Another Word for Nerd

Surely someone put this up as a joke..

First, I found myself listening to Kelly Clarkson.

Now, I’m enjoying this.

The only way I can explain it is that I must be ill.

My GPS arrived on Thursday, but I never got around to going wardriving in my neighborhood. There are still a few bugs to work out in regards to getting my GPS (a Deluo WAAS model with USB interface cable) talking to iStumbler properly. Perhaps this coming weekend; that gives me time to completely wipe and reload OSX 10.4 onto my iBook.

I did get the Google Maps hack done, and it’s ready and waiting for data!

We got another letter from the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade a few days ago. I opened it up, and it’s their monthly newsletter and a plea for donations. “In our 51st Year!”… I scanned the newsletter into a PDF – then discovered that they have a website, with PDF versions of the newsletter already available. They even have past newsletters back to 1954!.

Someone needs to let these people know that the Cold War is over, and that we won.

Got the new Dell system all setup and updated with Fedora Core 4. Today its new video card arrived, a Radeon 9250 PCI (128M) that was a “thank you” gift from a friend for setting up the website for his upcoming wedding.

After 1.5 hours of fighting to get the ATI card working, I’ve come to the conclusion that ATI’s Linux support still sucks as bad as it did two years ago when I had troubles getting FireGL 4 cards working under RHEL 2.1. I finally got things working properly with the Xorg drivers (ATI’s latest drivers won’t compile under the 2.6.12 kernel), but it should *not* have taken me an hour and a half to do so.

Next time I’ll ask for an nVidia card, as I’ve never had one take more than five minutes to setup with their binary driver package and installer.

I’ll have to wait a few months for a Sun-branded Opteron, but my Dell SC420 arrived today. Celeron 325J (2.53Ghz), 512M RAM, 160G SATA hard drive, CD-ROM, 10/100 ethernet, etc, for $265 shipped! I’m adding a DVD-ROM drive that I’ve already got here. Betatesting a Web service for an Austin startup earned me $78 in Amazon gift certificates, so that just ordered another 512M of RAM that will bring the box up to a gig of memory.

Sun finally put up details about their “Free Ultra 20 with a three-year service/support contract at $29.95/month” offer.

It’s not actually $29.95/month. It’s “three yearly installments of $359.40″.

Since I don’t have $359.40 free right now to blow on something like this (I *did* have $29.95), it will have to wait. 8-(