Blog

I would like to thank IBM for having such a crappy online ordering process that I have decided to buy from a different company. I would have purchased an IBM Thinkpad R, but whenever I would try to pick the parts I wanted, the price would always be “NA”. Maybe that means they are sold out of Thinkpad Rs, but they could have told me in a better fashion.

Because of this set back, I might just buy a laptop from Compaq. If someone had told me last week that I was going to get a Compaq, I would have laughed my ass off. Instead, I have fallen in love with the Compaq Presario 900. As of right now, it is looking like I will be getting these specs:

• Mobile Athlon XP 2000+
• 256 MB 266MHz DDR
• 30 gig hard drive
• 8x DVD drive

14.1″ XGA Display

• Built-in 56k modem and 10/100 NIC

The laptop is a bit beefier than my last one (1.5″ thick and 6.8 lbs), but it shouldn’t be a noticeable difference.

You know you are a software engineering geek when:

An every day problem comes along, and instead of just trying to solve it immediately, you have to plan for it. “Well, we first have to figure out what the real problem is before we can solve it.” Then you have a requirements phase, trying to figure out what will need to be done to solve the problem. Then you have a design phase, trying to come up with a good way to solve the problem. Then you actually do it.

I need to spend more time with biology and less with computer science. It’s pervasive.

The engineering job fair was this week. I don’t want to say much, but there were three companies that were quite interested in me. Two are on the West coast and the other is on the East coast. I don’t think I am ready to move just yet. Real life is pretty scary.

Sprint PCS sucks.

There is a very good reason that the greeting on my phone has been Sprint POS ever since I got it. Let’s go over what happened to me this month: I moved from Ann Arbor to Livonia back to Ann Arbor. I changed my address on the Sprint PCS site about a week after I moved to the new Ann Arbor apartment. The changes just wouldn’t stick. I would change the address, save the changes, reload and the old address would be back. I tried for about 3 days to get it to stick, no luck.

Eventually, I just couldn’t log into the website. I make all of my payments online, so this was going to be a problem when September 7th rolled around (my billing date). Obviously, that day blew past. I couldn’t log into the website for a couple weeks and my bill was overdue. They didn’t turn my phone off for a couple weeks, so I thought I was set. No so much. They turned it off yesterday. I STILL can’t get into the website.

This morning, I called their customer service number. I had to PAY $3 to get my address changed over the phone. That is strike 1.

My new apartment is in the basement of a house. My cellular reception is extremely spotty and random. Sprint PCS rarely works in university buildings. My job, classes and main study area are all in such buildings. Thus, my cell phone only works when I am walking to and from my destinations.

What cellular provider should I go with?

When people thing of Mac accessories, they think fruity colors and translucency. Not any more, meet Hubzilla.

*Still* sick!

As much as I hate using this page as a place to rant, sometimes it has to be done.

The first assignment for my senior design project is due this Wednesday. Basically, it is a presentation that explains the requirements of the project. In order to do the presentation, we need to have a good idea of what the project will be. Since our project was pretty open-ended, that required meeting with the client (in this case, the biomedical engineering professor). Professors are busy people, and thus he could not meet with us until today. He found an opening in his schedule and emailed us at 11:15 AM saying he was free from noon until 2 PM. None of my other group members could make it, which is understandable given the short notice. Thus, I had to meet with the professor by myself, while still extremely sick. Luckily, I was able to be partially coherent and not spray snot all over his office walls.

Since I am poor and car-less, I took the bus from north campus back to central campus after the meeting. There was one kid standing up in front of my seat while myself and the kid next to me were trying to get off the bus. I let the kid next to me get up first, then I started to stand up. When the first kid got up, the guy that was standing slid back and was directly in front of me. Without even looking above me, I stood up. I stood up directly into the guys elbow. Crack, right on top of my head. Now my leg and my head hurts.

On top of still being very very sick, I was woken up this morning at 5:45 AM with the most excruciating charley horse in my right leg. It probably only lasted 15 seconds, but it felt more like a minute. Here we are, seven hours later, and my leg is still in pain. I need to reboot my body.

Trojaned OpenBSD CDs. Making your own ISO of OpenBSD is a trivial exercise. Hell, I make an i386 specific ISO every time a new version of OpenBSD comes out. You can still get the latest one here. People buy the CD to support the project, and that’s it. No one that has the technical knowledge to need/want/use OpenBSD would be unable to make their own CD. To all the people that bought this trojaned CD, installed it and got 0wn3d, you deserved it.

TCP/IP Sequence Number Analysis. Instead of simply stating that Mac OS 9 has a very predictable TCP/IP sequence, there are graphs that show the spread of such “random” numbers. Very enlightening.