/dev/zero

I’ve been hanging out at the church a lot this week, now that I’m the stage manager for the inagural production of the Labyrinth Theater. I’ve been helping out with set / seating construction and technical (computer) issues in the theater office. I’ve been trying to get my laptop to work with the churchs’ 802.11b router with no luck. I have the WEP key and have verified it is correct. My laptop will authenticate with the router, but the router doesn’t pass it an IP address.
I spoke to Martin yesterday and he suggested perhaps the admin had MAC locking turned on. We called him and found out he does not have MAC locking enabled. If I have the WEP key it should be working fine.
Laurel brought her brand new laptop in today, with a Linksys 802.11g card and it is having the same problem. Someone tried to tell her it was because she’s trying to use a G card with a B router. I explained that that doesn’t matter and her husband agreed, explaining that their router at home, with which this equipment works just fine, is also a B router.
I have attempted to log into the router here at the church (I’m connected to ethernet right now) and confirmed that it is also a Linksys router (Skywise, my laptop, uses Intel Centrino wireless), so it’s not a brand cross-compatibility issue. I was told what SHOULD be the password for the router, but it isn’t working.
Anyone have any ideas? (The admin isn’t available to troubleshoot it. He has a regular day job.)

<sigh> I should have expected this.

I recently had to rebuild Skywise, my laptop. I had to repartition and reformat the hard drive, reinstall the OS and all software. The laptop came with Norton Antivirus 2004. When the complimentary virus signature update period expired, I paid for an additional year through Symantec’s web site.
After re-building the system, I was able to download the “trial” version of NAV 2004, which comes with a 16 day trial period. I contacted Symantec customer support to have them send me my registration key so my “trial” download wouldn’t expire until my paid subscription runs out.

What did I get back from some guy in India?
“The version of Anti-Virus installed on your laptop by the manufacturer is a complementary OEM version. The trial version of the software is not “licesneced”. If you like you can purchase an upgrade to NAV 2004…”

No, you nimrod, I already “purchased an upgrade”. I just need my license key!

I just received an unusual phone call.
Back story: I used to do theater in high school
My church is affiliated with the Labyrinth Theater. Last week I happened to be at the church picking up some papers for Mom. While I was there I dropped in on the Labyrinth office to say hello to Kevin Ash, the theater’s founder / artistic director and a member of my Sunday school class. I’d talked to him about helping out with the theater (which is just getting off the ground with it’s first production) before. I told him I could come by and help with set construction the next day and all that week. Unfortunatly other activities around the house took higher priority so I wasn’t able to help out last week.

So about 5 minute ago Laural Ruff (the theater manager) called and asked if I was willing to stage manage the show.
I haven’t done theater in almost 10 years. I haven’t stage managed since ‘88. This should be interesting.

After much fooling around with it and attempting a number of things that at first partially fixed the problem, but then more fooling made it even worse, I finally gave up. I pulled out my full-install XP cd, reformatted the entire drive and installed a fresh, clean instance of XP sp1. Luckily Winbook makes getting all the drivers for my laptop downloaded and installed a breeze. I even discovered a utility for my wireless that wasn’t previously installed that gives me access to a number of config settings and data that were hidden behind the XP interface (Intel 2200Pro utilities)
I’ve just finished downloading and installing all Windows updates and installing Service Pack 2 RC 2.
Now all I need to do is figure out how to download and install Norton Antivirus and get my subscription working. May have to talk to Symantec tech support for that.

(Not that any of them will see this or pay any attention to it, but…)

Don’t waste your time spamming my blog. Spamming my blog is even more useless than spamming my email. The purpose of blog-spamming isn’t to get ME to see your spam, or even to get my readers to see it, but purely to get your URL onto my page, so Google will index it and increase your pages “Page Rank”.
However my blog software does not make any new comment available for reading by anyone until I presonally review and approve the comment. Obviously I’m not going to “approve” your spam, so it will just get deleted without ever being seen by Google.
Spamming my blog is merely wasting both my and YOUR time and resources and gets you NOTHING.

