I’m writing this in a draft in Gmail because I can’t remember my WordPress password. The reason I can’t remember is I’m not on my normal computer operating system. raisinbottom emailed me today with questions about Ubuntu, and he mentioned Wubi, so I got all hyped up and spent the evening fighting with it. Again. My big problem, as usual, is the wireless stuff. When I mentioned to A what I was working on, she couldn’t believe it - I have installed and uninstalled Ubuntu at least four times now. I have a love/hate relationship with the damn thing. I was unable to get the wireless working, but I’m jacked straight into the network right now, so I can at least write this while in Ubuntu, save the draft, and go into Windows (where my passwords are all saved) and post it!

Anyway, today’s classes were pretty good. I enjoyed the project we did in Deaf Studies, and I was pleased to see another friend of mine is now in the class. A few other people joined too so it is now getting pretty crowded! More people came into my Linguistics class too, and it’s now huge, but we can’t get a bigger room so we are all jammed in tight in a semi-circle. It turns out one of the visiting students is emerge’s sister, I was tickled to find that out! I had some quibbles with some of the teacher’s opinions…I had asked about Gestuno, and then later I asked about Esperanto…and she tried to compare it back to Gestuno. In reality, Gestuno can be more accurately compared to Basic English, because Esperanto behaves very differently from either of those. She wouldn’t hear of it though - did I mention she’s excitable? Oh well.

Apparently when I got this computer I was temporarily stupid. For some reason I didn’t install ZoneAlarm, AVG, or Spybot-S&D. And they didn’t get transferred from my old computer either, probably because was still stupid. I noticed the ZA absence a couple of days ago and got a BSOD after installing it; just now I was doing nothing - I was talking to A with the computer idle on my lap - and I got another BSOD! Good grief. AND I apparenly forgot my blog password, I just had to change that. And I lost an entry I was writing in Notepad and hadn’t saved yet; fortunately I hadn’t written much when the BSOD randomly popped up. And my website design is messed up for no apparent reason…I didn’t change anything!!

Computers and I usually get along pretty well, but…yaaaaargh!

As those of you who follow me on Twitter know, I used to have a 1GB SD card, a 256MB SD card, and a 1GB mini SD card with an adapter. The first two were broken (I think by the CatCam, though don’t ask me how) and they won’t take pictures or format or anything. The mini got lost, I have no idea where it is. My Dell Inspiron 1501 has an SD card slot built in, and it accepted all three of these cards before they broke/got lost.

So I went to Microcenter the other day, and they only had a 2GB mini which was more than I wanted, but I bought a 4GB Kingston SDHC card for $30. It works in my camera just fine - the camera says right on it that it handles SDHC - but I’ve just discovered that it doesn’t work in my computer’s card slot. It’s supposed to, other people have gotten other SDHC cards working in their Inspiron 1501 laptops, but this one doesn’t work in mine. I can get pictures off using the good ol’ cable, but that SD slot was awfully handy.

Well, hopefully when I get a 1GB mini card again, it will still work in my laptop. Otherwise I have an SD slot that I can’t do anything with, unless it works with the 1GB card I got as part of my new gBlog job…I bought the 4GB because I wanted more capacity, and A was going to put the 1GB card into her camera, and the 4GB works fine in the camera so I don’t plan to return it, but…

Yeah, hi. I’m a geek.

I’m using Ubuntu right now. Again. This is the third time I have installed Ubuntu and the second time I’ve actually had the wireless working. I noticed that the Cisco Clean Agent software required for wifi at my university wasn’t required if you’re on Linux, so I figured Ubuntu was my last shot short of buying a new computer. (firesign3000 reports that it was probably my sucky processor that was keeping SP2 from being usable.) Amazingly, I managed to get Feisty Fawn installed with few problems; it probably helps that I did a wired connection to my router during the installation process, so I was able to get the utilities needed for my wireless to work.

For right now I’m planning on using it full-time, but if I get annoyed with it, I will probably boot into Windows at home and Linux at school. I guess. I dunno. I want to get Wine working too but I know very little about it. Also, for some reason my Firefox settings didn’t port over, so I need to move those; I also need to make sure I have read/write access to my Windows partition, since most of my stuff is over there anyway.

Okay! I think I have resolved my computer problems and my classes. I wasn’t able to do much online the past couple of nights, because the whole SP2 mess really hosed things up. At one point my monitor decided to make itself “vertical” and I had to crane my head sideways to read anything! I got that fixed but then it refused to come out of VGA mode. All I wanted was to have things back the way they were before I tried to fiddle with SP2! Fortunately Dave Pietromonaco has written a wonderful solution for monitor problems that fixed me right up!

Today I attended the history class and I was kind of taken aback by how uninterested the students seemed. I was one of just a few that asked questions or contributed during the entire class. I happened to bump into ayala920 on my way out of class, and learned she was headed to the Honors section of the same class. She wasn’t surprised that I was unimpressed by the regular class, and told me what time the Honors section met - and it was at a time I could fit into my schedule! So this afternoon I spoke to the Honors program director and got permission to switch, and then sent my academic advisor an e-mail and she clicked the magic button. So now I’m in class with ayala920, to_be_in_snafu, and three other people - there’s just six of us in the class now! The books are nearly twice as expensive as the regular section, but I think I will enjoy it a lot more.

