Missed a Day

Whoops! I missed a day. This post is therefore being posted retroactively.

Today (Yesterday, when I'm writing this) has been (was) very "full." I got up at about 10:30 and prepared to head out to the NAU Bookstore to pick up the T-Shirt I ordered back in March for Megan. (Oops, a bit of a delay in the delivery, but I can't say I mind too terribly much.) I also happen to have received the video card for flatdell and the hundred-stack of Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs yesterday, which was a nice bonus. I did also actually go shooting with the D300 and everything. There's even some nice images I think, but I haven't really had a chance to go through them yet.

Flatdell's new video card installed perfectly. I had to bring the machine and the card into the office to get it all set up, because I lack my own tools right now, but once Mel and I got the brackets rearranged, the card installed great and the drivers installed pretty easily.

Not too terribly much progress was made on the ThinkPad/OPENSTEP project. I burned the CD and the OPENSTEP boot discs seem to realize that the CD is there, but the machine seems still unable to read the disc -- that or I burned it wrong. I may try another (more conventional) CD to see if the machine is physically capable of reading the Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs, and I'm also getting a different CD image to try.

I also lacked progress on Meaghan's laptop, mainly because I had a bunch of other things going on. I'll work on that more today or tomorrow.

Progress on Projects

Today I finally went to my PO Box at NAU's Central Campus post office location, underneath the NAU Bookstore. It was after today's Freshman Orientation information session, Meaghan and I stopped in to check the prices of some books and for me to pick up a package I've been waiting for.

So tonight's project involves finally getting Meaghan's little old PII Dell Latitude CPi working. I've already got the new hard disc installed, and I had Meaghan drop it off at my room. I just need to put Windows 98 or Windows NT4 Workstation on it here. I'm going for NT4 personally, since the goal is something that'll be fast and reliable. I just need to find out where I put imager, and we'll be good. Imager does include a blank Windows 2000 Pro image, so I may install that purely for the fact that it's easily available.

Tomorrow morning I'm going to go to Postal Services again to pick up the new graphics card for flatDell, along with my hundred-stack of Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs. Part one of that project is to get flatDell upgraded with the graphics card, and get some games installed onto it, at which point I'm going to remove the bootcamp partition from my iMac.

After that, the next project is to install OpenSTEP 4.2 on the ThinkPad 760ED. I've already got the two install floppies made and they  both work well, now it's just a matter of burning the install CD. With luck, and the Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs, it'll all work properly, and I'll have OpenSTEP running on real hardware.

New Toys for Summer

Well, my summer projects are all mostly here. First and foremost is the Sun Ultra60 workstation, which I'm taking to work tonight. This one is just to have a Sun workstation, and because I want to host ULW locally again, on something that's ultra.

The other big part of today's shipment is some ThinkPad 760-series stuff. Unfortunately their epic amounts of memory aren't compatible with my 760CD, but I think that between the 760ED and 760EL, I can get at least one more very workable 700-series ThinkPad. My intent is to combine their parts to make one pretty ThinkPad, and install OPENSTEP 4.2 on the hard disc drive it's got. Maybe I can even find an OPENSTEP-compatible pcmcia ethernet adapter.

And on the topic of PCMCIA adapters, I got the Sony Ericsson GC83 GSM/GPRS/EDGE Network Wireless Internet PC Card, with the Cingular logo on it. I've already got it installed and set up on the R61i too, so that setup is ready for summer. I'll be able to blog and post photos in Michigan. I gave it a try today, and I'm really happy with it. Once things have started loading, it's faster than dialup, but there's huge latency issues, especially since my room can't get full signal with the EDGE card. I have no doubt that under any given situation where it's the only thing available, it will be no problem at all. It's not like I intend to rock out in the dorm with the EDGE card. (on a regular basis, anyway.)