Saturday - feeling a bit tired and 'under the weather'. Thankfully it's a nice long 3-day weekend!
Friday 16 January
2004
Friday - arrgghhh. They want the thesis in "A4".
Which is british empire paper, slightly narrower and slightly taller
than the US standard of 8.5x11 inches. I'll have to email and see if
that is acceptable...
Thursday 15 January 2004
Thursday - I've been trying to help someone finish
their doctorate. It's all done, actually, and just needs printing and
binding. I've got the text - in Microsoft Word 97 ( and can't be
changed, else the equations will be messed up!), and have emailed to
find out details of the binding and so on.
Wednesday 14 January 2004
Wednesday - well, the president has spoken. A new
space policy, goals, missions, and cuts. It's hard to say at this point
what is going to happen - clearly there is a lot of redirection going
on over in the space side of NASA but what it means to the aeronautics
side, where I am, is rather vague. It's been smaller side of NASA for a
long time, since the "space" part was added actually. I should clarify
that - I don't actually know if the aeronautics side of NASA gets more
or less money, percentage wise, than NACA did. Heck, it may be more.
Sometimes I hate Netscape Composer. Now it ignores the space bar until
I type the next character. Given the low quality of my typing, and
hence my continual backspacing and retyping it is an incredibly
annoying thing to happen. Bit rot?
Tuesday 13 January 2004
Tuesday - someone said I was "brief" yesterday. Well,
a combination of unpleasant news at work and an annoying evening
working on a laptop. So, a less brief synopsis of laptop operations:
The laptop saga. It's a middle-aged HP Pavilion laptop, circa 2000,
with Windows XP on it, belongs to a friends daughter. Over time
the operating system has become corrupted, virus ridden, and needs
reinstalling. Unfortunately it didn't come with system disks but with
the system version of XP stored in a secret partition on the hard drive.
So, if the viruses or whatever wreck the hard drive the backup is gone.
Not much of a plan, but it saved HP from shipping 25 cents worth of
CDs. We are hoping that the partition was is OK. Question: how to do it?
XP comes with a system restore, but the only checkpoint was late last
year, not good enough. Nothing
under restore on how to get back to the "as shipped" state. After half
an hour of thrashing about looking on Google it turns out that it is a "system recovery" not a "system restore" for this procedure. Going back to HP's site, sure enough, under the desktop section there is stuff on how to do a recovery. But with a caveat, if XP Service Pack #1 has been installed then the recovery won't complete, and will hang the PC.
Check the laptop. SP1,sigh. But wait - there is a HP patch for the
Microsoft service pack, click "here" it says. Which sends me to a
dead page. More thrashing
around to find a valid copy of the utility. Finally I download it onto
my own desktop (the laptop's networking isn't working), put it on a
floppy, transfer it to the laptop, and run it there. It fails. Some ID number missing. Check Google again ( the HP pages not showing any sign that anyone has ever
had this fail...) and sure enough, someone had this problem, and
someone replied! Alright! The solution is at hand!. Check the reply: "email HP".
Arrgghhh. So, I messed around, emailed people, and eventually got the
laptop networking to work again. But as of late evening, no replies to the emails, so I'm waiting before trying the system restore...
I also tried putting a new anti virus software, Norton 2004, on the
laptop. It wouldn't activate because there was no network connectivity
at first. Then, after I got connectivity to work it still just hangs,
without any error or progress messages, for hours, 'configuring', after
supposedly "activating".
I'm going to get my sliderule out.
In other news, the weather continues fine....
Monday 12 January 2004
Monday - eh.
Sunday 11 January 2004
Sunday - didn't do a lot. Cleaned up the garage a bit, visited with some friends, went out to lunch, worked on computers a bit.
Picture of the Week
Photo Notes:
Each year, at the Rose Parade, the two California State Polytechnic
Universities get together and create a float. This year is was
apparently some sort of sea theme...
Travels and Images