Download file

If anyone can take a look at the above and tell me how the hell to fix my system, I’d be most grateful.
Details: I was preparing for my trip to New Mexico and needed more room for music to take with me, so I torched my Linux partition and reformatted it NTFS, mounting it in the “My Music” folder of my profile. I wasn’t thinking too far ahead and forgot that the Grub stage 1.5 and config files were on the Linux partition, so I had effectivly nuked my boot loader as well, turning my laptop into a brick.
I attempted to use Vcom’s “Fix-It Utilities” to repair the damage with no luck (hint: their software is junk).
I eventually restored a working boot loader by reinstalling a minimal Mandrake installation. This installed Lilo, which recongized my Windows install. My first boot into Windows went right in as I had shut down by “hibernating”. However on my frist attempt to do a full shutdown and restart of windows, it died. It gives me the boot logo screen with the scrolling bar, then the screen goes black and the system locks up. I’ve attempted to do a “safe mode” startup, which gives me the text mode display of all the drivers it loads, but it locks up just after “loading agp440.sys”. I know from experience that this means agp440.sys loaded succesfully and the problem is something AFTER this point. However, finding nothing else useful in the MS knowledge base, I went with what it suggested anyway and used recovery console to disable agp440.sys. This had no effect.
The above is my boot log from my last attempt to boot.
I HAVE successfully reinstalled XP into a new directory, but it is a (ahem) less than legit CD key, does not have my user profile and none of my software. Since the CD key is bogus, I can’t go through Windows Update. I’d like to have my fully legitimate XP Pro working with all my installed software and user profile.

I got back from Taos, New Mexico, last night. It was exactly 20:00 CDT (UTC -5), when I took the key out of the ignition and closed the garage door behind me. We left Taos at 06:15 MDT (UTC -6). Total travel time: 12:45. Total distance: 746.3 miles. I drove about 200 of that, from just east of Amarillo to Vernon.

I’ll do a more complete write-up of the whole trip later. I’ll probably back-date the entries, to cover each day of the trip.

Our accomodations in Taos, The Abominable Snowmansion, were truly abominable. The shower was tiny, the floorboards under the linoleum were rotted out and you had to be careful turning on the hot water lest you scald yourself (I’m not kidding - the water was seriously hot enough to cause serious burns. Someone is going to get hurt some day if they don’t turn it down.) It was hard work. I got very dirty. I have boots and pants that are not fit to be seen and will disappear into the back of my closet until next year. And I’d happily finish my laundry, throw it in my bag and go back tomorrow.

Sat., 10 July - Meet at the church at 06:30, meet most of the rest of the mission team: Ann, Christine, Jessica, Stephen, Vance, Jeff and Alic, our new associate pastor, load up the van and leave for Taos. Approx. 12 hours later, arrive at The Abominable Snowmansion and meet up with the rest of our team: Bud and Carol, our team leaders who arrived two days earlier with all the food. I drive about 265 miles of the outbound trip, from just east of Amarillo to Las Vegas, NM. Unload the van, eat dinner, some of the team heads off to the pow wow; I go to bed.

Sunday, 11 July - Up for breakfast, off to Sunday service at El Pueblito UMC where our contingent of 11 is about 1/3 of the congregation. Back to the Snowmansion for lunch, then off to the pueblo to attend the last day of the pow wow. (Pictures later) We left early, around 16:30, 17:00, but the pow wow lasted until about 21:30. I had a beutiful hemetite necklace made.

Mon, 12 July - Early start, off to the pow wow grounds to help dismantle the arena. Lunch provided by the indians. With our help, get the arena dismantled in about 12 hours. (They’ve tried leaving it up all year, but someone started torching it every year, so they have to take it down every year after the pow wow and put it back up the following year.) I leave with Carol to help get dinner ready. That evening Jimmy, one of the tribal elders, drops in on us at the Snowmansion to say hello. He invites us to visit him at his ranch just up the road. He takes Stepehn with him to show him how to get to the ranch and where the keys to the gate and his cabin are.

Tues, 13 July - Finally we go onto the Pueblo grounds to do the work we came here to do: this year, more work on the Garcia house. We arrive to find that the floor has been completed since last year and some of the plastering. We get to work on completing the plastering and painting all the walls. We knock off early that day to return to the Snowmansion and get cleaned up, then drive out to la junta point, at the Wild Rivers Recreation Area. Dave Gomez, our liason with the Pueblo, his wife Vera, their son and daughter-in-law and their son join us for a wonderful dinner. After dinner the Gomez family returns home and we have communion service, then return to the Snowmansion.

Wed, 14 July - Back to work on the Garcia house. Dave drops in to say hello. Much painting and plastering is done. Jeff decides not to work that day. The electrician drops by to take a look at the rooms that need to be finished, then leaves. Myra Gomez’ (the woman who will be moving into the house when it’s done) brother drops in to check out the house and say hello. He lives right next door, but has never so much as waved at any of us, on this trip or any prior. Bud and I have a long conversation with him about this and that. The electrician comes back with his crew just as we’re leaving. Bud, Carol and I relax on the back patio of the Snowmansion to watch the thunderstorm over the mountains before bed.

