February 8, 2003

Min and I got up this morning and headed straight out to Frankfort to visit her family. It is winter weekend for her brother so he is getting all dressed up and heading off to the school dance (winter weekend is apparently a mix of what I remember as homecoming and the prom.) On the way out of town we stopped by Borders to try exchanging that bad DVD for the new one that they were holding for me. After having two bad experiences in trying to get this problem resolved, I was just waiting for something bad to happen today as well. But, the girl working at the desk who helped me actually did some redeeming for Borders and told me that I would not have to get another copy of the same movie and she happily refunded my money. Then I bought three books there so they made out pretty well. So, I was not nearly so upset after that. We had tons of laundry to do so it was good timing for us to be near a washing machine:) It seems like we washed clothes pretty much all day. We did eight to ten loads, I am sure. We watched a number of movies while we were doing it including Father Goose with Cary Grant, Clambake with Elvia Presley and Toy Soldiers with Sean Astin. We also made a trip out to Walmart and did a little shopping there. We managed to find an awesome deal on a recumbant stationary bicycle so we decided to go ahead and pick it up. It was only $100 which is pretty cheap for excercise equipment. We also found a small stair stepper machine that was all that we needed for only $50 so we picked that up too. It is like having a major portion of a home gym and having only spent $150. Not a bad deal. We do want to get an elliptical machine yet and that won’t be nearly as cheap (we have both used a Gazelle and they totally suck and they can fall over when you get going hard. We found a really nice real one at Dick’s for the same price that we really like that we will probably end up getting eventually.

We went out for dinner with Dominica’s parents at Lotta Burger in Utica which is a funny name but the place is really nice. This is my second time there and I really like it. We stayed out there until 1:30 am and then drove home. I didn’t end up going to bed until 5:00 am which was a bit on the late side. I am trying to get ready for my sleep schedule next week and that is going to be really rough. Especially with three guys splitting a hotel room for four nights.

We didn’t end up having enough to get all of our laundry dried so we have a bunch that we are going to have to dry at the house tomorrow. I did get the stair stepper set up while we were in Frankfort and I tried it out a bit and it seems really nice. I am glad that I got it.

Loopy is planning on staying up all night tonight so that it is easy for him to adjust his schedule tomorrow. He emailed me today to tell me that he had figured out how to start writing his own operating system and managed to get a basic kernel written and to get the GRUB bootloader to load it up and that it ran really well. It doesn’t do much of anything yet but it is there and it really works. For those of you unfamiliar with operating system development, it is one of the hardest things to make. Writing code designed to run your computer is very different from writing code that runs on an operating system that is already there. Imagine trying to work on a computer that does not have anything at all on it. That means NO Windows or DOS or ANYTHING. This is a really big deal that Loopy managed to do this. Most people who work on making their own OSes never make it this far. And this is only day one! Of course, now he is going to be out of town for a week 🙂

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