I got a 10-day free trial of World of Warcraft from cynica, because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. First I downloaded the 2.84GB install file, which I had to delete after unzipping because I needed the space to do the install! Once that was finally installed, I discovered I had to download a half-gig update. I had a hard time getting that to install, and when I finally did I discovered I had another half-gig update to download! I ended up removing RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 from the machine, because I can always reinstall it; I also removed a bunch of my music, which freed up a few more gigs. After the trial is over, I will restore the music from my external hard drive.

So I finally got to play the game after hours of downloading and installing. I created an undead character first and then a human character; I ended up playing as the human for a while. I got her to be a Level 2 Mage by killing a bunch of demons - at least I assume that’s how that worked. One thing I really like a lot about the game is that all those gigs of storage on the computer translate to a much faster playing experience. One reason I’m not really into Second Life is because it has to download everything as you move around, whereas WoW stores everything on the computer and then just interprets the instructions it receives.

I wasn’t able to get any other human beings to talk to me. I saw some people talking on a general channel but I couldn’t figure out how to talk to them - I think it may be limited by the free trial account. I know several people who play WoW but I have no idea what server they’d be on or anything like that. I can see why WoW is appealing - it’s fun to run around killing things and improving your stats, and I imagine the role-playing servers are fun too - but I’m not sure why it’s Warcrack for so many people. I don’t expect to keep it past the 10-day trial, which means I have to remember to cancel because otherwise I’ll automatically be billed $15/month. I’m glad to see what all the fuss is about, but I think there are probably very similar combat/RP games - even MMORPG’s - that are less expensive, and perhaps less space-hogging on the computer. I might try to find some alternatives, just for fun.

The new version of Ubuntu (called “Dapper”) was released a week or two ago. I held off upgrading because I haven’t even used Linux lately - I’ve been booting directly into XP because that’s where my games and Paint Shop Pro work. But I wanted to see if the Linux alpha version of Second Life ran any better than the Windows version, so I went into Ubuntu. I figured while I was there I might as well upgrade, and I let that run while I was out of the house for most of Saturday.

When I came back, everything had gone smoothly - except the wifi connection didn’t work. So I booted back and forth between Linux and XP, did some research, and asked around in various places. Finally, this afternoon, I got the answer. When I installed Breezy, the previous version of Ubuntu, I had to also install a utility to make the Windows wifi card drivers usable in Linux. Dapper had native support and didn’t require this utility, so it was confused about whether it should use the utility or the native driver. I renamed the native driver, so it would only think to use the utility; after a reboot everything came up working great! I’m back to using Linux for at least a little while, but there’s already a game I wanted to play tonight so I might end up going back to XP in a bit…

The computers here in my agency’s interpreter lounge are used by a lot of different people, most of whom download crap onto them. Therefore, there is a lot of malware on these machines. There’s only one guy who’s responsible for maintaining all the computers in the office, so he doesn’t have time to mess with our machines as they’re not typically mission-critical. I only get into the office a few times a month, but when I’m here I’m often asked to try fixing these two machines.

I spent the past two and a half hours attempting to clean this one machine of a virus and adware and all kinds of things. I downloaded Ad-Aware and quarantined 180 items, but the message about a virus - located in C:\WINNT\system32\egedg.dll - kept popping up. Norton said access to the file was denied, so it couldn’t do anything about it. The problem has been going on for months and it’s been driving me crazy; the main terp logon has full administrative rights and I still couldn’t figure it out.

After much fighting and kicking and screaming (and consulting with friends via IM on my Sidekick), I managed to boot into safe mode with the command prompt and I was at least able to rename the file there. I was even able to move it to the root C:\ but I still couldn’t delete the damn thing. I removed all attributes and still nothing. I finally threw up my hands (it wasn’t my dog anyway) and decided to just boot Windows normally and surf the web. So now there is a file called C:\harmful.foo on this machine; I hope nobody touches it.

But y’know what? I haven’t had the message pop up since. Did I fix it? I don’t know. Will people screw up this machine again? Undoubtedly. But for now, it’s okay and I’m okay.

I don’t think I like what Firefox 1.0 is doing to my machine. I know I don’t like it telling me “you are missing plugins” every time I load a page with Flash. (If I wanted a browser with Flash, I would open the page in IE.) I don’t think I’m going to use Live Bookmarks at all. It also feels like Firefox 1.0 is a bigger RAM hog than the previous version. (When you have just 64MB of RAM, a little difference matters a lot.) I think I’m going to “downgrade” and go back to 0.9.2, which I still have an installer on this machine. I’m going to try to back up as much of my data as possible, just in case I have to uninstall 1.0 in order to reinstall an earlier version. I definitely want to get this fixed before tomorrow, though - I don’t want to spend my day off trying to repair my computer!

Added: Well, that went very smoothly - I didn’t even have to reboot! While I was backing up my Firefox profile, though, I noticed that I only had about 130MB of space free on my C:\ drive. (It’s a 4-gig partition.) I deleted some software I’m not using, deleted duplicate copies of photographs that have already been posted online, and went looking for more ways to free up space. To my surprise, the root directory was harboring 190MB of file*.chk files and another 200MB is tied up in save2dsk.bin. (Yes, I’m running Windows 98 on a laptop.) I blasted those .chk files but I’m not too sure about the other one. A trip through the first several Google results reveals that it’s unclear whether or not this file is necessary for hibernation. I’m not sure how it got to be (or why it needs to be) 200MB, but I do put the laptop to sleep regularly (shutting it off after a couple of days) so I don’t want to mess with that. I now have 444MB free, so hopefully my swap file will be happy for a while.