Journal 2002-09

Current entries

2002-09-30, Mon (Day 688, temperature at 07:02: 20.4°C, difference: -1.2°C): I continued finding and testing drivers for the camera and card readers in the student publications office this morning. Evaiva [sp.] vacuumed the office. It seems that in order for the office to be cleaned and the trash taken out someone needs to be in the office in the morning once in a while.

I got the 2002-09-18 and 2002-09-19 issues of The Oregonian this morning. In the afternoon and evening I worked on the Analog Failure Report. This fixing takes longer than the Webinator report since the referrers and requests are uncorrelated. I searched through the entire Phoenix site in SpeedSearch to find the locations of the bad links. This searching took about ten minutes for each query so I didn’t make much progress today.

Also, I got sidetracked reading the Atlantic Monthly in the afternoon from a reference on the Daily Jolt. The articles were about the World Trade Center, ductile security, and public key encryption. The security article stressed that it is more important to make a security system fail well than make it more resilient.

The encryption article answered many questions I had about encryption since a year ago. Essentially I now have a better idea how a public key can be openly shared but the encrypted data still remains unreadable. Mathematically, prime numbers multiplied together give a product and while computing the product is relatively easy, factoring the product is very hard. The public key is the product and the private key is the factors.

I had dinner with Jesse in Sharples soon after 17:00 and we were there until almost 19:00 talking. The Phoenix editorial board met at 21:30 and I went to the SWIL movie in Kirby at 22:00. I have seen “Flight of the Navigator” before at home but not in its entirety.

I worked some more on the Analog Failure Report after the movie and then got too tired to do anything at 02:00 so I went to bed.

2002-09-29, Sun (Day 687, temperature at 11:10: 21.6°C, difference: -2.4°C): Part of my dream contained this survival challenge on an island or in a house. There was this big black rat running around but my Mom killed it by smashing its head in.

Today I got up at 07:00 and sometime after 08:00 but I didn’t stay up until a few minutes after 11:00. I ate lunch with Anna and E.B. in Sharples. I read Swat e-mail throughout the rest of the day. I got through the greatest number of messages in the afternoon.

After eating a long dinner with Jesse and Andrew I went through the cache scan report for the Gnutella web cache. Using the 2002-09-25 data I formed a list of new URLs to add my cache to. I also added my cache to hosts that still were not in the green for number of URLs.

This cache updating took a couple of hours to complete so I didn’t get to process the web request logs until after 21:00. I found out that due to a greater proportion of requests for the GNetCache I lost the 2002W38 Trucksess.com log. I added the call to the log rotation script in the GNetCache index page so this problem shouldn’t happen again.

I may have had this missing log on my computer at one point but it was before I did the recycle backup to both USB drives. Also, to rotate logs for this week I requested the Trucksess.com front page today but this action may have inadvertently clobbered last week’s data since this week’s data is larger.

I started taking care of the Failure Report in Analog for the PHP logs, which include The Phoenix Online. I decided to consider the failures composing at least 1% of the requests in the Failure Report and the Failed Referrer Report. I only fixed the first two items in the Failure Report: fixing a masthead image link on the entire 1999-04-01 Phoenix issue and redirecting /org/phoenix/index.html to /org/phoenix/index.php. I went to bed at 02:00.

2002-09-28, Sat (Day 686, temperature at 07:05: 24.0°C, difference: +1.8°C): This morning I worked in the publications office. I found out preliminarily that disabling the “USB Mass Storage Support” extension allowed the office camera to work without hanging the Finder or bombing the startup process.

I ate lunch quickly and fixed the errors reported by Webinator on The Phoenix Online. I went to the Scott Amphitheater after 13:30 for the outdoor performance of the Asian American jazz festival. The performance was scheduled from 12:00 to 15:00. I did the laundry and read e-mail in the late afternoon. I didn’t finish until after dinner since I only had one washer and dryer to use the entire time.

I wanted to go to dinner when I finished the laundry but it got to 17:50 when I started the next part and since Sharples closes at 18:30 on weekends I really only could go now. I didn’t see many people to sit with in Sharples but I did see Anna, E.B., and Emily. There was one seat left at their table so I sat with them, next to E.B.

I continued reading Swarthmore e-mail in the evening but I got distracted by incoming thoughts. At 22:30 I went to Olde Club for the bands “Olde Club,” “The Bitter End,” and “Hokkaido Concern.” All of the music was heavy metal type. The audience there also was older and didn’t have many of the Olde Club regulars.

“The Bitter End” was the climax of the evening. A group of people started shoving themselves around creating mayhem. One person threw his cup of beer across the room and while it didn’t splatter completely on me since I got out of the way it did cover a portion of the floor. I got back at 02:00 and went to bed soon after that.

2002-09-27, Fri (Day 685, temperature at 07:00: 22.2°C, difference: -2.0°C): I dreamed Dad and I were driving south through rural western Pennsylvania outside of Pittsburgh. We walked through the Army College for Women, which was on the west side of the road.

Today I went to breakfast this morning and did work in the publications office until 10:05. I ate lunch with John and Tom. This afternoon I looked for a Ridley football schedule online. I went to an engineering lecture in Hicks Mural Room at 15:30 about dual-antenna cell phones. Mike Wengler was the speaker. The Mural Room now has two large room air-conditioners.

I ate dinner alone in the Sharples big room most of the time but Chris and Kevin joined me for the remainder. I worked on updating the Webinator search index for The Phoenix Online this evening. I found out the Refresh rewalk type option doesn’t work properly. When I ran it I didn’t receive much in the way of progress as it was working and the database maxed out at 9,999 pages. For some reason Webinator indexed everything inside the SCCS linked from The Phoenix save for user directories that had a tilde in the link. Also, the refresh rewalk option should download only new and modified pages but it downloaded files that hadn’t actually changed.

I went to the Soul Shack concert in Upper Tarble at 20:15. The concert took a while to get started and ran two hours over, ending after 00:00. These artists performed: Subtle Ground, Cee Knowledge (formerly Infectious Organisms), Natural Selection, Saigon Slim, Medicine Man, Kierstin Gray, Patrice Berry, Gabriel Tajen.

After the concert I ran Webinator again and went to bed sometime around 01:00.

2002-09-26, Thu (Day 684, temperature at 10:01: 24.2°C, difference: +1.9°C): I dreamed I was in the Dodge Spirit in South Philadelphia with Uncle George and Dad. Uncle George is starting to pull out going east (apparently this street is two-way in my dream) while across the street a tour bus is about to pull out west. The rear of the bus is almost on top of this infant. The bus starts to back up, which would crush the child.

