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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

  • Weekend Update

    The Kerezman Clan had quite the weekend this time around. Erica went to the chess tournament held at the Oregon Convention Center from Friday through Sunday. She ended up with a 2.5 ranking (two wins and a half-point “buy”) of which we are all very, very proud. When you figure that this is her first year of playing chess in a competitive environment, she’s done very well for a 2nd-grader. Way to go, Erica!

    On Saturday we went to celebrate my grandfather’s 75th birthday. Other than Aunt Jean, we were the sole representatives of “our side” of the family. Granddad’s son Eric was there with some of his family and other relatives. We got to pig out on Mary’s wonderful cooking, embarassing stories were exchanged, and a generally nice time was had by all. We were there for over five hours; in our family that qualifies as a family togetherness marathon.

    Sunday was spent with the girls going to the last two rounds of chess competition and the boys going to the office. Alexander and I went around to all of the sales cubes to run the software inventory data collection program John Graefe at Corporate put together. Everything went smoothly, and we celebrated by hanging out in the training room and eating mac-and-cheese. When the girls were done they came to pick us up, and then we rented some videos and collapsed in the living room for the rest of the day.

    It was a splendid, busy weekend.

  • Anti-aliased fonts!

    This probably ranks quite low on the scale of “Things Geeks Should Do With Their Linux Boxen,” but I’ve been wanting to see working anti-aliased Truetype fonts under Linux for years. Thanks to the instructions on this page I was able to do just that. Actually, I had to read the gdkxft documentation thoroughly and repeatedly as there were some quirks on my newly-rebuilt Zero that made it a bit more difficult to implement.

    As of now, Zero has a nearly complete set of software and interfaces. My next move is to set up some more of the guts-level stuff, mostly so that when the machine is restarted everything comes back up that’s supposed to. (Email, webserver, etc.)

  • The Fortnight Friday Five

    Or, as Jessy might typo, the Firday Five. *chortle*

    • What are your hobbies? – You mean, other than all the time I spend geeking around on computers? Oh yeah, I have a decent-sized music collection, I’m into anime (especially on DVD), various Sci-Fi TV shows, various and sundry Fantasy/SF writers, and occasionally I get all creative and make a video or a wallpaper or write something.
    • Do you collect anything? If so, what? – CDs by certain recording artists (Genesis, including solo acts; Midnight Oil; Jethro Tull; Pet Shop Boys; used to collect Depeche Mode, etc). Some comic book titles, mostly imported manga like No Need For Tenchi and Sailor Moon. Go ahead, laugh.
    • Is there a hobby you’re interested in, but just don’t have the time/money to do? – Model vehicles. I love radio controlled boats, cars, planes and just about any other vehicle they can think of building in working miniature. That stuff’s expensive, though. It also helps to have good mechanical skills, which I tend to lack.
    • Have you ever turned a hobby into a moneymaking opportunity? – I’ve never turned anything into a moneymaking opportunity.
    • Besides web-related stuff (burbs, rings, etc.), what clubs do you belong to? – None at the moment, though I keep threatening to join NOVA (Northern Oregon/Vancouver Anime) even though the meetings are almost always on days when I can’t attend.

    Friday Five

  • Zero Plays Television

    At long last, I have audio and visual cable TV on my computer. Again. This time around, though, it’s the new ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder card that’s providing the TV tuning. It took some hoop-jumping to get working, including a switch to the Alsa sound drivers. Turns out that yes, Virginia, the internal audio cables on the AiW Radeon are just like those on earlier AiW models.

    In other news, I’ve stocked my Mozilla 1.0.0-rc1 install with the usual slate of plugins; Acrobat Reader, RealPlayer and the Java Runtime Environment 1.4.0 are all installed on the box; Evolution is working perfectly. It kind of balances out the parts of my workday that were totally crappy…

  • Enco, Win2K, Digigram, Tyan. Bastards, all of ’em.

    Today’s project was to get the new Newsroom 1 Enco workstation online. Piece of cake, right?

    (James Burke voice:) Wrong!

    (If you don’t get that bit, I insist that you find a copy of The Day The Universe Changed, all of it, and watch the series through. Then you will.)

    Thanks to Win2k’s ACPI and the damned Tyan motherboard’s inability to set IRQs by slot, I swapped cards around in that chassis for hours. Oh yes, and until some genius realized that we needed to tell the motherboard that IRQ 10 needed to be reserved for the ISA sound card, we couldn’t get the Digigram drivers to recognize said card. Duh.

    As it stands, there’s still two cards with shared interrupts… the PCI Digigram sound card and the NIC. This is not a good thing. Eventually both devices will see simultaneous load, which will probably crash the machine. When it’s a machine running live broadcast programming, this is the kind of thing you try to avoid. The problem, of course, is that no matter where I place either of the two conflicting cards they both come up on IRQ 11. Gah!

    And we get to hammer on it some more tomorrow morning. Joy to us all.

  • St. George’s Day Work Schedule

    In between dealing with the usual assortment of network space issues, printer problems and other nonsense, I get to place the rebuilt West Conference Room computer back into its Smartboard enclosure. I also get to spend an hour or so in a conference call with the rest of Entercom’s erstwhile IT/IS team. Mind you, half these folks are engineers first and computer techs second. I’ll probably compile more stuff on Zero while I have the “mic mute” button toggled. I don’t have anything of value to contribute, as I’m well ahead of the standard Entercom computering curve.

    No false modesty, it’s just that Entercom Portland is unusual (Hah!) in having a dedicated IS staffer. That would be me, for those of you following along at home.

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