Thurs, 15 July - More work on the Garcia house. Late in the day Bud sends Vance, Christine and Jeff off to the Headstart facility to get started on prep work to pour a new concrete floor for their storage shed. Benito, the supervisor of last year’s mission team, drops in with Harold (Jimmy’s son and the tribal sherrif) and Harold’s deputy to have a look and say hello. Most of us go out to the Rio Grande Gorge while others go to Old Blinking Light for drinks. Those of us who went to the Gorge return to the Snowmansion. Some of us change clothes and join the others at OBL.

Friday, 16 July - Finish up plastering and painting the Garcia house while Vance, Kristina and Christine finish the prep work for the concrete floor at the Headstart storage facility. Jeff, who has refused to do any real work since Tues, is detailed to Carol, who puts him to work helping make lunch and dinner. Clean up our work area, scrub the floors and head back to the Snowmansion to get cleaned up and eat lunch, then we get to explore the historic Taos Pueblo (Pictures later). After the pueblo, we join those who chose to skip the pueblo in town for window shopping, then back to the Snowmansion for dinner. After dinner I pack up my things, then join some of the others in the lobby where Stephen and Vance are watching Christine and Jessica play chess. The ladies get upset with their kibitzing and walk off in disgust, so Vance and I finish their game. The ladies come back and play cards at the table while I kick Vance’s butt at two more games of chess.

Sat, 17 July - Up very early for breakfast, then we hit the road. Arrive at the Church about 19:20, unload the van, I get home at exactly 20:00. Unload my car, drop everything in the living room, undress and head straight for the pool and shower. It feels good to take a shower where my elbows aren’t constantly banging the walls and I don’t have to worry about burning off my skin.

More detailed descriptions of each day later.

Back around Christmas I was cleaning my office and was quite annoyed to discover that many of my CD jewel cases were empty. I was upset because most of the empty cases were for my favorite CDs, and I knew I’d played many of those CDs since moving to Texas. I couldn’t blame their disappearance on getting lost in the move out here.

Tomorrow I leave for Taos, New Mexico. I wanted to bring as much of my music with me, so I’ve been ripping everything to MP3 on my laptop. I started digging in my closet for all the CDs that got put away when my office got painted, and ran across a wooden CD storage box (the type you might use to store your favorite CDs on your desk at work, if you had a nice office) and lo and behold, all those missing CDs are there.
I have all my favorite tunes again.

Based on the lj interests lists of those who share my more unusual interests, the interests suggestion meme thinks I might be interested in
1. reading score: 16
2. movies score: 13
3. music score: 13
4. science fiction score: 12
5. anime score: 10
6. coffee score: 9
7. monty python score: 9
8. writing score: 8
9. star trek score: 8
10. computer games score: 8
11. harry potter score: 7
12. plano score: 7
13. cats score: 7
14. life score: 6
15. frisco score: 6
16. history score: 6
17. dvds score: 6
18. lord of the rings score: 6
19. chocolate score: 5
20. roleplaying score: 5

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<pant!><pant!><gasp!><gasp!>
Nothing like finding out the key chain dongle that is supposed to deactivate your burgler alarm doesn’t work from the kitchen.
I accidentley activated the system from the keypad by the back door, then it wouldn’t take the code to deactivate it. And the key dongle wasn’t working. I set off the alarm when I stepped into the other room to grab the other dongle. Luckily that one worked.
The security company just called a minute ago to check that everything was ok. I didn’t realize simply deactivating the alarm wasn’t enough. Apparently you have to “cancel” it or they do their thing. Good thing my parents told me the pass phrase in case that ever happened.

Livejournal user Chuck_lynn asks “I think it is awesome that you are going to work on the reservation.. what will you be doing? I look forward to the details.”

This is my first time going, but I’m told whenever our coordinator asks the contact on the reservatin that same question, the response is “We don’t know yet. Ask us when you get here.” They’re not very organized it seems.
For those who are interested, this is the reservation.
Our group will also be attending the pow wow on the evening of the 10th.

Yeah, yeah, I haven’t updated much lately. Haven’t had much going on to update people about.
Anyway, I had a quiet July 4th weekend. Pretty much kept to myself most of the weekend. Sat at home watching TV most of the time.
I invited the DFWUfies over for a 4th of July BBQ, but only one person said she was coming. I got one “maybe”, and no one else responded.