I quickly think to tell Uncle George to keep honking the horn until the bus stops. He also pulls out but I want to get out of the car. I was sitting in the back seat on the right, closest to the bus. The bus is backing up and the rear axle passes over the child and now the child is somewhere under the bus.

I had a hard time seeing where he was at this point. I had a problem getting out of the moving car but the driver also made it more difficult as he kept changing the direction of the car so I was trying to avoid getting hit by the Spirit.

Today I fell behind schedule right away by noticing that I was now included in the cache scan report for the Gnutella Web Caching System. I went through the caches that had a number of URLs in yellow or red and added my host cache to them. This action, which benefited the network overall and my own cache, took until 12:15 to finish. I got up at 10:00.

At this point I was sufficiently behind where I didn’t have enough time to go to lunch and do reading for class. I ate a Tastykake pumpkin pie in my room, got The New York Times and The Phoenix, and went to Trotter to read.

I got a package slip that I claimed right before afternoon classes started. However, like I thought might happen it wasn’t a package but it was The Oregonian. I received two rolls of newspapers. One of them would have fit in my mailbox but the other one probably wouldn’t. They were sealed pretty well so I couldn’t tell without opening them what issues they were. This sealing though was helpful to keep the papers dry from the tropical rain today.

In poly sci I noticed that the date 2002-09-18 was on both Oregonian paper rolls and since there was a rubber band around them I thought that everything I received today was just one issue. I settled the confusion when I opened the papers in my room. The big roll was the Sunday edition, 2002-09-22 and the smaller roll was Friday, 2002-09-20. I guess the Saturday paper is still en route.

I ate dinner with Caroline and Renee. Following that I went to the publications office for Phoenix ed board at 19:00. Ben and Greg cleaned out the office fridge, thankfully. It took almost three months for the thing to get cleaned since I first noticed the mold problem. That delay shows how busy or unwilling people (including me) are to do things.

Following the meeting I did reading for philosophy and sent a response e-mail to Raff. I finished at around 22:00 and was planning to go to bed soon after 23:00. That plan changed quickly when I stopped in Jeremy’s room and talked with Kai and him. Jeremy authored under the counsel of Kai and I an e-mail to their friends about voting in the class officer elections tomorrow. Jeremy and Kai are running along with Kasia and Renee.

I didn’t return to my room until sometime around 01:00. Yet I still went to bed with the full expectation that I would get up at 07:00 and do work in the publications office. If anything, I went to bed hungry so getting up early to eat breakfast was the most pressing incentive.

2002-09-25, Wed (Day 683, temperature at 10:01: 22.3°C, difference: -0.7°C): I dreamed I was outside the old Ridley High School auditorium and I was getting a packet along with my Swat friends for the women’s studies major. I received a goody bag that contained Ridley High School graduation stuff. It contained the commencement photo taken in the auditorium that didn’t look great at all, a cafeteria menu, and a AAA safety program letter thanking me for my safety service with a plastic closeable cereal bowl.

This afternoon and evening I revised my poly sci paper due tomorrow. I left Beardsley public to go to Parrish for the first Phoenix deadline at 17:00. I get up to the publications office and I see Nathan and a bit of confusion. The doubletruck WSRN schedule and the cover were giving problems. Distiller on the server would fail to produce the PDFs giving errors about the image commands or a problem with an offending command.

The WSRN problem was fixed by sending the image at 200 dpi instead of 600 dpi. Later Nathan found that Distiller could not downsample a 1-bit image from 600 to 200 dpi with bounds greater than about 10,000 pixels wide. The cover was another story. While it didn’t look complex Distiller would fail to produce the PDF while it was distilling and gave an error about an offending command. The command referenced appeared to be a random string.

Nathan had me try distilling on one of the clients but that gave the same error. I suggested that Liz try PDFing on Itchy, which has not been reformatted yet. That didn’t work either. Nathan PDFed the cover in pieces and eventually narrowed down what images worked. The final cover had one main image on it instead of two but it had to do.

Later on Nathan found out that the second main image was corrupted but it wasn’t apparent unless the EPS was opened in Photoshop and you looked closely at the bottom of the image. A band at the bottom of the display area was this gray streak instead of the image data. In the past Photoshop has corrupted saving files but they would allow the PDF to be made. However the corruption in those cases typically was not at the end of the EPS.

I didn’t leave the office until after 20:00 since the print problems caused at least a half-hour delay and exporting the pages for online wasn’t going particularly fast. Also, a large portion of the paper was done at 17:00 so that made the first deadline take longer to process.

I quickly revised my poly sci paper from about 20:30 to 22:00 in Beardsley public. The second Phoenix deadline was met on time. Nathan found out through Internet searching that Quark files should not be opened over a network drive, not just AppleShare IP. From that finding it would imply that the Quark file-locking problem might not be fixed with Mac OS X Server.

Luke, Yavor, and I finished the online edition soon after 02:00. Even though we chatted more and didn’t work that quickly we finished not much later than last week when things moved more swiftly.

Afterwards I continued looking for the source of the transfer interrupted message in LimeWire. I noticed looking through the upload log that a host from on campus completely downloaded two files. Based on the presence of the full file size in the upload line and the host only made two incoming connections it seemed this transfer did not get interrupted.

Uploads in LimeWire starting with version 2.6 only report the size of the file portion requested and not the entire file size. As more of the file gets downloaded in 32 K chunks the size requested decreases to about 32 K if the transfer completes. Also, each reconnection after a transfer interrupted causes another incoming request to be made in the firewall log. This on-campus finding gives more weight that neither LimeWire nor my computer is causing the transfer interrupted message but the bandwidth shaper is the problem.

I planned to try Mactella before I found this case out so I continued with this test. I looked at Mactella my sophomore year when Napster was still good and while Mactella would connect and give back search results I couldn’t download anything successfully.

When I tried Mactella today the performance was even worse. I didn’t need to search for stuff but I wanted to see how uploads worked. It took a while to get connected to even one host, which was given as a known problem in the release notes. However, Mactella kept hanging my computer and unexpectedly quitting even after I gave it more memory and restarted with only the Finder and Mactella running.

2002-09-24, Tue (Day 682, temperature at 10:26: 23.0°C, difference: -4.1°C): I dreamed that the IP address at home changed. I know my dream involved more than this minor detail as the past couple days I have had vague and unpleasant dreams having in part to do with tall buildings and Portland, Ore.

I tried getting up at 07:00 today to start my poly sci paper but I wasn’t awake enough to do it. Instead I got up after 10:00 and soon went to lunch. I had a very philosophical discussion with Akira in Sharples. I turned in my revised psych project proposal, started my poly sci paper at 12:30, and then did reading for class.

