I've got my car back. I've got my car back. I've got my car back.
She's all shiny and clean and they even vacuumed the interior. I've got to replace the bulb in the trunk which I took out cause the trunk wouldn't close and I didn't want the battery to die on me. But I left the bulb in the trunk, like a fool, and now it's lost, someplace in the trunk I assume... I also have to put the sub back in and clean up a bit in the trunk from junk I left in there.
Vrroooom.
Just called the bodyshop that has my car. They said late today. So I may have to ride the bus to fetch my car later on today unless I can convince Mr. Worth to take me after they do give me a call later on today...
I'm ready to have my car back....
No car today. The person manning the front desk yesterday apprently didn't know what she was talking about. I hope the person today had an idea of what she was talking about. If not I will just be calling each day until it is ready.
I get my car back tomorrow.
My co-worker returns on the 9th. He will be taking some extra time on off to spend with his new baby.
I ordered a couple CDs on Amazon last week. They apprently are not expected to arrive until late April or early May. So I may have to order a couple more to hold my self over...
My IP address changed sometime last night. Which nearly left me with out services that I've grown accustomed to using durring the day. Thankfully I've got more than one place to get most of these services.
I also implemented a fix on all the servers that should prevent the problem I had today from being a problem later on...
I may start working on another project idea I've had for a while soon. Maybe not. I really should be saving money rather than spending on random spurts of geeky and/or creative endeavors.
No word on the car yet. I'm gonna call tomorrow. I hope to have it back soon.
Man I walked a lot yesterday. The Gmaps Pedometer about 7.5 miles. I'm feeling ok today not sore or anything. But when I finally got home for the day yesterday my legs felt dead and heavy.
I took a few of pictures that I hope to put up later today after sorting through.
I miss my car.
It is weekend now. I have no car. I have no plans for the weekend. I may go out and take some pictures in the area as I can't go too far.... I could take the bus, but I'm not going to be taking it far. I was on it for a bit yesterday and that should hold me over for a few months...
Side note: People who are mentaly unable to care for them selfs have cellphones...I was nearly shocked when I saw 3 of 4 mentaly handicapped people on the bus with cellphones... Why I'm not sure. I'm sure just my mention of it is insensitive. But if one stops and thinks about the situation for a moment it isn't so bad or strange...
So my computer used to have this problem where I'd try to turn it on and it would come on when it damn well wanted to. Today that problem seems to have fixed it self which is nice.
Got trained on a new system they rolled out at work today. It seems pretty good.
The guy training it dove me nuts. I'd worked along side him at a previous job and even then I wasn't a huge fan of him. But as a trainer he is extra annoying. He said "right?" at the end of many many sentences and added all sorts of places it didn't need to be. At one point I started to tally it up, keep in mind this is only when he used it at the end of a sentence not when he was taking a question or something. The tally got to 28 in about 10 minutes. By the end of class it was close to 60. I'm sure I missed a few and I didn't start to tally until just over an hour into the class. I was some what sad when they didn't ask us for feedback on the class or training...
I need to get out futher to like an actuall park or some such and take photos sometime soon...
Fixed the auido yesterday... Dropped my car off too...
I miss my car...
gonna be flying solo at work for the next couple weeks, Damon's baby arrived.
I broke sound somehow yesterday. So no more music playback. I had to leave before I could get it going again yesterday but I'm hoping to get it working today after work. If not I may just reinstall the whole deal and make some improvements along the way as I realized my partitioning scheme leaves something to be desired. ..
Got jUploadr uploading photos to flickr.
Bibble Pro (still in trial mode) is processing my raw images. As we can see on this post.
I'm so far unable to get Fedora Core to do the 3d accelerated desktop stuff that it is supposed to be able to do even after installing the drivers for it. Not a huge deal but think it could help desktop performance some.
I'm not sure if I can play DVDs or not just yet. Lets check... Nope...
Also the secondary monitor doesn't leave text mode and just flashes there and is generally pretty ugly. I'll get on that in a bit.
I also have to find/install a suitable email application. I'm thinking Thunderbird will do and it may already be installed.
My desktop box now dual boots Fedora Core 6 and Xp. I'm in the process of updating fedora and installing aps to make it usable as my everyday OS. Stuff like mp3 playback, songbird for ipod management, firefox 2.0, and maybe getting a flickr uploader to work. Then after those things I will start to worry about the photo processing video playback...
I'm pretty happy with it. I'm hoping to like it more as time goes on.
More photos of it here.
Pixel looks really soild. Works pretty well too. While it can read raw images from my camera with no problem it doesn't prompt or have a place to configure all the parameters of the raw shot like Photoshop or Bibble. I may purchase bibble pro.
Gas costs a lot right now. I'm thinking the tank of gas i just bought is gonna last me longer than usual. Mainly because on monday I'm taking my car in to be fixed and that may take a couple weeks....
I'm trying yet another photo app on linux today. This one is called pixel. it is supposed to rival photoshop. We shall see. The reason for all the testing of photo apps on linux is primarily the desire to move to linux on all of or most of my computers. Right now I've got two that are on windows and a few others that are servers that are on some flavor of linux. I think I can make it work. I can always run a XP machine in a virtual machine if I find my self desperate for windows, or I could setup dual boot.
Anyways the photo application testing... ya I'd like to make it fairly painless for my self by testing things out before I jump in head first and find my self disapointed because I can't work with my raw images. I've got a few other concerns as well but right now my primary is imaging.
Played with lightzone some. I need to play with it some more and maybe do some reading about it. It's no where near as institutive as bibble or photoshop or even the tools that come with the camera. The LightZone is free for Linux but other platforms it is $250 or $150 so I know it is of value. I just have to figure out how to do what I need/want to do with it.
