Benfalk Blog

Today was a pretty good day.  In spite of quite a few interruptions I set out on building the web kiosk system I have been working on from the ground up today.  I opted to try Gentoo’s minimal install for it’s speed and ease of use.  So far I must say I have learned quite a bit more about Linux that I previously didn’t know.  If anyone wants to learn more of the nuts and bolts to Linux, or the idea behind any operating system for that mater, I recommend installing Gentoo from scratch.  It makes you compile your kernel from source, which, in theory will give you a leaner and faster running operating system because it will only have the things you need it to have.

I brought the kiosk system home from work so I could finish getting some things squared away on it because it was bugging me.  Before I did though, I went for a run tonight to try and keep some sort of order to my training.  When I got back from my run Mason helped me by explaining how to load up different kernels into my boot section.  Now I have a game plan to make a final clamped and locked down kernel for the system when I have it all ready for release =) .

A large part of my evening, aside from running was spent over at Lucas’s watching Blade… ‘LOL’ at the graphics for that movie.  After the movie we made a voyage to Walmart, in which I made a quick purchase of 48 cans of tuna, 4 pounds of spinach, and a tube a carmex cream for my lips… what a life I live haha.  Tomorrow is my Friday since I have Wednesday off from work before the big Thanksgiving holiday. I’m hoping to pull an all-night coding tomorrow and finally finish my user library for Codeigniter!

I didn’t get as much accomplished today as I wanted, but all in all it wasn’t a bad day.  Lucas and I went down to help our mom again.  We mainly cleared out stuff from her bedroom and moved it down to the basement to get it out of the way.  We had a fairly big lunch and I ended up falling asleep on the couch for about two hours =\ .  Before we left around 5:30 or so we made sure mom had plenty of wood in the house to keep the fireplace going until Thanksgiving… which I found out today is going to be down at our parents house for the Falk side of the family.

Before we got back home I got a call that the email was not working in the Philippines which had me a little irritated as I knew it was going to take a bit to get it going again.  After it was solved I started working on my user library again.  I am very close to getting it done!  I am extremely glad that this is only a two day work week, which will give me plenty of time to test it and make a nice front end package to it =).

Before I go to bed tonight I’m going to look into how I can better manage my multiple monitors in Linux.  It is really nice having the multiple monitors.. but it would be really nice if there is a window manager or something of the sort for it.

Today was a pretty good day.  I did some work on the user library for CodeIgniter and then Lucas and I went down to help our mom with stuff around the house.  We met at Pizza Hut and had an early lunch while finding out the only thing our mom really wanted done today was to move her water bed upstairs in Lucas’s old bedroom.  The longest part of the process was the draining and filling of the bed.  Our mom wanted to put the bed in the room at an angle to maximize the wall space… which seemed goofy to me but oh well =) .

Water Bed Construction

While we waited for the water bed to fill back up we cleaned out the ashes in the fireplace, brought some firewood in and restarted the fireplace.  There was still a ton of hot coals in the fireplace and judging by the amount of ash in the fireplace it looks like mom has been running the fireplace quite a bit this week.

When we got back I started doing a bit of research on my system and started looking for a descent walk-through on how to up my system a bit.  I did eventually find a good walk-through, although it does have some gaps in the explanation.  I’m running memory tests on my machine right now, but already I can tell it’s a ton faster than it was initially =) .  I think the real problem with the system was it was running my memory slower because it wasn’t giving the memory the voltage it needed.  It’s almost 1am but I want to see this system up performance through before I head to bed.  After looking around for a good walk-through on how to overclock your system I am planning to do some research on these newer AMD systems and make my own walk-through!

Today was a descent day.  I didn’t get a whole lot done today at work because this morning I was bombarded with calls, one right after another it seemed like until about 10am.  When I finally was able to sit down at my desk and get some coding pounded out a person showed up to work on some of our measuring machines as part of an annual maintenance contract.  I led him around the building to show him the devices and gave him a quick break down of everything that I knew was wrong with them.

At lunchtime today I finished chapter eight in my C++ book =) .  After lunch my day seemed to fly right by as I got a little bit of coding done and thought out some logic problems I knew I was going to run into with my project.  When I got home tonight I changed into some warmer gear and went on a run like I had promised myself I would do last night.  I am very glad that I went to bed early last night, it seemed to help me through the whole day a lot better.  After my run Lucas wanted to go to Walmart to pick up a frozen pizza and some tea so I tagged along and got a bag of generic brand cereal, “Honey Nut Scooters,” and a gallon of milk.

The rest of my evening so far has been spent in disapointment trying to overclock my system to a degree in attempts to get it’s performance up higher… but it just won’t do it.  I have not given up yet, I’m going to do some more reading on what it is I need to do to get this system running faster, but not tonight.  I’ll worry about it later.  Going to spend the rest of my evening working on my windows installation some and get it ready for the LAN party next weekend =) .

Today was a descent day.  I was able to get some coding done at work and all in all had few problems to deal with, minus an error that cropped up due to a downed database in the afternoon.  When I got home from work I kept loading up the Linux part of my system to get it back to where it was before my system went dead on me.  For the most part it’s back up and seems to be working well =) .   I know I have some extra helper software and programs that I need to install yet, but that will come when the need reminds me of it.

