Language
Posted on August 28, 2007
I should make this quick because I have a five page paper due tomorrow in Second Language Acquisition, which I haven’t started on yet. (o_0)
Had the first class in Intro to French this evening. Pretty interesting. We went through some basic phrases, numbers, the alphabet, and touched on the topic of gender in nouns and adjectives. It seems that if a word is spelled so the last letter is a consonant, it it pronounced with a vowel sound at the end. If a word is spelled with a vowel at the end, it is pronounced with a consonant ending. The rule apparently doesn’t cover everything, but I guess it covers masculine and feminine nouns and adjectives.
The paper due tomorrow is pretty much a five page report on why I am interested in Second Language Acquisition. The assignment sheet seems very… it reads like the instructions for a “hamburger essay” in Elementary Composition. Yet the instructor also wants a compelling narrative. It seems a bit contradictory in the instructions, but maybe that’s just me.
Upgrades
Posted on August 24, 2007
Upgrading my PC didn’t work out so well. I kept having an error with x11-common, but I think it’s fixed because the PC is updating beyond what it had done over the past few days. In the meantime, I’m writing this from my laptop. I want to get the PC going so I can watch a movie on the widescreen. :-)
The server for work came in today. I was hoping it would be in around 10:00 or so, but it didn’t get delivered until almost 2:00, and I had to leave at 3:30 because of overtime. Overtime requires prior approval, and this wasn’t an emergency. It’s a Dell PowerEdge 2950 rack-mount server with a 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon Quad-core CPU, 4 GB of RAM, 3 SCSI hard drives of 146 GB each arranged in a RAID array, and two power supplies. The power supplies and hard drives are hot-swappable meaning the can be removed and replaced while the computer is running. It’s running Windows Server 2003 R2. I couldn’t help but wonder how fast it would do some of my Blender ray-traced models ;-) Since it came in late in the day, I didn’t get a chance to get it fully up-and-running the way it should be. I installed the updates and the anti-virus and got it running on the net, but that was about it. In addition to the two CPU’s there are four powerful fans inside the case. Turning it on, it seemed to roar to life, almost literally. The fans almost drowned out the sound of the air conditioner in my office, which isn’t the quietest thing in the world.
Since my PC was conked out and I didn’t want to bother with it until the weekend, I decided to read up a bit on Windows Server 2003. A week or so ago I bought a book called Windows Server 2003 Inside Out from Microsoft Press, which is a very thick tome that I thought might do me some good. I’ve mainly been reading about preparing and installing Win 2k3, which I probably could have skipped, but it did give me some insights into planning an IT infrastructure. One of the big things I will be concentrating on is backups and recovery management. Even though the server has some redundancy built in, such as RAID and dual power supplies, I don’t like the idea of relying on one computer to hold all that information. If the building got hit by a tornado, there would be no way to recover the data. Backing up the information to a computer at another site alleviates this potential problem. A couple of other LSP’s I know make tape backups of their servers every week and take the tapes off site. I figured losing a week’s worth of data would be difficult, but accpetable in certain circumstances. However, I also realized I could setup a PC with extra hard drives to act as a backup server, and I could put the PC in another location off-campus. Doing it this way, I figured I could hack together a script to make backups daily. However, Win 2k3 has a program called Volume Shadow Copy which does this and more. It takes “snapshots: of the server at set times. If something happens and data it lost, it can be recovered from a previous snapshot, even one that was taken weeks ago. It works a bit like System Restore. Anyway, I will be working on that in the near future.
In other news, I had my first class this week for “Second Language Acquisition,” and I already have a five page paper due by next week. I guess grad students do work harder.
Karma 2
Posted on August 21, 2007
Since my monitor went out yesterday, I decided to buy a new one today. I was planning on waiting until I got the laptop for/from work, but I found out it won’t be delivered until mid-September. In fact, the new server will be in before the laptop will. On the upside, the 1 GB USB stick came in today, so that’s something.