Saturday evening I trolled through the latest postings on Monster and sent my resume out to 35 or 40 potential job listings.
Sunday I went to church, then called Amethyst as I was leaving to make sure she had directions. She told me due to the distance and being broke, she wasn’t coming after all. I told her I understood (and I do), but I admit I got a little pissed off at that point. I figured ONCE in a while people could drive up here to N. Dallas instead of me having to drive down to Grapevine / Bedford / Fort Worth all the time. The more I thought about it through the day, the angrier I got. I’ve lived here for a year now and no one will come up here to my turff, and the only time they get together is to eat dinner and see a movie, things which cost money. I do realize that for Amethyst and her house mates, it IS a long drive, and being a student and a teacher working part time for the summer she’s just as broke as I am, without the luxury of parents to pay for her gas. I can’t blame her for being hesitant to drive 80 miles to get here. I was just frustrated as hell. Anyway, around 1:30 she called back to tell me she had called Vulpine and they decided to come up after all. They got here around 3:30 and we just kicked back and relaxed. Took a dip in the pool for a while, came back inside and cooked burgers and hotdogs (the grill was out of gas) then watched Bulletproof Monk.
After the movie we headed off to the Breckenridge Park fireworks show. Richardson put on a good show this year. We found real nice seats right by the water. Getting back on the shuttle buses after the show was a bit of a pain, due to the way they had the barriers set up to direct people onto the bus (they tried to tell us we had to go back to the end of the line because we were outside the erected barriers, that we couldn’t even see until we were almost to the front of the line). When we got back to the house, Amethyst and Vulpine had to leave right away, as it was already 11:30 and she had to work the next day. As they were walking to her car, she let out an EEP! I poked my head out the door to see what was wrong and there was a large armadillo walking around in the front bushes. I’ve never seen live armadillo before. This one was pretty big, probably 18 inches from snout to tail (not including his tail). He did not like having a flashlight on him though. He kept running from it, eventually making it around to the south side of the house before disappearing into the bushes next to the creek. That was kinda cool.
Monday was a lay-about day. Ended up staying up all night Sunday night, then went to bed around 6 on Monday. Woke up at Midnight when Dad called from Las Vegas to give me flight info. Went back to sleep, woke up around 6 AM. A little earlier than I’d like to get up, but after 12 hours of sleep, I wasn’t going to get any more, so I read for an hour or so, then got up.
I was late getting out the door to pick Mom and Dad up from the airport today, and their flight status info said their flight was running early. About half way to the airport, Dad called to tell me they were on the ground. Great. Now I’m really running late.
I got to the airport about 5 minutes after their plane was scheduled to land, about 15 minutes after it actually landed. Pulled up to the door and tried to call Dad. He’d turned off his cell phone. Make note to lecture Dad about turning off his cell phone when meeting someone at the airport. Wait 5 minutes, calling every minute, with no luck. After about 5 min, I figure security is going to start looking at me funny, not to mention other cars behind me, so I pull out and around and find a way into the parking garage. Luckily DFW makes this easy. Found a good spot and parked. Just as I was getting out of the car my phone starts ringing. It’s a recruiter. I tell him it’s not a good time, can he call me back? The recruiter agrees to call back in an hour and a half. Went inside and start looking for Mom and Dad. They’re nowhere to be seen. They’ve been on the ground for half an hour by now, and the way DFW is laid out, baggage claim is is right next to the arrival gates. Walk up and down from one end of baggage claim to the other and back, still no sign of him. His cell phone number is still going direct to voicemail and the signal in the terminal is strong. Finally I resort to having him paged. About 5 minutes after the PA pages him, he calls me on my cell phone. Their plane had to sit on the tarmac a while until their gate cleared and they could pull in. I walked up to him and gave him the lecture about not turning off his cell phone as soon as he completes a call. Mom is quite amused, as this is the same lecture he has given her (and I have given her) on several occasions.
Dad and I stand by the carousel until Mom’s bag comes, then we go out to the car and head home.
Half-way home, the recruiter calls back. It’s only been an hour, but we’re on our way home and I’m not driving, so I talk to him. He decides I’ve got most of the qualifications needed for the job he’s trying to fill, but not all of them, so I’m not a match (the key ones I didn’t have are Exchange 5.5, which is kinda important for this job.) He’s going to call back tomorrow so he can get my resume in Word format (why the hell he needs that I don’t know. If it’s that important, he can just import my TXT version into his template.)
Anyway, that was my weekend, and life of late.
Next week, I leave bright and early on the Saturday morning to go with my church’s mission trip to Taos, New Mexico, to do work on the pueblos on the indian reservation. I’ll be out of touch until some time on the 17th or 18th.

I am a member of 8 cliques of size 8

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I have no idea what their criteria for a “clique” is, but oh well…