I went to McCabe soon after class to get citation info from a stylebook. The book was missing 20 pages so it took a bit for a librarian to get those pages photocopied from the reserve copy so I could place them in the reference copy.

In Sharples I ate dinner with Renee, William, and Joan at first and then with Kai, Matthew and his girlfriend, Anna, and Ellie. Afterwards I wrote the draft of my poly sci paper this evening in Beardsley public. I got back to my room at around 00:00 and unwound. I tried getting a Gnutella client to work in Linux and this second attempt failed for various reasons. I tried other clients besides LimeWire that didn’t require Java but they required other things. These other things in some cases were installed but the configure scripts couldn’t find them or some other problem prevented it from installing.

2002-09-23, Mon (Day 681, temperature at 09:02: 27.1°C, difference: -0.2°C): I took a shower this morning since I had my senior portrait in the afternoon. Kai and I went to Parrish after 14:15 for our senior portraits. I was tired all day today so my session wasn’t as great as I would have liked it.

I did laundry in the afternoon, which was a good time to do it since usage of the machines was very low. At Sharples I ate dinner with Kevin, Renee, Kai, and Kasia. I went to a faculty panel on the impending Iraq invasion in the Scheuer Room at 19:00. Kevin gave me a portable recorder and headphones to record the event but the battery died about 15 minutes into the discussion.

I went to Phoenix mini ed board in the publications office at 21:30. This meeting was more productive than last week but I still had to cut out of it at 21:55. The video connection in Kirby was not working so the SWIL movie was moved to Kohlberg 116. The speakers had better base response than Kirby but the effect of the sound being around you was lost since the speakers were only in the front. The movie “Yellow Submarine” consisted of this crude Beatles animation that didn’t keep my interest that well since I fell asleep through a good part of the movie.

2002-09-22, Sun (Day 680, temperature at 07:04: 27.3°C, difference: +0.1°C): Today I got up at 07:00 but was too tired to do anything that early. I realized close to 09:00 that two hours have gone by and I felt no more awake than when I woke up. I returned to bed and slept until I felt more rested. I got up at 13:00 and tried on my dress clothes for tomorrow’s senior portrait. Upon doing so I found out that I didn’t have a dress shirt. I called home and Dad drove over a short time later so Mom could give me the shirt.

I ate lunch at Sharples in the mid-afternoon. I went to McCabe afterwards to revise my psych senior project proposal. Following that, I ate dinner quickly and then read Gnutella Forums posts. I went to Olde Club after 19:30 but things hadn’t started yet so I went back to my room to upgrade to LimeWire 2.6. I returned to Olde Club closer to 21:00 and the first act, Palomar was on the next to last song. John Vanderslice played next and then The Mendoza Line.

I got back before 00:00 and at this point installed GNetCache on Trucksess.com. This PHP script allows Gnutella clients including Gnucleus and LimeWire 2.6 and above to connect. The code wasn’t fully register_globals = off compatible so I needed to make a few edits. I went to bed after 03:00 since I wasn’t seeing much positive activity with the cache and I wanted to see what it was doing in the beginning.

2002-09-21, Sat (Day 679, temperature at 12:01: 27.2°C, difference: +1.8°C): I woke up at 12:00 not feeling too bad. I talked to John in the Tarble game room for a few minutes. He works there from 12:00 to 14:00. I finished up the second Webinator report and went to Sharples at 15:30. Dad picked me up at 16:00 so I could go home and celebrate my birthday. I returned to Swat sometime after 17:30 and went to dinner. Jesse and Tom were there so I ate with them.

In the evening I needed to do my laundry but I didn’t have a full block of time before the first showing of “Monster’s Ball” at 19:30. I laid down in my bed for a few minutes but that unknowingly turned into two hours since I fell asleep. I got up after 21:00 so I went to the second showing of the movie at 22:00 in LPAC cinema. This movie was an unfiltered version of rough southern life with capital punishment, a suicide, and a hit and run.

I planned on going to bed soon after the movie but it was hard to go right to bed from that. Also music played on the hall, which I am not used to, so I went to bed at 02:00. I felt somewhat more tired by then.

2002-09-20, Fri (Day 678, temperature at 09:44: 25.4°C, difference: +0.5°C): My phone rang before 10:00 this morning and it was a solicitation call from the Inquirer. I didn’t hang up on them but I also kept saying that I wasn’t interested. Eventually the caller just gave up and hung up.

I took a shower this morning since I wanted to be clean for the day’s activity since it is a friend’s birthday. After lunch today I went through the error report that Webinator gave last week when it indexed The Phoenix Online for searching. Most of the report consisted of broken links. I spent the rest of the afternoon on that. After 17:00 I walked with Jeremy to the train station to meet Caroline, Renee, and Norense.

Kai met us at the Market East train station in Philly. We walked around the Gallery a bit and then went to a liquor store in Society Hill to buy wine for our dinner. We ate at the Darbar Grill on Market Street. This place has menu and buffet Indian cuisine. Our group got the buffet. The food was very rich and made Caroline and Kai overly full.

The train on the way back was running behind, which pushed up against a surprise birthday party after 21:00. We go to Wharton D basement to join about 20 people waiting in the basement. There was cake, food, drinks, and later music. I stayed until the end at about 00:00. Following the party I hung out in Jeremy’s room with Kai and Mike for a bit.

Thanks to Kai I found out that my door could be locked with a key from the outside. I just needed to turn the key a full turn. When the door is locked this way only a key can unlock the door so the action of the door shutting doesn’t remove the lock.

Jeremy, Kai, Mike, and I went to Olde Club for a SOCA party, which ran until 02:00. We stayed for about an hour and then left to our rooms after then.

I continued working on fixing the errors from the Webinator report and didn’t get through them until after 04:00. I then recrawled The Phoenix Online to get the current issue in the search index. Webinator had new errors to report, which I worked on then. It seemed that it will only list up to ten references to a broken link so it may take a month of regular indexing to handle all of the errors.

I stayed up into the morning to finish fixing the second error report. I went to breakfast after 07:30 and went to bed at 09:00. However I didn’t get through the entire report.

2002-09-19, Thu (Day 677, temperature at 10:00: 24.9°C, difference: +1.2°C): I did reading for philosophy following afternoon classes. I ate dinner with Renee and went to Phoenix ed board at 19:00. I sent a message to Raff summarizing my philosophy reading and then got caught up on Gnutella forums. However I didn’t finish until 01:00 so it was unclear if I would be able to start at 07:00 tomorrow to work in the publications office.

