Bloghorn

So, all things in order.

First, I moved out of ken’s room and into a single. It’s nice and roomy, and all mine. There’s a certain sense of freedom that comes from switching out of a double, and it’s pretty nice.

Last night the new constitution for the IST House was approved, with very little grumbling. We set next Monday as the night we’re going to unveil it to the residents and explain all the changes.

Now on to the fun stuff. You one reader out there will remember my Windows Home server, which was running on ridiculously underspec’d hardware. well, I finally got around to upgrading, with a whole new case, new power supply, and most importantly, a new processor. Something markedly faster than 600 MHz. The old box, which used to belong to Tom, is now with Jeff across the hall waiting to be turned into… something. Anyway, it was a pain in the ass to get everything moved, but it just worked when I plugged it in on the other side, so no complaints from me.

EDIT: New Specs:

Server case (Black)
Asus M2V-MX SE mobo
AMD Sempron LE-110 1.9 GHz AM2
2x1GB RAM
350W Power supply

Notarouter is back up and running again too. If you want the password, ask.

I don’t know whether it’s the fact that there’s nothing else to play, or that I always did want to learn to fly, but I picked up Microsoft Flight Simulator X, and I love it. Sure, it would be better if my controller wasn’t a crappy $10 Wal-Mart POC, and would be even nicer to have a throttle stick, but hey, it’s still playable.

The awesomeness of it hit as I was flying out of University Park airport in a  737 and flying around the Happy Valley area, just having fun, and recognized all the locations along the way, landing at La Guardia in New York city.

The graphics need work, the controls suck, and the voice actors sound like they’re rejects from *insert MMORPG here*, but it’s too much fun not to like. At least, until Assassin’s creed comes out for PC.

So, for Christmas, Aunt Julie gave me another $200 gift card to the Sony Store. I spent last year’s on some headphones, which were nice on the JFK-Heathrow trip, and didn’t know what to use this one on. So I decided to get a PSP, since they seem to be hacked pretty easily, and I always wanted to try to get Linux running on something other than a computer.

I ordered the PSP and a memory stick from Sony on the 9th, both orders were shipped on the 10th (according to their site), and so i waited. The memory stick arrived on the 17th, right on schedule, but the PSP was nowhere to be found. So a quick hour-long (on hold) phone call to Sony reveals that they lost my PSP. Great.

As of Friday, the tech is filing a claim with the shipping people, and he’ll “get back to me”. It’s Wednesday already, and nothing has changed. That’s the last time I buy important electronics online…

 I sent in my resume to Bear Stearns early in the week, was asked in for an interview the next day, and by Wednesday I heard those beautiful words: “when can you start?” They want me to do some on-demand programming, so it sounds like it’s going to be pretty fun.
School started up on the 11th, and I signed up for the first few shifts back at ResCom. Saturday night was a completely East dominated shift, the lazy Pollock workers not even bothering to show up. Tom is back, which was a surprise, but it’s good to see him again.

I confirmed that my server at home is functioning perfectly, I’m able to restart it without any issues remotely, and data flows through the proxy at about 300 kb/s, which isn’t great, but it’s better than nothing at all.

Classes are starting up too, nothing terribly interesting though. It’s been a slow first week, but it’ll pick up. It always does.