September 2008 Entries
Antony got a second Bluetooth laser mouse today and is calling himself poor, so I'd like to show him an actual poor geek's collection of mice:
From left to right: 2x Mitsumi PS/2 scroll mouse, Microsoft Serial-MousePort Mouse 2.0, Gateway (Microsoft) Trekker 2.0A Wheel Mouse, Microsoft Serial Mouse 2.0A, Logitech Serial-MouseMan, and Logitech MouseMan. I can't find the controller card for the InPort bus mouse, so I can't tell if it works or not.
I would like to point out that none of these mice are cordless, optical, or even USB-compliant. The newest one of the lot (the Trekker) is from 1998,...
I never thought I'd see the day that my Gmail quota usage spiked to 2%...
If anyone's curious, I'm attempting to distribute my backups should something go terribly wrong. The obvious place to back up all of my e-mail was to Gmail via IMAP.
...square-drive screws are your friends. Phillips-head screws are not. Neither are ni-cad batteries, nor are the prohibitive price of air-driven nail guns which in retrospect would have easily cut our total time spent by five or six hours.
I spent some of my weekend helping my friend finish his Eagle project. His task was to build a segment of a bridge through a swamp in Reading, Massachusetts. Admittedly, it was a pretty good learning experience: I had some exposure to woodworking, and perhaps more importantly, as my friend put it, was introduced to something called nature: "No, nature doesn't have power...
I figure that at the very least, I'm getting one more year of use out of my laptop and went ahead with buying a new battery. I opted for the six-cell instead of the 12-cell or the 6/12 combo, which I was able to find on eBay for $38 (which is considerably marked down from the HP price of $149 and the Newegg price of $78). I'm glad I did; the six-cell battery offers just over three hours of battery life, and as of yet I haven't managed to purposely discharge the entire thing. Road trip, maybe?
On Saturday, I accompanied...
A particularly humorous discussion as presented in my Statistics class yesterday:
Teacher: This graph shows the distribution per year of total computer virus infections. Notice that numbers remained relatively steady until 1999, when total infections "shot up" quite drastically. Can anyone tell me what happened in 1999?
(Various suggestions offered here.)
Teacher: It's simple, really. Windows 98 came out.
It's my final year in high school. I'm taking four college-level courses, for which I hope I can accrue a few college credits and opt out of some core curriculum classes in college that could otherwise be spent productively. Exactly who in computer engineering is going to need Language and Composition or Economics?
If there's one thing I wish were different about this year, it's that my school had more computer programming courses. Our two options are "Introduction to Computer Programming" and "AP Computer Science", both taught using the Java language. The problem is that Intro to Computer Programming spends most...
By now, it's common knowledge that the ISP megalomaniac, Comcast, has finally disclosed exactly where its bandwidth cap is. While I had often thought that Comcast's cap was low enough to trap anybody that's ever used YouTube, it turns out that the cap has actually been placed at 250GB.
Let me begin by saying that, if my last two months of router logs are any indicator, I don't use 250GB of bandwidth in a full year's time.
Of course, Comcast's own explanation of their quota is still somewhat ambiguous - a certain number of photos or songs, without actually mentioning the size...