2002-09-18, Wed (Day 676, temperature at 09:30: 23.7°C, difference: -2.2°C): The ringing phone became my wake-up call at around 09:30. I didn’t get up in time to answer it but I had voicemail. My mom left a message at 07:30. I went to class and immediately after philosophy I met Barry Schwartz about my psych senior project.

I get to Sharples sometime after 12:44. This is an awkward time to go since almost all of the seats are taken but a table you sit down at is likely to empty in a few minutes. I didn’t see Kevin and others so I sat down at a table in the middle room that I thought Robyn was sitting at. Instead Eviva was sitting at the table along with David and Miranda. David left rather quickly and Eviva and Miranda stayed for a little longer but they all eventually left like I expected.

I realized early this afternoon that Napster merchandise might be hard to get in short time since the company is bankrupt. In response I mailed a check today for two white Napster t-shirts. I plan to wear one and save the other. I spent the rest of the afternoon reading Gnutella forums. I noticed I had two Swarthmore connections in LimeWire so I took note of their fast speeds. Like on 2002-03-29 when I saw the high speeds, locally I didn’t have much drive space, which is a coincidence.

While I was doing this I still needed to read the Gnutella forums and it was getting close to 17:00. At that time I needed to go to the office for the online stuff. To make things more interesting Jesse calls me at the height of this busy period and actually wants to have a conversation with me. I get another call while on the phone with Jesse, which I hear on the voicemail afterwards. Andrew tells me that Retrospect is complaining about an internal consistency check error rather frequently. I say that I’ll be in the office at 17:00. It gets to 17:00 and I’m still doing stuff so I just had to leave from where I was.

Luke and Yavor were there for the 17:00 but I didn’t need both of them right then so I had Luke do the first round of exporting and Yavor left. The early edition was up by 19:30 and I went to my room until John and Tom got back. I went over to Pittenger and played NCAA Football 2003 on the Xbox with John and Tom for the night. Considering that I haven’t played a football game in a while I didn’t do that badly.

I head towards Parrish after 22:00 and I see the publications office is dark and I wonder if something happened. I met Yavor outside Parrish so we went up together. I enter the office and the computers are asleep and no one is there. I check the PDF folder and the issue finished almost an hour ago so I reasoned that the second deadline was met early. I checked my voicemail and Liz confirmed what I observed. Luke, Yavor, and I worked on the online edition. Our progress this evening was quite good and I finished at around 01:30, which is one of the earliest times that I have finished.

I return to my room after leaving the office. Earlier I left the Spare drive with 30 MB of free space but I came back to it having zero K available. When I was connected to my computer in the office after about 01:00 I was getting five minute long latencies. In front of my computer the AppleTalk network complained about being down and then would come back up again until I freed up space on the Spare non-startup partition. I had the same problem on 2002-09-04 with AppleTalk cutting out and network drives disconnecting only in this case the startup drive was nearly full. I went to bed today after 04:30.

2002-09-17, Tue (Day 675, temperature at 10:02: 25.9°C, difference: +1.5°C): I got to the Tarble Atrium in Trotter a few minutes after 12:00 to do reading for class. While en route I thought of an idea to make the data on a laptop more recoverable from theft. It would also reduce one of the risks I perceive with a notebook computer. When your laptop is stolen you lose any data on it that you have not backed up. A script running on the laptop makes a backup copy through synchronization to a remote computer such as the home desktop via a Wi-Fi network. If my laptop is lost or stolen I can just go home and get my data.

The recycle backup to drive A that I started at 11:00 was still in progress when I got back from class but finished before 17:00. I went to Sharples at 17:00 to finish dinner earlier so I would have a larger block of time to read Gnutella forums. However, I just kept talking with Jesse and didn’t leave until 18:30. I watched TV in his room until 20:00 since I was lazy.

I get back to my room and finish up philosophy reading and write an e-mail with my comments to Raff. I fall asleep for a half-hour and then finish the message. I read Gnutella forums posts afterwards until about 01:00. I went to bed about an hour later.

2002-09-16, Mon (Day 674, temperature at 10:01: 27.4°C, difference: +0.6°C): I didn’t have class today so the entire day was lax. This afternoon I worked on putting the extra information from the page PDFs into the 2002-04-25 Phoenix Online issue. I did this work to free up space on Spare B for Photoshop. When I finished I didn’t have my goal of 100 Megs free so I started to do another issue. I then realized the extra art I needed was burned to a CD and I would have to go to the office to get it. Instead I just got by with what space was available.

Using Photoshop I made smaller versions of the Space Imaging Manhattan images for Gnutella. I then saw LimeWire 2.6 came out of beta, which has a different version of the uploading code I believe. I’m going to wait a couple of days before I try it in case a 2.6.1 or greater is released.

I went to Phoenix ed board at 21:30 but things were pretty laid back so the meeting didn’t start until after 21:55, which is when I left to go to Martin to see the SWIL movie, “Dark City.” I met Yavor along the way and sat with him and Ken.

I was going to go to bed soon after the movie ended at 00:00 but instead I got distracted by browsing images for four hours. I was planning on getting up early tomorrow to do reading for class but now that reading period has been dramatically reduced.

2002-09-15, Sun (Day 673, temperature at 10:02: 26.8°C, difference: +1.3°C): I got up at 10:00 since I would have been too tired to get up earlier and go to the publications office. I spent most of the day trying to figure out the transfer interrupted problem with LimeWire. Most of the uploaders in LimeWire are getting continual transfer interrupted errors as they download the file in numerous attempts. With persistence the entire file can be downloaded but most give up early.

At first I thought LimeWire wasn’t getting enough processor time since dnetc takes the idle time. I set LimeWire’s priority to high in Peek-a-Boo but that didn’t seem to help reduce the number of transfer interrupted errors. This afternoon I tried LimeWire in Windows 98 on Virtual PC. It took a long time to install it since Virtual PC is slow doing new things. It also took several hours to hash the shared files. While this was going on I vacuumed the center of my room and cleaned my refrigerator.

I ate dinner with Kevin, Renee, Kent, and Jeremy. In the evening I had LimeWire open on Windows to wait for uploads. No upload requests came in after a couple of hours so I forced my IP since Virtual PC uses a 192.168.* IP. Still nothing until about 22:00. I got three requests for files but they stuck in the uploading state for an abnormally long few minutes and then went to transfer interrupted. The requests did not automatically retry and stayed at zero and one percents completed.