Installing Fedora Core 6 to a test machine right now to try that lightzone thing out. I know I should try ubuntu but it doesn't seem to handle the built in compact flash reader quite right. Plus it would require putting a CD drive in and then a CD in the drive. Which is too much work as I've got Fedora Core 4-6 on Network install Plus CentOS and a recovery distribution as well.
Oh ya and I did some reorg of my flickr stuff so now I have two collections.
I need to download and try LightZone.
I also need to go through all my flickr photos and reorganizing those maybe removing some stuff. Removing fluff and just bad photos. At the very least some reorganization. Also flickr added Collections. Which is part of the reason for the wanting to reorganize things a bit.
I'm just staring at the lamp. I could call it done. But I'm not going to. I've got two smaller LEDs to find a good place to put and attach. This is proving harder than I previously thought it would be as they are quite a bit dimmer than I thought they would be. Well compared to the primary light which is really quite intense. Maybe I'll just work a program that fades the primary enough to see the two smaller ones or something, once I find a good place for them...
So the insurance people didn't have the number for the guy who hit me... The insurance company of the guy who hit me didn't have his number. So yesterday, I gave them the number I got from him after the incident. Today the check is on the way to the body shop...
I'm just baffled that they didn't have the information to contact their own client/customer...
So I was nearly killed getting on to I5 again. This on ramp is stupid. It's too short many car's and trucks simply don't get up to speed while getting on to I5 I've merged on to I5 behind vehicles going 30Mph in a 60Mph zone. Often it's a Pepsi truck. But today it was some dumbass in a Ford Thunderbird License plate ZPD 503 (I think that was it) slammed on the brakes mid way up the on ramp. Which unless traffic is stopped is totally unsafe and unacceptable. I slammed on my breaks and managed to not smash into this guy, who had been going under the speed limit on the way to the on ramp and kept going under the speed limit on I5.
I need to find route to get to work...
I thought today was Sunday and nearly didn't get out of bed. I also slept poorly last night. I blame the time change.
Chris called me last week and was asking if I would be interested in another dive class with him sometime in April. He rattled a couple classes off and I expressed interest in the night/low visibility course. But I'm going to need another $150 (approx) of gear and then gear rental/tank fills/etc for the class and another $99 for the class and another as of yet unknown sum of money for the Hotel/gear rental/fills in Hoodsport for the open water after the class...
Had some crazy messed up dream about a monster that took females and used them for energy somehow. It was looking for a queen. It was weird freaky shit. It was almost a movie style dream. Damn crazy. I think it was beat by electrocuting it with an electric blanket.
I had another weird one earlier in the week where I was at what was someone's cabin. But it was more of a mansion. I wondered the place counting the number of ovens/stoves. I stopped counting after 7. I don't recall much of a plot or anything else other than large home type place with lots of rooms some in various states of completion and disrepair and lots of stoves/ovens...
I want my car fixed. I get a little depressed each time i see the back of it.
I added a detachable rs232 connector to the control board for the lamp. Prior to this the serial cable was affixed to the control board by a screw down terminal which meant getting a small screw driver out to attach or detach the serial cable to get it to interface with the PC to reprogram it. So I took care of that. I also got some foamy tape to help keep the stuff on the inside of the lamp in place once it's finished.
I've still got some details to work out. Things like running the wires and placement/securing of the two smaller LEDs that will be showing up next week. I'm debating on a power switch of some sort, which may require tools that I don't have...
Just ordered the the two low powered LEDs for my super lamp. So I'm thinking it will be done or nearing done next week sometime. Shouldn't take much more than running some wires and tidying up the installation of the lamp enhancing components.
Then it's a matter of finding a place to put the lamp. That will allow it to be shown off but not in the way. Or a buyer... But I doubt many of my friends would pay the price I would ask.
Still no action on the Ben was rearended by a big white pickup truck saga...
However some goodies arrived for me today. A lamp that I've already started modifications on. The Light bulb and wires have been replaced with a high brightness LED and I plan to later add two more lower brighness LEDs. So far it's good. Remind me and I'll post photos of it.
The adjuster/appraiser guy came and looked at my car today. So thats yet another step out of the way but more waiting to do. Hopefully I'll have my car in the shop by the end of the week. As long as the dude isn't a total knob and deciding its totaled.
So that mysql upgrade nobody cared about earlier this week. Well shits all busted now. So I'm rebuilding that server... Pain in my ass. But it shouldn't be too painful as I've a decent system setup for installing setup. I may even configure a kickstart for this box.
9:10pm Update:New OS loaded and configured. Configuration files reconfigured packages installed, shit working.
Just as well its all good too as I was running an old version of Fedora which I'm pretty sure wasn't going to be getting a DST update.
I've still got some nonessential packages to install and configure. Like the UPS monitoring software and mrtg to graph my bandwidth usage.
Less than 2 hours isn't too bad if you ask me.
On my way home yesterday I was rear ended. I'm fine. While it doesn't look like it at 1st glance it's a little more than $3,600 in damages to my car. The damage-r was 92 Chevy pickup, whose bumper managed to entirely miss my bumper. Why put bumpers on trucks/SUVs at all if they aren't going to bump the bumpers of regular automobiles?
My trunk won't close.
Worst case is I get new car...
While I'm not on facebook or myspace things like this do make me want to minimize my web presence. Maybe pull the blog(s). Delete accounts or change info on and or cancel various accounts on public sites. For the most part I This would be pretty easy for a few sites it wouldn't necessarily make information by interested partys unavailable.
Stephanie is back from the Korea/Air Force. I'm gonna go visit her in Salem today after work. Should be good to catch up. It's been a couple years since I last saw her and even longer for some other people who I'm sure are anxious to see her, like Mike.