zarnochwf1.com The ramblings of a sleep deprived college student.

I'm currently in the middle of a whole-town blackout with only 17% battery life on my laptop(was in the middle of conditioning the new battery) :/ celphone is fully charged though, . More when i regain power, saving my remaining charge for emergency use if needed.

In other news, my floppy drive came in yesterday!

Well, to start off, i did get the hp 50g graphing calculator, it's very nice, has a ton of features, and the quality is excelent. The only cavet is the lack of a hard case like the ti calcs have.

And thanks to my good friend Tim, I now own an IBM Thinkpad 600E laptop. Pentium II 366mhz 13.3" screen, 128 meg ram, 10 gig harddrive. Came with xp and win2k on it, i added XUbunt 7.04. Needed to buy a new battery(expected, as this computer is almoast 10 years old) and a new keyboard to replace a defective tracpoint(i know i could have just used a external mouse, but i love my tracpoints) I also bought a floppy drive and the external enclosure for it, since i need to use floppies at college for work with the oscilloscopes and the cnc machines. Again, kudos to Tim for parting with this insanely usefully piece of ancient history!

I also broke down and bought a Western Digital 1TB external harddrive for my desktop system, as i was down to a combined total of 700 meg on all my drives(data packratting and redundant backups mostly)

More to come as time goes on.

Well, it's sad to say but I'll soon be retiring my Ti83+, as it can no longer keep up with what i need to do. Don't get me wrong, it's a great calculator, and was a nice asset on many a math test, but it doesn't cut the mustard with simultaneous equations with imaginary numbers.

So, to cut to the point, i just bought a HP 50G from walmart, and am awaiting it to come in sometime next week. Most people i know have a Ti89 Titanium, but i prefer a more open calculator, and a few good friends, the main one being Kevin, recommended it highly, so i went for it.

It looks better specs wise than an 89, since it uses an ARM processor, has 512K ram, 2 meg flash, an SD card slot, and also touts irda, usb, and serial connectivity. It also has a RPN stack, which i am looking forward to greatly. It's also fairly open, with a c compiler and other niceties not found with most calculators.

Check back sometime next week for the updates and maybe a set of "unboxing" pics.

Well, the upgrade finished, but not without some scary moments.

Now i just have to re-pair my bluetooth headset and do some other junk and I'll be all set!

I finally bit the bullet and decided to upgrade my system to Ubuntu 7.10 from 7.04.
I was planning to do a full system backup to DVD, but didn't have the space to do the backup in the first place, so i threw caution to the wind and started the upgrade procedure about 10 minutes ago.
I figure i can always reinstall after burning all my home directory to dvd if there are any big issues, but hope there aren't.

I'm also dreading recompiling my graphics drivers and the drivers my wireless card (have to use one, since there's no way to drop an ethernet cable from my room to the router :/ )
There's also Vmware's kernel modules to contend with.

So in all, if ya don't see me on for a while, you now know the probable cause why.

I've added an electronics page to document my past, current, and future projects.

You can find it in the nav menu to the right.

Well, this is my first real site on non-free hosting.

I plan to eventually put up some of my projects and some of the photos I've taken, along with a little bit of daily rambling from time to time.

Hope to get this thing configured soon enough,(god this is harder than they make it seem...)