Then when I was sitting on my floor making sentences from word magnets on my fridge I heard my hard drive make lots of noise. I saw a file transfer go uninterrupted at about 40 KB/s. I was impressed. But that was all I saw for the next hour. Also, the requests for files still looked like push requests even though I could accept incoming connections.

I tried LimeWire in Linux and that was more of a problem. I didn’t know how to extract a .bin file and while that wasn’t a problem for the LimeWire installer since there also was a .tgz, the Java runtime environment was in .bin format. I did find a .ppc.rpm of the runtime but I couldn’t download it in FTP and Netscape tried to display the binary data. I couldn’t get a contextual menu to appear in Netscape to download to disk and since the download was so large I didn’t want to save the binary data from the browser window. It was getting late so I gave up and went back to the Mac OS.

2002-09-14, Sat (Day 672, temperature at 10:52: 25.5°C, difference: +4.3°C): I dreamed a small United Airlines plane crashed on a runway in rural western Pennsylvania. I was using some geographic terrain information from southeast of the PA 352 and US 1 interchange in Delaware County. The plane was radioing in a distress call when John, some other people, and I were on foot near the runway. We saw the plane start to ascend from takeoff at a another airport but then it returned to level off and prepared for an emergency landing at the nearby airport we were at.

The plane was able to land on the beginning of the runway but then it veered off and dropped a few feet off the runway on the left side. The airplane landed on the runway at medium speed and stopped when it fell partly off the runway. The plane didn’t roll over completely but it was tilted. The left engine cover labeled “Airbus” was fairly dirty upon landing. We were standing on the left side of the runway on an access road that went down towards the beginning of the runway. The Airbus jet didn’t explode into flames and people were getting out of the plane through all of the windows on the left side reasonably quickly. However there weren’t many emergency personnel on hand to get people out of the plane so it took extra time for the passengers to climb out themselves.

The retrospective question I have here is how come my group didn’t help. There wasn’t a fence between the runway and us. I think we thought the plane was going to blow up so we didn’t want to add to the casualties. However in this situation I would hope my group would have helped since there weren’t many rescue personnel on the scene.

The police showed up in large numbers first but it took at least five minutes for a fire engine to be on the street en route to the crash. The pilots radioed for help ten minutes before the crash happened. I was remote viewing a bunch of areas around the area to see where the emergency vehicles were. I was using geographic building information from the southwest corner of Mac Dade Blvd and Fairview Road in Woodlyn. I didn’t see any ambulances yet.

When I saw the massive police response I commented to my group that this pattern indicated that Pennsylvania didn’t have many forest fires yet; otherwise there would be more fire engines and they would have responded to this crash faster. The weather in the dream was cloudy and it was near sunset.

Today I didn’t have both of my alarms activated so I got up closer to 11:00 instead of at 10:00. I did the laundry in the afternoon. I also was going to see The King Stag in the Scott Amphitheater at 15:00. A few minutes before then though it started to rain heavily. The rain location for the event was in LPAC so I figured it would take place regardless.

I go over to the amphitheater a few minutes before 15:00 and I see people leaving the amphitheater at one entrance and entering the amphitheater at another. I enter the amphitheater and stay at the top to survey what is going on. I see that some people were there to see the show but the set was heavily soaked with rain and the people closer to the stage were talking about going to Hechinger’s. The only thing is Hechinger’s went bankrupt so I think they meant The Home Depot. Hearing this conversation reminded me of the Ridley High School ITS trip to the Bucks County Playhouse in 1999. Our set got damaged somehow and a few people needed to find a hardware store to make repairs.

I stood around for a few minutes and the people close to the stage said the running time was going to be an hour. Some of the audience left at this point and I decided to take off too since it didn’t seem like things were going to get started anytime soon. I also thought that the show must go on.

Back in my room I was in the process of freeing space on Spare B so I could run Photoshop. Photoshop needs a place for a scratch disk. However the only items that I could remove involved using Photoshop so I had to be clever. These items had to do with The Phoenix Online and take a good amount of time to process and delete.

While I worked on this task it sounded like the play in the amphitheater started and I looked out my window to see some activity over there. However it didn’t take long for it to rain again and it came down heavy enough that part of the audience left the amphitheater. There was a lull and then another rain burst pushed more out of the amphitheater and it seemed at that point the show stopped for the day.

After dinner I went over to Pittenger to watch “Strange Days” with John, Linda, and Tom. Tom got a new 27" TV and a Xbox. He put both things on his desk. It looks a little odd but his room is getting very loaded.

Before leaving I cleaned up John’s computer. He told me it hasn’t spontaneously restarted in a couple of weeks. The weather has also been less humid and hot. I ran Ad-aware and had it remove 140 pieces of spyware. Before Ad-aware, visiting any web site such as www.swarthmore.edu would cause a pop-up window to open. When I tried going to the Swarthmore home page a pop-up for eBay appeared. After running Ad-aware the pop-ups stopped. I also ran Scandisk, which found no problems and did a virus scan, which also ran clean.

I stopped in Wharton briefly and then went to Olde Club for the French Show. The Walkmen, Mazarin, and Mink Lungs played. I haven’t been to the Olde Club for an entire show before so I didn’t know what to expect. Tonight I get there after 22:30 to find a line at the door. I thought the place already filled up but instead things were just getting started. I went downstairs to snack and then returned to the main floor to wait for the first band to play.

It was hard to hear what band was which so I don’t know what order they went in. I liked the level of energy from the first band. The first band played for about an hour and then there was a break for the second band to setup. I wasn’t too hot on the second band, which also played for about an hour. The third band, I think were The Walkmen and they took longer to get going but when they did their quality was incredible.

I was glad I went to the show and now I wonder why I hadn’t gone to Olde Club before for more than a few minutes. Part of the impetus to go now is I figured why wait to hear live music when I am in Oregon when I can go see it now.

I didn’t get to bed until after 04:00. I think I was falling asleep in my room before then.

2002-09-13, Fri (Day 671, temperature at 07:02: 21.2°C, difference: -2.9°C): Today I got up at 07:00 but couldn’t fully wake up in 20 minutes so I slept until 10:00. I had planned on going to the publications office in the morning if I was awake then.

I ate lunch very quickly since I had to be in my room at 13:15 so I could be picked up for my driving test. Dad and I get to the Bortondale driving center 30 minutes early so we drive around to look for a place to practice parallel parking. We found a rather ad hoc place behind a few stores that weren’t actually parallel spots but an improperly placed concrete barrier served as a marker for part of the spot.

