Blog - /Personal

I feel like giving an account of my trip to Purdue today, so I shall do so.

As I was walking about 3/4 of a mile from my car to the office area with a computer case in my hands, I realized how much control I have over my environment when I'm at my dad's house. I lacked said control on campus.

• You can't park anywhere close to the campus with a residence parking permit, unless it's after 17:30.
• Parking garages (even after 17:30) have the entire first floor reserved for those with special permits.
• One way roads are the norm in the vicinity of campus, which means you have to keep special Point A to Point B routes memorized and link them together in order to get to your destination.
• I decided not to take my laptop along because of the outside temperature (hot and humid) and the thing's weight, which meant I was stuck with the radio. I like being able to pick my own playlist :^( .

It's not a nice campus to visit for prospective students. When I came with my dad, and later with my mom, we made wrong turns each time and felt harried due to the parking silliness and one-way roads.

Back to the point: hauling the donations from others to the office wasn't too big of a deal. It was really annoying though to realize that I would have to wait an hour (until 17:30) in order to be able to get close enough to campus to drop of the stuff I was bringing with me for PLUG, because they don't allow undergrads to drive on campus until then. So I made a quick stop, parked closer than before, stole a mail cart, and took my things in.

Our office machine, which is the only one with X installed, got a new hard drive and a re-installation of Debian. The old hard drive had been failing at times of activity and freezing the machine. I have a suspicion that the chipset of that machine might be to blame: it might benefit from an extra option or two that isn't enabled in the stock kernel.

I tested my donated machine and two other machines to decide how to distribute parts. The machine from my dad (which was sans hard drive) did not turn on. My machine booted but did not have a network card. The other machine required me to hit F1 because of some error with the floppy disk every time I booted. I tried to fix this by unplugging the floppy drive, but then it refused to boot at all and beeped Morse code at me. It continued to do so even when I reconnected the drive. Curses. That thing had a horrible case design. I hate and loathe the cases that have the top, left, and right parts all in one piece; they are difficult to get back on. It managed to draw blood from my knuckles and the back of my hands in about 4 places.

/me fantasizes about introducing the rogue machine to "Mr. Hacksaw" the next time he visits the office ....

I got as far as installing a network card in my donated machine, but was too tired by that time to start an installation. If I recall correctly, even that machine started to make a few funny noises at me when I inserted the installation CD. I decided to inventory the donations (as requested by the donors) and head back. I wonder what PLUG policy should be concerning books about proprietary software. I'd vote for giving them to CSociety, but I'll have to ask the other officers for their opinions.

On the way back, I purchased enough gas to get me back to dad's house. A trip to McDonald's for 2 McChicken sandwiches and a strawberry shake provided sustenance. For half of the trip, I was stuck behind people who went 55 in a 55 zone. Morons, don't they know you have to keep traffic moving? 62 is a minimum polite speed to travel in a 55 zone. I didn't feel motivated enough to pass such vehicles until someone ahead of me took the initiative and started passing people.

I took some pictures of the office and the surrounding area. Now to decide what to do with them. I'd like to do some magic with the Wiki and autogenerated image albums. I'll definitely post a link when I'm not so tired and not so craving of Trigun.

On the topic of big plans: I would like to play around with OpenLDAP and NFS on the office machines so that accounts for everyone can exist on every machine with a minimum of hassle. Another benefit would be that the HOME directories (much akin to the "My Documents" folder for all you Windows users) could be centralized and be accessible from any machine. Now that we've got that nice 40 GB hard drive installed on the office machine, it's time to put it to use!