I went to Staples which is on the way home from work and looked at what they had to offer. I decided I wanted a widescreen, and since the monitors are getting so cheap now, I decided I would get a 19″ widescreen, as opposed to the 17″ normal screen it was replacing. I got one by HP, which looked good in the store. It’s very bright. In the store, all of the monitors were run from one PC for comparison’s sake. Quite a few of them looked pretty dim, so I fgured they must have been on display for awhile. However, it’s kind of hard to judge that, because they may have had dim screens to begin with. I went with the HP because it is a brand name, it had a bright screen, it was the right size and the right price.
When I got it home, I unplugged the old monitor and plugged in the new one and it seems to work nicely. I had to adjust the screen resolution because it is a widescreen. My old monitor had 1280×1024 resolution, while the new one has 1440×900 resolution. There are a few downsides, though.
It takes a little adjusting to get used to the shorter and wider screen. What is added in one direction seems to be lost in another direction. Also, the monitor has poor “smoothing” or anti-aliasing. I suspect this is a matter of the Nvidia driver, but I am not sure. I downloaded a new video driver from Nvidia, but couldn’t get it to install, because they don’t want X to be running while it is getting installed, and everytime I shut down X, Ubuntu starts it up again. Ubuntu decides something is wrong and attempts to recover. I’ll have to figure out how to fix that. I’m upgrading Ubuntu in the hopes that the driver gets updated and/or the smoothing gets fixed.
Another quirk is that the screen seems to loose 50 pixels at the top or the bottom, so I can have a status bar in the bottom of my browser, or I can have the menu bar at the top of the screen, but I can’t have both. I tried messing around with the monitor’s setting via the OSD (On Screen Display), but that didn’t work. It allows the user to squish the screen horizontally, but not vertically. I can move the screen side-to-side and up-and-down, but I cannot squeeze the display so it’s all on the screen.
Only another two hours for the system to finish upgrading itself via the net.
Karma
Posted on August 20, 2007
Perhaps it was karma.
This weekend, I intended on doing laundry, but the few times I checked the machines in my building were being used, and I didn’t go back and check on them very often. So today, I went to work and on my way back I got caught in the rain. The clothes I was wearing were thoroughly drenched, and I don’t know if I have any clean clothes left.
To make things worse, when I got home and strted my computer, the monitor didn’t come on. I did bring my laptop home from work, which is how I’m typing this. I hooked the monitor up to the laptop and it didn’t work, so I am fairly certain the storms we had today got the better of my monitor, despite it being plugged into a surge protector.
I got a raise at work and had been planning on upgrading my PC, but I planned on keeping the same monitor. I guess the PC will have to wait until I get a new monitor. There are some cheap ones at Staples. There are also some nice, inexpensive laptops at Staples, also. Pricewise, getting a new case, motherboard, CPU, memory, and monitor would be roughly the same as getting a new laptop… at least based on the prices I’ve seen. for the moment, I still have my nice old P3 IBM laptop. I will also be getting a brand-new laptop from work soon, but it will be running Vista, and I plan to use it almost exclusively for work.
Hot and cold
Posted on August 8, 2007
Normally, I like my apartment around 68 – 70 degrees. At night when I go to bed, I drop the thermostat down to about 68 because I sleep better when the place is cool. When I go to work, I turn off the AC to save some money and energy. Most of the Midwest has been going through a heatwave lately and temps in Indy have been in the mid to high 90′s, but with the humidity it feels hotter. Since the AC is turned off when I’m at work, it’s natural that the place gets warmer. I don’t know if it’s because of the heat, but I know it’s bad out when I enter my apartment and feel cooled off by an apartment that’s about 78 degrees.
Since I don’t have a car, I’m kind of ambivalent about the weather. I take it as it is. Reading weather.com helps me prepare myself mentally for what to expect. Coming home today was kind of nice because it rained for a while. If you are in a high heat/high humidity situation, a nice rain can feel refreshing.
On the other hand, I’m thinking about starting to ride a bike to work. I’ve actually got two bicycles that I haven’t ridden for a year or two. Indy isn’t a very bicycle friendly city. Also, both bikes need tune-ups and there’s the question of where to lock up the bike at work. The former I can probably deal with for a while and I think I’ve figured out the latter. The tough part will be when it rains or snows, but I can deal with that too. By bicycling, I will spend less time out in the weather, whatever it is. These days, spending less time in the heat sounds like a great idea.
