The curious case of the lost network jack
News, Technical, Guns, School ·Monday January 19, 2009 @ 23:41 EST (link)
20090112: Bought a used computer (Celeron 2.4 MHz, Windows XP pro) from a guy at work for $100; carried it from his building (16) back to mine (36) so I wouldn't lose my parking spot. I set it up upstairs in the spare bedroom with the used Ikea desk I got a while back. At this point, we discovered the network (Ethernet) jack that used to be there was gone; apparently the contractors had covered it over when making the windstorm repairs in 2006.
20090114: Called our contractor about the lost network jack and he promised to send someone out.
Picked up AR-15 (no CPL, no "what country", since I put "U.K (ENGLAND)" instead of just "U.K" this time) at Cash Company; returned library books. Put the AR-15 together; trivial, just two pins to join the upper and lower. I'll pick up some ammo and cleaning tools at the WAC show this weekend.
20080115: Setting up a carpool to the WAC show, and a lunch meetup (which never panned out—two of us were there, with a sign even, and me wearing my Glock shirt as I had told people). Bought two polymer AR-15 mags from a guy here (on the msgun list) for $25 (total).
20090116: Watched pilot episode of Homeland Security USA. Pretty good; I suspect that for reasons of political correctness, Mexican criminals will be underrepresented, but at least they were included (kind of hard not to with the rampant immigration crimes in the south).
20090117: Puyallup gun show. Picked up a cleaning rod (Dewey 30"), some .223 ammo (500 rounds of Wolf and 100 rounds of reloaded brass). I need to get some brushes and a bore snake; will probably get them at a local place like Wade's, even though they're expensive for larger items.
20090118: Went shooting (at SVRC) for the first time in a while; shot my Glock and EMP, but not the new rifle yet, although I did talk to someone about procedure, how to set up, etc. The club provides iron target stands, which is nice, and there are holes out on the field where they can be inserted; bring your own cardboard backing and targets, same as the pistol pit. When I got back, Honey told me she'd noticed some mole hills in the back yard; argh. I wish it was legal to shoot them (it's too close to another house), although it'd probably be hard to catch them in the act anyway.
20090119: As promised last week, the contractor that handled the windstorm damage in 2006 (Jim Cameron, a generally good guy), sent an electrician to restore the network jack. Nice guy; didn't take too long for him to discover the network cable behind the phone jack in the room, and convert it to a phone-and-network jack. Plugging in the computer immediately netted it a network address via DHCP (from the downstairs server), and all was well. Thanks, Jim! (Because of that, I worked from home today.)
I'm working on assignment 2 for my class, which was recently posted; this one was easier than the first; I'm already finished (took maybe an hour, including the extras described below). Part of it is an interpreter and translator for a small subset of Logo , which produces a list of points visited from a script; I wrote further code to use ImageMagick to generate an image from the points visited (for fun, and as a verification).
We wanted to re-record a program (Dharma and Greg) on the Myth box without going through all the old ones individually; it wasn't too difficult: just find the show in the oldrecorded table (in MythTV's MySQL database, called mythconverg), and set the duplicate column to 0 (meaning allow record again), e.g. update oldrecorded set duplicate = 0 where title = 'Dharma & Greg'.