After practicing a few times I drive over to the driver center at 14:00 and wait in line. The people in front of me were failing the parallel parking primarily because they started too far away from the spot. I had a different examiner each time I have taken the test. I go to parallel park and I made sure to pull up close alongside the spot. I then backed into it. It seemed like I was angled too sharply so I slowed down so I wouldn’t run into the curb. At the point I felt the car brush into the curb I went forward and then reversed left to compensate. Upon reaching this point the examiner said OK and then I pulled out.

I enter the main road and when I made a left turn onto a side street the examiner tells me that I cut into the other lane. He gave me a tip that when I make a turn I should cut the wheel when my shoulder enters the opposing lane of where I am turning into. I was cutting too early.

We get back to the driving center and we go inside to get my license. I didn’t need my picture taken since my photo ID picture was used. My driver’s license is vertical instead of horizontal and has the background colors of the state license plate.

Dad drives back to Swarthmore but we take a more direct way back, the way that Swatties go to Tom Jones restaurant. We didn’t know the entire route directions beforehand but we had pieces to assemble. Dad and I go up Brookhaven Road and I tell him to turn onto Rose Valley Road. This dumps us on PA 252 south of Strath Haven High School. Dad turns right onto PA 252 and then left onto the continuation of Rose Valley Road. A few minutes later we are driving between Strath Haven Condos and Mary Lyon, which is what we wanted to do.

I get back to Wharton and start reading e-mail. I go to the Wharton barbecue at 17:30. I talk with Luke and Karl and meet Christian and Rachel. I go to the SCCS media lounge a few minutes before 19:30 for the showing of “Duel to the Death.” The only problem was the viewing room was locked and no one was around. Since I was in the Clothier basement I looked around the media lounge and got on the computers there. I used a Mac G4 running OS X, version 10.1.5. I also got on a Linux machine.

Out of curiosity I looked at The Phoenix Online and Trucksess.com in the various browsers. Most did fine although Mozilla didn’t like the CSS and JavaScript on The Phoenix Online. The default desktop environment on the Linux machine was KDE and when I tried switching to Gnome it opened KDE anyway. After leaving the media lounge I looked around Tarble to see if there were signs about the SCCS movie, which I had seen posted before. Now I could not find those signs.

I went to LPAC before 22:00 to see “Lord of the Rings” but the 19:30 screening was still in progress and the people waiting said that the second showing wouldn’t start until 23:00 and that the movie was three hours. I didn’t want to stay up that late so I returned to my room. I ended up going to bed later than when the movie ended. It seemed logical to not see the movie tonight since I wanted to go to bed early but I ended up going to bed late anyway.

2002-09-12, Thu (Day 670, temperature at 10:02: 24.1°C, difference: -2.5°C): Today I got up at 10:00 and soon went to lunch with Kevin. I did reading for afternoon class in the Tarble Atrium.

I ate dinner with Jesse. He realized that I was serious about moving to Oregon when I told him I subscribed to The Oregonian. He asked me what I wanted to do for entertainment over there. I told him that I wanted to hear live music. I listen to music differently now and I would like to hear live sound besides recordings. When I listen to a song now I don’t just hear music but I hear the pieces of a song and the patterns within. I went to the publications office for the 18:45 Phoenix ed board meeting and hiring session.

I left Parrish after 19:30 to go to the Student Budget Committee office in Clothier. I needed to get reimbursed for the cabinet lock in the office. An assistant in the office told me that the treasurer needed to do this. However Student Publications doesn’t have a treasurer. The translation is that Andrew, student publications coordinator needs to do it. However at the moment Andrew was in the publications office sitting in on The Phoenix hiring meeting. I couldn’t drag him out of there then so later I’ll need to give the form and receipt to him.

I spent the rest of the evening working on my psych senior project proposal. Printing from the iMacs in McCabe failed in the mid-evening but worked by the time I needed to use it. I went to bed at around 02:00.

2002-09-11, Wed (Day 669, temperature at 07:03: 26.6°C, difference: +1.7°C): Today marks the one year anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 2001-09-11. I went to the silent gathering in the Scott Amphitheater from 08:30 to 09:00. Following that I went for a walk. I looked through my copy of the New York Times in my room before going to class.

I ate lunch with John and Tom in the small room of Sharples. I read Gnutella Forums posts in the afternoon. However I fell asleep again so I took a nap from 14:30 to 15:00. I put my phone on do not disturb and when I woke up Liz left a voice mail. The digital camera card reader was crashing the computer in the publications office most likely due to a corrupted card. I tried solving the problem over the phone but things didn’t work so I went up to the office to try using a USB direct connect cable. The camera being used didn’t have a USB port so I setup the office digital camera.

Meanwhile it is after 16:00 and no pages have been PDFed yet. Nathan shows up too and he helps out a bit. The first deadline wasn’t met until 17:30. Yavor and I worked on the online edition starting then. I had him export the stories from Quark to XML. I had just enough time to get the early edition up and see “Promises” in LPAC cinema at 19:30.

Luke joined Yavor and I at the second deadline. It was cool doing the online edition in parallel with three people. Yavor exported the remaining stories in Quark and also updated the in-section.php and section indices. Luke designed the front page and wrote the headlines e-mail. I put the pages up, coded the front page, ran the image script, and closed things out.

The server needed to be restarted after the 17:00 deadline since pages 6 and 7 for news wouldn’t open anywhere due to a file locking problem. The server crashed while running the image script a repeated time. My computer stopped file sharing reliably when I tried to open six web images off of my computer in Photoshop. I had my computer mounted on two clients in the office. I could logon to my hard drive after this crash but opening a few folders would cause the client to hang.

I returned to my room to finish the online edition. Before I did so I checked two exterior doors in Parrish to see if I could reenter the building with the office keys in case the server crashed while I was still working. My Parrish keys were able to unlock the exterior doors.

Somewhat to my surprise my computer was still functional but it did crash before I went to bed after being up for about four days. A possible trigger is my room was cooling off fast and that might have unsettled my computer.

2002-09-10, Tue (Day 668, temperature at 06:52: 24.9°C, difference: +1.8°C): I dreamed I was home and my stuff was in various places in the car and in the apartment. Aunt Robin drove in. I was getting impatient about where to move all of the stuff in the car that only some of which was mine. I said to Dad that I’ll move it in inside and if you change your mind I’ll move it again.

Next, I am standing between Clothier and Parrish looking towards Parrish beach. I am thumbing through print copies of Phoenix issues from the 2000-spring semester. I get to about the fourth or fifth one and I realize that the name on the masthead is spelled wrong, “Protland” instead of “Phoenix.” It seems like it is trying to spell Portland but that’s not in the name of the paper.

