WEBCAM IS UP

One of the rare pieces of hardware that translated well over to XP was my webcam. I decided to put it up during the day while I’m away from my room.

I have it looking across the road that most people walk along to get to Wreck Beach. I know, the zoom sucks, but web cams are like that. The first person that invents a cheap web cam with an optical zoom will probably get very rich.

I’m in the process of trying to move the cam to a much better position. Stay tuned for that.

In the meantime, you may view the cam here.

BUSINESS CARDS

Every once in a while I think of a stupid way to waste some of my hard-earned and small amount of money. This is one of those times.

I’m thinking of making business cards. I’m not talking about those horrendous full colour ones either. Mine would be black text on a white background. The front would have only one line of text right in the center. It would read, www.erwintang.com. I was going to leave the back blank, but I was thinking of putting the quote, “A shining example of bad web design since 1996”.

You can design business cards on-line and preview your work. I was going to include a screenshot but my screenshot app got hosed from the move over to XP.

If I did get some cards made up, I’d most likely get raised lettering or card stock that had some texture to it. I think that would have a greater impact than some 10 colour layout. What do you think?

I POOP ON YOU MICROSOFT

Things haven’t gone so well since my last post. At this point XP thinks my soundcard can only support two channels rather than 5.1. I actually thought this was my only problem, which I believed was quite solvable.

Since then, the problems have piled on, in much greater severity. First, before I formatted by C:\ drive, I thought I had backed up all my e-mail from my Interchange\Telus account. After I had burned all messages onto a CD, I browsed through the CD to make sure I could see all the files. I could. Stupidly, I thought that meant the files were safe. When I went to import my message back into the new Outlook on XP, it couldn’t read the messages. I tried the CD on two different CD-ROM drives and they couldn’t read it either. It turns out you can see the files and know how big they are but you actually can’t copy them from the CD. What the hell?!?!?! I can’t tell you how many e-mails I had backed up there. There were a lot of registration e-mails on that CD, things like the id/password combos for my domain registrar. I also had a lot of attachments. That CD was the only place I “backed up” those e-mails. I guess I’d be more choked if they were my erwintang.com e-mails, but still. And here’s the kicker, I had a whole bunch of other crap backed up on that CD, stuff I wouldn’t even think twice about if it was lost forever. Guess what? That reads fine.

If that weren’t enough, I also realized how stupid Microsoft’s requirements are for XP. They state that you need 1.5 Gb of free space to install XP. Yes, that’s true but they neglect to tell you won’t be able to install any programs on it afterwards. I have 50 Gb of space spread over two drives. I installed XP on a 2 Gb C:\ partition thinking 500 Mb would be enough for a swap file. And yes, I know that no matter where I install a program, they do put some files on the C:\ drive. Well, wasn’t it a surprise when after intalling a few program on my D:\ drive, I noticed my C:\ drive was up to 1.9 Gb! That’s total bullcrap. Soon XP started complaining about being low on drive space. I was so mad. I would have deleted a few partitions beforehand to make space if I knew I needed it. Now, with XP already installed, it’s going to be a lot harder to resize and move my partitions. Why doesn’t Microsoft tell you you’re gonna need way more than 1.5 Gb???

It’s going take me a day or two to resize my partition and hopefully things will be better. Did you know that Partition Magic 8 costs $100 at Future Shop?

SHINY AND NEW

It took me all afternoon to change over to Windows XP. I’m still installing drivers and applications. It will be several days before everything is back to normal. However, since you’re reading this, things have gone relatively smooth.

I can tell you one thing, I used the Windows XP interface for about 10 minutes before I had to switch back to Windows Classic.

Well, I have to get back to unzipping porn the rest of my apps.

ALI G IN DA HARVARD

For part of Class Day festivities, Havard University brought in comedian Ali G to speak to the students. If you haven’t seen his show, I recommend you find him on either HBO or Showcase. It is quite entertaining.

Anyways, I like Harvard’s choices in their Class Day speakers. In the past they’ve had people like Will Ferrell and Conan O’Brien.

I managed to find an on-line video of Ali G speech. When I viewed it, I thought it was funny, but extremely short. Most Class Day speeches hover around the 20 minute mark. I did a little more snooping and I found a transcript of Ali G’s entire speech. Apparently, Harvard edited out a lot of his remarks from the on-line video. Among the highlights cut out is this little snippet:

Checkit, me agreed to speak here today coz me wanted to talk to de brightest minds of our generation, to see what makes Harvard de most special university in de world, and also coz dey agreed to pay for me flight over here and hotel room. Sorry to bring dis up now, but when u iz told dat your hotel bill is bein paid for, u naturally assume dat dat includes essential extras like breakfast AND special interest pay-per-view movies. Imagine my surprise den dis morning, when I was given a bill for $164. Me was actually tryin to SAVE Harvard money by buying the 24-hour ‘slutfest’ packages at $19.99, rather dan paying for individual films at $11.99 each. Which would have cost u – [go thru them] Young and Tight….Backdoor Burglar 2……Backdoor Burglar 3…..Campus Confessions….Asian Fever…Shaven Buffet [get lost] twice dat one… Cold Mountain – dat was a mistake, Backdoor Burglar 4 ….almost 490 bucks. I mean come on, some of it was even research for dis, I iz sure one of de cheerleaders in ‘Ivy League Amateurs’ was wearin a Harvard sweatshirt…..

Be sure to check out both the video and the full transcript, funny stuff.

A NEW HOME

So for most of the summer, I’ve been faced with the prospect of not knowing where I’ll be living in September. At St. John’s College, they give you two years to complete a Masters. After that, they boot you out even if you’re not done. Well, I’m at the end of my two years and I’ll need a little bit more time to finish up.

You can apply for an extension, but the whole process is murky and a bit shady. Rarely are extensions given, and when they are, no one really knows why or how they got it. I could write a whole book about the mysterious workings of the SJC administrative staff.

Anyways, yours truly applied for an extension and I didn’t get it. For the last several weeks I’ve been wondering what the hell to do. I was wait-listed at a few UBC residences but I wasn’t getting in anytime soon. As of last week, I was number 13 for a one-bedroom apartment at Thunderbird, but there was no guarantee when I’d get that.

I was fully prepared to live at home for the beginning of the school year while I figured out what to do. Mentally, I began to prepare to eat with my parents for dinner again and maybe even let my Mom tuck me in.

Yesterday though, I received an e-mail from Thunderbird Housing. They had reached my position on the wait list. They were offering me a one-bedroom apartment on campus. My problem had been solved.

Today, I went to the housing office to accept my assignment. The lady there gave me some choices: there two apartments available on the 16th of this month or one apartment on the 20th of September. I didn’t want to pay rent for two places at once, so I chose the latter date. Also, that apartment was closer to SJC than the other two. I also know it’s a split-level apartment. I have the address and I’ll probably go look at it this week… from the outside at least.

I’ve never lived in a one-bedroom apartment before. I also don’t have any furniture. I’ll need a bed, desk, and a chair. I’ve determined those are the minimum items I need to procure for my place. I’ve already got my kitchen and bathroom stuff from SJC. My living room will be barren. Everyone is invited to come on over, but you might need to bring a chair. It’d be crazy for me to start buying stuff since I’m poor and I’m only going to be there for seven months.

So, the only complication is that I’ll need to move out to my parents’ place for about three weeks. Two of those weeks will be school weeks, so it won’t be that bad… I hope. My goal is to leave a bit of stuff with my friends here at SJC. What a pain it would be to move all my crap to Port Moody and then move it back just three weeks later.

I’ve got half a glorious month left at SJC and I’m going to make the best of it.