February 28, 2003

TGIF. We are working this morning at the Nyskayuna site to the east of Schenectady. That sucks a little because our travel time to home is an extra half an hour longer than it would be if we were leaving straight from Rotterdam like we had been previously.

I tried loading the main SGL page last night over the 26Kbs AOL dial-up connection that we had in our room and it took roughly 33 seconds for the page to totally load. That is so awful. And there are only like seven images on the entire page. And they are all really small. Dial-up is awful. I can’t believe that many of you use this all of the time.

John has decided to buy our old house server, Gordon, from us. Gordon has put in a good long run but he has been replaced by Big Bird and is no longer in service. John will be cleaning out space for Gordon once he gets back home this weekend and he will be coming up on Sunday to pick him up and take him to his new home. John has already gone on eBay and purchased new drives for Gordon and a new processor. Gordon will be quite happy with all of the improvements. We will be happy to finally have all of that equipment moved out of the house. Gordon and his drive system take up a lot of space and I have been storing extra parts for him in boxes everywhere. It will be easier for me to find things once we get him out of here.

Today was mostly a nothing day at Schenectady International. Loop, John and I spent most of the day taking out the garbage, cleaning the staging area and filling out paperwork so that we could finish up. We managed to leave around 3:30 and headed back to Ithaca.

Min is feeling much better today. Her back is not hurting nearly as much as it has been and she is able to get around pretty well. She baked me brownies for my birthday which we are celebrating tomorrow.

My “new” HP portable computer was in my room when I got home. It is really neat. It runs a rare version of UNIX called HP-UX and it runs on an old Motorola 680×0 processor like the old Macs, Amigas and the Atari 512/ST. It has a monochrome amber screen and a detachable keyboard (the H doesn’t work) and a built in dot-matrix printer. It is the weirdest portable computer that I have ever seen. It is even weirder than the laptop that I have with a built in thermal printer. I don’t think that I will ever get any real use out of this machine (I was originally planning on trying to learn HP-UX from it) but it sure makes an awesome addition to my antique computer collection. It is a real reminder of the late 1980’s when Motorola was a dominant force in the processor market and Intel really had to spend a lot of time playing catch-up. In a world where Intel has been the big processor maker for so long, it is hard to remember a time when they were not. With AMD doing such a good job recently, maybe those days will come again.

We arrived home around 7:00 pm. I was totally tired and decided to go to bed really early. Like by 9:30. So, very little news today as I am sleeping.

Dominica’s parents and her brother Joe and coming down to Ithaca to visit tomorrow and to celebrate by birthday. We are planning on going to the Nines for lunch so that we can get Cheese Deluxe sandwiches. Yum!

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