email. I’m trying to set one up here at LeTourneau and just haven’t found anything useful (the mirror server is running Fedora Core 5 right now). Also, advice on what to mirror for Ubuntu would be nice, I’m not sure what they are called in Ubuntu, but stuff like universe, mutiverse, etc.

http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2006/09/25/trickle_theory.html

If you are a Linux user at LeTourneau University, and happen to use Fedora Core 5 or Gentoo Linux, you need to check out our new shiny local mirror. Once I get my hands on some more disk space, I’ll be able to support Debian and Ubuntu so do not despair if your favorite distro isn’t on the current supported distro list.

I’m back from TJOC 2006 and I’m armed with a whole set of cool ideas and plans for TJOC 2007 and other nifty things. I’ll post some details and thoughts after I get some sleep. Good night!

Well, I’m leaving first thing tomorrow morning for the Texas Junior Orienteering Camp. I can’t ever seem to remember how many years we’ve been doing this (and I’ve been to every one), but I think it is somewhere in the range of 7 or 8 years. These days I just provide technical support, and a little training help, but mostly I’m there for the tech. If anyone needs to reach me while I’m gone, which will be until June 3rd, you can call my cell phone, or try sending me an email. I should be checking it a few times while I’m gone (mostly due to work needs), so that might actually work for once.