Today, after eating breakfast I worked in the publications office until 11:00. I went to lunch and then did reading for this afternoon’s classes in Tarble Atrium in Trotter. Following class I went to McCabe for a research session about Psych 98, the senior project. I ate dinner with Kai and Jason, a sophomore.

I was going to work on my psych senior project proposal this evening but Swatmail went down and e-mails I needed to work on the project were in the account. Instead I read Gnutella Forums posts since I had a big block of time and this task needs to be done in a continuous block. After 15 minutes of inactivity the unread threads are marked old and then it is difficult to know what to read.

My progress reading Gnutella Forums wasn’t great since I was falling asleep early on and I had two weeks of posts to get through. With that much time to cover it’s difficult to move quickly through the forum. It got too late to get caught up on the posts so I went to bed at around 02:00.

2002-09-09, Mon (Day 667, temperature at 07:01: 23.1°C, difference: +0.3°C): Upon waking up at 07:00 I wrote yesterday’s journal, went to Sharples for breakfast, and then worked in the publications office until 10:10. Anthony from environmental services stopped by.

I prepared a mail subscription to The Oregonian this afternoon. This order cost more than I thought at $6.16 a week for all seven issues a week. I didn’t want to spend more than $200 at once so I opted for a 32-week period. This period will cover me until some point in the spring, which should be sufficient although I will likely renew. If anything the paper will cost less for me once I move to Oregon.

I ate dinner with David and Thomas, who are roommates. I went to the borough hall this evening for the 19:30 borough council meeting. This meeting had many active threads and at times bogged down the progress.

I quickly went through reading for tomorrow’s classes following the meeting and went to bed at about 01:00.

2002-09-08, Sun (Day 666, temperature at 08:02: 22.8°C, difference: -0.8°C): Today turned out odd. I get up at 08:00 to go to the student publications office. I planned on stopping at 11:00 to eat lunch but instead getting the Apple menu tested on all of the machines ran over and I didn’t get to Sharples until 14:00.

I expected to do academic work for much of the rest of the day. I start after lunch but then fall asleep in my room with the music on. I decided to take a nap until 17:00. I expected to eat dinner and watch films by Jean-Pierre Jeunet at 18:00. However when I wake up I feel like sleeping some more so I take a second nap until 21:00. At this point I continue my work.

I did reading for class tomorrow, sent Raff a message containing my comments about the philosophy readings, and then went to bed after 02:00.

2002-09-07, Sat (Day 665, temperature at 10:03: 23.6°C, difference: +0.1°C): Today I got up two hours later than I wanted to but I still did a fair amount of stuff today. After eating lunch I did the laundry in the Wharton E basement. The four washers and three dryers are new from last year and are much easier to clean since lint and gunk hasn’t accumulated on them yet. People were slow to pick up their clothes and there wasn’t a table to put them on once the space on top of the dryers filled up. I went looking for a table and found one in the Wharton B basement. It had a checkerboard game pattern painted on the top but it still was a table. I carried it across the courtyard and placed it in the laundry room.

I went to Pittenger after 16:00 to go see “Signs” with Linda, John, and Tom. We went to the AMC Marple 10 and even though this theater has a number of small single aisle auditoriums, “Signs” was not showing in one of them. The sound for the movie was great with the realistic depth of the surround sound.

Following the movie we went to Tarble to eat dinner. It took 40 minutes for me to get served. Before 21:00 our group went to LPAC to see comedian Dave Russo. The show started late since he was late driving to campus.

Following the show I cleaned out the Spare drive a bit. I have a feeling that the files on Spare are getting stale.

2002-09-06, Fri (Day 664, temperature at 08:01: 23.5°C, difference: -1.8°C): This morning I started in a traditional way by eating breakfast, going for a walk, and then picking up the paper. I ate lunch with Kai and Emily.

I didn’t get much done this afternoon since I knew I had to go to Worth Health Center to get a meningitis vaccine. However I did manage to make my room even messier and also find out that the handset on my phone falls off when I hang my phone vertically. I wanted to make best use of the desk and dresser space around my computer. John and Tom wanted to go out to dinner so I went to Pittenger at 17:00 to meet them along with Linda.

Our group went to Nifty Fifty’s to eat. Following that we wanted to go bowling. Our first stop was the Mac Dade Lanes. Right before stopping in front of the alley Tom and I went to Austin’s Sports Center to buy socks. Tom wasn’t wearing any socks and he wanted to if he was going to wear bowling shoes. I took this point as an opportunity to buy socks since the ones I have now are falling apart and need to be replaced.

The Mac Dade Lanes had leagues until closing so John drove us to Sproul Lanes. They also had leagues until 22:00. Set on bowling, John then drove to the Conchester Lanes and we found an open lane there. Everyone bowled near or above a 100 for the first game but after then Linda, Tom, and I played worse and John played better.

John drove quickly back to campus to see the hypnotist Dr. Steve Atwood at 21:00. The LPAC wall was down and the theater was crowded. Our group needed to sit in the Cinema seating area but the view was not that bad.

I went back to Pittenger with Linda, John, and Tom to hang out until after 00:00. I got back to my room and stayed up until after 04:00 to put my stuff back in order.

2002-09-05, Thu (Day 663, temperature at 10:01: 25.3°C, difference: -1.1°C): I got up at 10:00 initially thinking I had class in 30 minutes but I soon remembered that today is a Thursday and my classes would start in the afternoon.

Starting in the late morning through dinner I printed and prepared all of the electronic or course reader documents for my classes. I figured the most efficient way to print the readings out was to do it all at once for all of my classes. I had class in the afternoon so I didn’t spend the entire day working on the readings but it still took a fair amount of time.

I also tried printing out my AppleWorks video tape database and the first problem I ran into was I had to make the margins larger since the HP 8100 DN has a smaller printable area than the Apple Color StyleWriter 2400. Second, the footer printed at the end of every record and empty fields were squashed. I repeated this problem in the publications office on a HP 4050 N. The Wharton dorm printer wouldn’t work since the toner was low.

Phoenix ed board took place at 19:30. I got e-mail up to date this evening and did reading for class in my room. I went to bed a bit after 01:00.

2002-09-04, Wed (Day 662, temperature at 09:53: 26.4°C, difference: +2.8°C): I quickly went to the bookstore to pick up The New York Times and go to class. In the early afternoon I read e-mail and moved the web request logs to Spare A and the Phoenix partition on Milhouse. This change enabled me to have enough free disk space to comfortably do this week’s Phoenix online edition.

