Daily Doings at the Line of Death Bar & Grill

After being unable to use the modem and network cards with my "new" laptop (a Dell Latitude CPx), I thought I wouldn't be able to successfully run Linux on a notebook or laptop computer. (To recap the problems I was having, I couldn't connect to the internet using either a PCMCIA modem card or wireless network card.)

This past weekend, during some housecleaning, I found the copy of Windows XP Professional I bought last year. (This was bought with a deep student discount, as I was taking a class at Sinclair at the time. I refuse to pay full price for average software for the average user.) Tonight, I installed it and it appears to be working fine. And as evidenced by this post, I can connect with my modem card.

In the next few days, I will be installing some more hardware and software, getting the latest patches, and migrating software and files from the old laptop ("tardis Mk II", a Dell Latitude XPi CD). I intend to install OpenOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird on the new laptop ("tardis Mk III", the Dell Latitude CPx J).

I'm not completely giving up on Linux, though. My last employer scrapped a Gateway 4000-E desktop because the hard drive went bad. So I put dibs on it, took it home, put in a new hard drive, and installed Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). It appears to work great. I still need to install the network and video drivers. Maybe I can install MySQL and Samba on there.

To the Linux geeks out there, thank you for all the help you've given me over the last couple of months.

Shout-outs: Happy birthday uk_kay_kay!

I often hear people say "...It pisses me off...." when referring to something that's bothering them. The way I see it, it's not the object or stimulus that's *causing* the upset, it's the person's *reaction* to the stimulus. I know I have the choice to let something (or someone) bother me, or to not let that something (or someone) bother me. Even it's a split-second kneejerk reaction, it's still a choice.

Friday night, John (one of my New Warrior brothers) and I drove out to the Red Bird Center to do some much-needed cleanup on Saturday. Shianne was gracious enough to let us spend Friday night in one of the cabins. Despite the rainstorm that night, we woke up bright and early. I had a breakfast of coffee, hard boiled eggs, and a bagel.

The first task was to scrub the bathhouses. John took the upper one (near cabins 1-5); I took the lower one (near cabins 6-10). The sinks, toilets, shower stalls, and floors were scrubbed. (I didn't have glass cleaner, otherwise, the windows would have been done as well.) The next task I worked on was to inventory the tool shed. The next task after that was to mop up the water that had leaked into the basement of the lodge. I used a floor squeegee to push a lot of the water toward the drain, and whatever didn't get pushed got picked up by the Shop-Vac. We then broke for lunch.

After lunch, I then worked on sorting the tool area inside the lodge, pulling out all the tools and sorting them by either type of tool (hammer, wrench, saw) or function (carpentry, plumbing, electrical). After that was done, I washed one of the serving carts in the kitchen, which had accumulated a lot of dust. I then helped move furniture in the lodge so that someone else could sweep and mop the floor. The last task of the day was assembling a healing lodge (commonly called a "sweat lodge") from saplings. We had to bend and arch the saplings and tie them down.

There were about a dozen of us working that day. We got a lot of the requested tasks done. After a small dinner, John and I drove back to Dayton.

In the past couple of weeks, I've been very lax in wishing my LJ-friends happy birthdays. So, without further ado, here's who I missed. Happy belated birthday to catsleftpaw (5/17), filker0 (5/22), billroper (5/23), thatcrazycajun (5/26), doeadear (5/28). And an on-time happy birthday to wulff!

I won't be attending Marcon this year. There are a number of reasons.

1) Going to cons just costs too much these days, between gas, convention registration, and hotel fees.
2) I have to work on Saturday. (We have a deadline of next Friday.)
3) I'll be spending time with M on Sunday.
4) I've been feeling ambivalent about Marcon the past few years -- too big, the same old things every year.
5) I've had a chronic feeling of estrangement toward or by fandom.

I spent part of yesterday afternoon making backup copies of my data. This morning, I had a copy of Windows XP with Service Pack 1 that I installed on my system. Service Pack 2 was on a separate disk, and when I went to Windows update, discovered that Service Pack 3 had been released. I had to find and use the drivers CD that came with my system. I didn't install everything I had under Vista, but I think I have enough for me to be able to move forward for the next couple of weeks. That is, once I get the built-in Tomcat server configured.

Ah well. This beats whining about all those "out of heap space" errors I was getting, and not being productive.

Does any of this make sense to anyone out there?

I can't get any work done today.

For the past several weeks, I've been getting "out of heap space" errors when I try to run code through the debugger. This is despite me having 3 Gb of memory on my machine.

The Eclipse startup icon on my desktop has the following command:
C:\eclipse\eclipse\eclipse.exe -vmargs -Xms512M -Xmx768M -XX:PermSize=256M -XX:MaxPermSize=512M

Everything I’ve seen on the Web about this suggests I boost up the parameters. I think I’ve boosted them as high as I can go. (I tried 1024M and the virtual machine wouldn’t start.) I even tried running MyEclipse 6.0.1, but I'm still getting the out of heap space errors.

Another big factor is that I'm the only one in the office running Vista and IE 7, because the machine came with it pre-installed. Everyone else is running XP, and not having problems.

I therefore deem Vista not suitable for Java software development with Eclipse.

Every day, around 3pm to 4pm, I get hungry. It's about 3-4 hours after lunch, and it's not quite dinner yet. But dammit, I wanna eat something.

Does this happen to other people? If so, what do you do to combat it? Or do you give in?

Somehow, the block on livejournal.com at work got lifted.

That doesn't mean I'll be posting very much from here, though.

I spent the morning sleeping in, with Marcus (my big orange cat) laying next to me in bed. I'm his "cuddle buddy".

I got up around noon, showered, got a haircut, dropped off the rent for my storage unit, had breakfast at Bob Evans, and went to work for a few hours in an attempt to make up for some lost time this week. While I was at work, I checked email and LJ, as I typically do. Lo and behold, the firewall at work now blocks any traffic from livejournal.com. Damn.

After work, I went home, fried up some stew meat and microwaved some Tater Tots. That was tonight's dinner.