Another Word for Nerd

Got all the books together that I’ve bought over the past few weeks… It should take me at least a week to get through everything, you think?

Recommendations for any other titles are greatly appreciated.

I finally sent emails off to three Lodges here in Houston today asking for more information. I look forward to their responses.

The teaser trailer for the movie adaptation of Alan Moore’s Watchmen graphic novel is up for viewing.

I first read Watchmen about ten years ago, and am and glad that the director is sticking EXACTLY to the graphic novel. This was long considered as one work that could never properly translate to the big screen, but it appears to have been pulled off.

Playing around with VMWare Fusion on the Mac tonight.

Running Windows XP, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD all at the same time, and I still have more than 600M of RAM free.

The Open Genera LISP development environment by Symbolics. It’s Brad Parker’s x86-64 port, running in a 64-bit Ubuntu 7.10 VM under VMWare Fusion on my Mac Mini.

For instructions on how to get it running, see here, here, or here.

I still pine after a real Symbolics Lisp Machine. Unfortunately, I can’t justify $1500 for a MacIvory board, an old 68K Mac to run it in, and the Symbolics keyboard with ADB adapter.

I recently got my $40 digital TV transition coupons, and found that the local H.E.B. grocery chain was selling a digital-to-analog TV “converter” (it’s a tuner with RF and AV output) for $40 + tax.

A few days later, I came home with a pair of the converters for a grand total of $6.60. On my way home, I stopped by Electronic Parts Outlet and picked up a couple pairs of “rabbit ears” antennas and a matching adapter (spade lugs to F-Male).

Tonight I unpacked it all to try things out. I’d first thought about running the AV output into a box I have that takes composite video and gives VGA out, but that would leave me with no audio.

Digging through my junk box, I found a little 3.5″ LCD display that takes AV in and has a speaker. Bingo!

I present the Ten Dollar Digital TV:

Philco TB100HH9 Converter Box: $3.30
Antenna and adapter: $6.70
Junky LCD Display: Free

I ended up just breaking down and doing it myself.

Here’s the 8926A (Omega-style bezel) with the new green bezel insert:

I’ll probably swap out the black bezel insert on the 8926C with a better black one this weekend.

I have the manuals and serial cable pinouts for nSTOR CR8e RAID arrays up for download:

http://www.mrbill.net/nstor

I managed to get these out of nSTOR (or whoever owned them at the time) four years ago when I was trying to reconfigure a unit but did not have the manual or console cable.

Someone emailed me to say that they’d found them useful, but only found them because I had mentioned the URL in a mailing list post from 2006. This should help anyone trying to keep their arrays running.

Added two handgrip rails, a vertical foregrip, a Hogue rubberized pistol grip, and a BlueForceGear Victory-series two-point tactical sling.

I’m ready for the paper target zombie hordes!

Just finished a data migration project at work that took up a lot of weekend and evening hours, and this is the first weekend I’ve really had “to myself” in the past two and a half weeks.

I’ve been reading a lot, and even picked up MORE Mack Bolan books at my new favorite used book store here in Houston, Quarter Price Books. Check them out if you’re tired of Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Half Price Books and just want the fun of browsing through stacks and stacks of stuff that isn’t remainders and unsuccessful titles.

The second box of books arrived this past Monday.