Zathras' Great Machine

GoC Progress Report

Well, after waiting several days to hear from Geeks on Call, I gave them a call on Friday to find out the status of my application. I passed their final exam! Just barely... I needed to get forty questions right out of fifty, and that's what I got. Whuff.

So I went in on Saturday evening (!) to discuss the position with them further. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this place is going to be a good match for me... the hours are longer, the pay is lower, and I'd have to spend a lot of time on the road, so I'm going to have to pass. I do hope they call and offer me the job, though, just for the boost to my self-esteem. It would make me feel like a real IT professional... even though I know, intellectually, that I am one already, hearing it from somebody else would be a good boost.

Had dinner with Rob on Friday night -- as part of my ongoing quest to find a Thai restaurant closer to home that rivals Duangrat's, which is quite a distance from here, I suggested Bangkok Garden in Bethesda. The food was quite good -- not quite as good as Duangrat's, but close, and the prices there are quite good. We'll keep that one on our list.

After dinner, we went back to the house, which Rob has been doing a fair amount of work on. The fireplace is working again, now that he's fixed all the water leaks, and we had a nice fire with our hookahs. Rob is almost out of smoking supplies; I'll have to set him up with some more. He also regaled me with tales of his three-week trip to India, where, among other things, he met his girlfriend's parents. Surprisingly, they didn't nag him to marry her and start reproducing. *chuckle*

In other interesting news, I got an email the other day from a marketing firm. As part of my IT position, I subscribe to a lot of periodicals (both print and electronic) and I also participate in a lot of IT professional surveys. As an incentive to participate in the surveys, they usually offer a prize in a drawing. In this case, the survey was on high performance computing, and the prize was five hundred dollars. Yours truly won the cash. That was a nice, pleasant little boost for the week.

I took the company's old file server home a while back... after waiting a couple of weeks to be absolutely sure that no one would need anything else on it, I spent some time yesterday doing battle with the damned thing. I tried both Win ME and Win 2K Pro, but neither would install. Turns out this thing needs a proprietary driver for the SCSI drives, so I need to grab that and try again. For the time being, I'm just sticking with Windows, but I do want to try Linux in the near future... although I'm a little concerned about getting it to install, even though the Linux drivers are also available for download from the Compaq web site.

Rob surprised me a bit by telling me that he wants to buy my old iBook, so once I get that cleaned up, I'll unload it on him. He probably wants to study OS X, since Apple is finally starting to make some inroads into the enterprise.

Have to say again how much I love this PowerBook. *grin* It performs better, obviously, and the keyboard, in particular, just feels so much nicer than the iBook's. It's also smaller and lighter than the iBook. The only annoying thing is that Apple has just released G4-based iBooks at a significantly lower price than what I paid for the PowerBook. That always happens with computers, of course, but to have it happen only four or five weeks after they released this model is kind of annoying.

Hmm... actually, now that I think about it, I'll have to look into partitioning the hard drive on this notebook and trying out Yellow Dog Linux. I've read a few reviews of it, and they've been pretty positive.

Posted by Zathras at October 27, 2003 10:06 PM