In spite of sounding like a broken record and pending any other show stoppers, I have two goals that I really want to knock out of the way this weekend.  I am finishing the user library package for CodeIgniter and getting a long run in as well.  My running has really slacked this week from lack of sleep and poor planning with my daily schedule.  This lack of sleep issue has really tolled on my system and I am heading to bed tonight by 9:45pm.  I normally head to bed by 10pm but lately it seems like its after midnight before I’m in bed.  Tomorrow I’m going to get back into the groove of scheduled running and plan to hammer out a long run on Sunday.

PS: Michelle, hope things turn around for you and happier days find their way back.

Today was a long day.  I was tired the whole day and was pretty busy in the morning trying to get caught up on some stuff that cropped up from my day of absence.  My Acer monitor and new motherboard showed up today.  I always have my stuff shipped directly to my workplace so I set up my new monitor on my work PC as a second display monitor and it was awesome =) .  I brought my tower in to work today and blew out the dust and mounted my new motherboard in it near the end of the day and from the small time I ran it I knew it was running boat loads better with the new motherboard.

When I got home I installed Windows XP first and made sure all the drivers were working.  Lucas stopped by to pick me up to go to Pizza Hut and before we left I started up the memory test that I was running before.  After we got back the memory test was at about sixty percent and had no errors on the same memory it had found so many errors with just last week.  I felt confident with my memory and canceled the test.

We found out tonight that Jake won’t be coming home for Thanksgiving =( .  It turns out if he has to go further than 300 miles from the base he has to take public transportation to do so and the cheapest form we could find that would give him enough time to even be here was over $500… sucks bad cause I know how much he wanted to come back for the day after Thanksgiving LAN party.  We’ll have another one when he gets back for Christmas leave!

Going to finish installing a base fresh install of Linux on my computer and head to bed… hopefully tomorrow I can get back into a normal routine of coding and running.

PS.  My Linux of choice is the new Ubuntu 8.10, 32 bit edition.  I hope the 32 bit edition works better with WINE, a Linux package I have tried to use in the past to play windows games and run other miscellaneous windows apps.

Today was not a productive day for me.  I spent a good amount of my day chasing down problems and fixing issues that probably shouldn’t need to be fixed.  I was reading my C++ book at noon today and I found a very excellent quote in it that I would like to share..

The ability to hold views that are not logically self-consistent is a hallmark of the human mental process.

Stephen Prata

Not a drop of code was worked on tonight.  I left work at 4pm so I could get some stuff done and out of the way before I got down to some good old coding… but it never happened.  I wanted to go out tonight and run somewhere between eight and ten miles but that never happened either.  My legs where not feeling well and the freezing air eventually sent me back home with just a tad over five miles under my legs =\ .

When I got back I helped Lucas fix our uncle’s PC and after he left I decided to take a nap… My “nap” turned into a 3.5 hour sleep and I am just barely going to finish this post before midnight haha.

PS:  I bought this shirt on Woot today…

Woot Shirt, OMG

Today was a rolling, slow day.  I dinked around with some Wordpress templates a little bit in the morning until Lucas, Mason, and I traveled down to visit my mom.  We didn’t do much work, mainly for my part I brought in a bunch of firewood and started a fire in the fireplace.  The TV in my parents living room has developed a jumping picture so Lucas and I took a look at it and found that it’s not the TV at all.  It’s the DVR from the satellite that is goofed up.

When we got back up to Fort Wayne somehow we ended up watching a movie called “Bio-dome” and then Lucas packed up his PC and left.  I made a quick run to Walmart for grocery items and then puddled around the remainder of my evening helping Mason try to get a virtual PC set up so he can play the legacy game “Mist”

I read a bit of my C++ book, almost to chapter eight.  Sometimes the chapters seem like they are almost over and then a whole new subsection crops up.  It breaks my rule, but I checked and I still have 15 pages to read in this blasted chapter seven.  I know I have fallen short on my C++ reading but it seems like there just isn’t enough time to do everything I want to do.  Such is life I guess.

Today was an awesome day for me =) .  I woke up this morning and got ready to head over to my buddy Sam’s so we could head down to run the first annual WOOF race down in Wells county.  It was raining and cold all morning long for the event.  On my first lap through the course I quickly learned that I was over-dressed for the event however and dumped off my jacket and sock hat at the beginning rest area on the end of our first lap.  I had a great time talking to Sam while we ran the event and I was extremely pleased at my fatigue levels through most of the race.  On the last lap Sam kept telling me to break on forward and eventually I did.  I opened up the throttle and ran at about my high end training pace at mile 12 or so of the race and felt great.

A couple people took note of my dress attire and hair, which I thought was pretty cool =) .  I wore my Walrus vs Eggmen T-shirt and a pair of rock-ware Pink Floyd pants (Dark Side of the Moon Edition. )  I saw on Sam’s blog that my time was 2:37:57.  I think that is a pretty good time for the run we did, which was definitely a tad over 16 miles =D .

Once I was back at my apartment Lucas was rearing to head out and get working on his car, which I don’t blame him.  Luckily we found the source of his oil leak which turned out to be the oil pressure sensor just beyond his oil filter.  The part to replace it was $12.95 and the time spent replacing it was only about 2 hours for the whole job.  He was happy and I was also relieved to see his car is in good condition.

I’m pretty exhausted from the day so I’m signing out early tonight.. 10:45.. maybe not so early I guess haha.  Lucas and I are headed back down to the homestead tomorrow as well so I’m thinking I may not get a chance to finish my user library this weekend as I planned, but that’s okay.  I had enough fun today to justify not getting it done.

WOOF Race T-shirt

Eating after the race.