I met Luke and Yavor at 17:00 so they could watch me process the first deadline pages. I finished this part soon after 18:30. I continued reading mail in the mid-evening. Luke and Yavor joined me again at 22:00 to do the second deadline pages. Nathan helped do the front page design and headlines e-mail. I got the front page done by 00:00 but I didn’t leave until after 03:00 since I started to work less efficiently later on.

2002-09-03, Tue (Day 661, temperature at 09:02: 23.6°C, difference: +1.1°C): I got up, ate a banana for breakfast, picked up my copy of The New York Times at the bookstore, and went to the publications office. I got The Phoenix print page proof script working with the new client setup. Last night I saw that the driver the script was trying to use was for Apu, the old printer. The HP driver didn’t work with the script so I used the generic Apple LaserWriter driver instead.

From the office, I was going to leave at 12:00 so I wouldn’t have a problem finding a seat at lunch but when I restarted Homer a network registration screen appeared in the web browser. I called Andrew and then ITS about the best course of action and the ITS help desk said the easiest option was just to use my username to register, which I did. This netreg process took a half-hour so I got to lunch as if I was coming from an 11:20 class.

I ate lunch with John and Tom. Afterwards I started my Tuesday-Thursday classes. Developmental Psychology, Psych 39 was in the familiar Kohlberg 115. Kai is in this class also. American Government, Poly Sci 2 followed in Trotter 303. This room wasn’t air conditioned and felt quite uncomfortable.

I bought the rest of my books after 16:00, dropped them off in my room, and went to the office to stay until 17:00. I ate dinner with Jesse, John, and Tom. I returned to the office in the evening and stayed until about 22:00. Back in my room I moved my dresser from inside the closet to the left of my desk.

I planned on getting up at 07:00 tomorrow so I could go to the student publications office early in the morning when usage is lower. I left early tonight since it was difficult to do work in the office due to the quantity of computer use. I went to bed at about 02:00.

2002-09-02, Mon (Day 660, temperature at 08:11: 22.5°C, difference: -0.8°C, classes start): Today I got up at around 08:00 and went to breakfast. I sat with Ani, Mack, and Nick. Following breakfast I walked through Beardsley to see how the renovations looked and went for a walk. The Beardsley public area has been cut in half and doesn’t seem that great now.

I went to Kohlberg for my 10:30 Econ 5 class, Economics and Education. Renee and Jeremy are also in that class. Philosophy 24 was next, Theory of Knowledge. The class was small so it was easy to contribute to the discussion. However, I spoiled things at one point by turning into a sentence what was trying to be explained.

I ate lunch with Andrew, Robyn, and Matt. After lunch I went to the bookstore to get the reading for my class today and subscribe to The New York Times. I paid $63.20 for a Monday to Saturday full year subscription.

I worked in the pub office this afternoon. Nathan was also here today so he provided help at points during the day. I worked on getting the Apple Menu setup on the clients but I didn’t finish today since it took too long to get it configured and copied. I went to dinner expecting to return to the office in an hour or two.

At Sharples I ate dinner with Kai, Caroline, Ani, and Renee. Kai, Caroline, and I went back with Renee to see her room in Mertz and chill. Jeremy stopped by as I was leaving after 19:00.

Jesse sent an e-mail to John, Tom, and I wondering where we all were and I wrote back explaining the situation. Jesse stops by my room minutes later and we talk for a bit and then I go up to see his room. His room on Wharton west 3d was a bit on the warm but most striking is the window starts halfway up the wall and goes to the ceiling. The window frame itself is old and it is difficult to adjust the window due to the position.

Back in my room I do network registration and install Network Assistant on my computer. John and Tom then stop by and we talk for a fair amount of time. We then go to Pittenger so I can see what their rooms look like. I decided to go out there since it was after 21:00 by this point and it didn’t make sense to be in the publications office for just an hour before going to the SWIL movie.

John’s room seems a little smaller compared to last year. Tom’s room has this emergency exit device on his door. Apparently if there was a fire people would pile into Tom’s room to use the fire escape outside his window. His room also contained an emergency light, an exit sign, and a fire alarm pull station by the window. It surely looked odd.

I tried fixing John’s computer, which kept restarting constantly but was unable to improve things. I ran out of time by 21:50 so I had to leave to go to Martin for the SWIL movie, “Dr. Strangelove.” After the movie I went to the publications office to continue working. I started falling asleep sometime after 03:00 so I just left since I wasn’t being very productive.

2002-09-01, Sun (Day 659, temperature at 15:09: 23.3°C, difference: -0.3°C): I intended to get up at 11:00 although I wouldn’t be getting more than two hours of sleep that way. However, it was dark today from the rain and my shade was down most of the way so I overslept. It would have been reasonable to sleep until 14:00 since a Phoenix all staff meeting was at 14:30.

However, I didn’t wake up until my phone rang after 15:00. Ben told me two people interested in web stuff were in the office. I quickly got dressed and went to the office to meet them. I have had contact with Luke and Bo before. Luke sat with me at dinner on Friday and Bo e-mailed me in the spring. At about 17:00, Yavor stopped by the office to inquire about the web positions. I received his name from someone at a Phoenix meeting yesterday. I was going to call him to follow-up on his interest but he took the initiative.

Before dinner I imaged Selma and Scratchy. At this point half of the clients have been imaged. I ate dinner with Andrew and then got ready for classes tomorrow. Ingrid the RA was holding a hall meeting at 20:30 so I did some more stuff in my room to fill the time. I upgraded dnetc and switched to using the faceless background application like I did at home this summer. Combined with not needing to run Quid Pro Quo, I have two fewer visible constant processes running now than last semester.

Ingrid gave out planners to us so that saves me having to buy one in the bookstore tomorrow. Even better the planners are well designed and look nice. However the plastic spiral bound may not hold up as well compared to the metal spiral of my old planner.

I went to the publications office after 21:00 and started Phoenix specific configurations. I also got the Publications Startup and Shutdown scripts implemented with the new client images. While I was doing this I imaged the rest of the computers that I can do now bringing the total to nine. Itchy, Sideshow Bob, and Troy McClure are left.

Itchy is not going to be imaged until Thursday in case The Phoenix cannot do something with the new image but it would work on the old setup. In addition I have a Select Storage annex on there that I would need to relocate. Sideshow Bob currently houses the Milhouse second backup as well as a separate Select Storage annex. Troy McClure is going to be the new server so there is little point in using it as a client now.

I didn’t finish until after 03:00, which was troubling since I was at risk to oversleep my first class meetings tomorrow. I setup the alarm on my travel clock and opened my shade so I would be less likely to oversleep.

Journal 2002-08