Arctangential

Only 3 months late, I have finally uploaded the pictures I took on my trip to Albany back in May. They’re all taken on the train; I only brought my 70-210mm lens with me, and it turned out to really not be useful for taking pictures indoors. It did provide me with some good shots from out my train window though, so that’s fun. I didn’t keep very good track of where I took everything, so a lot of them have questionable geotagging, but with judicious use of Google Maps, I was able to identify a few of the locations.

The pictures are all here.

Up until recently, I hosted most of my photos on skrewtape.com, a website hosted for me with great generosity by my friend Conrad. A few weeks ago, I tried to transfer that hosting to my own account, and dreamhost, for whatever reason, has decided that I can’t do this. In the ensuing events, the site was lost. I could set it up again with Conrad, and I’m sure he’d be glad to, but all I ever did with the site was to host images, and I’ve decided to do that all in flickr now, so I’m letting the site die.

I just spent the past 2 weeks uploading every to flickr, adding descriptions, tags and geolocations to everything. Then I spent the past 2 days going through all my old LJ posts and updating the image tags and links to go to flickr now instead of skrewtape.com. They should be all updated, but please let me know if you notice anything broken. (Not that anybody reads my old posts, but hey.)

So now my complete photographic record is here: http://flickr.com/photos/skrewtape/sets/

Let me know what you think.

Is it possible to arrange a Rubik’s cube such that no two adjacent facelets have the same color? I’m having a lot of trouble getting it to happen. If it’s impossible, I’m sure there’s a clever proof of that fact.

I am unbelievably stupid.

Some background; my computer has a weird intermittent hardware problem where, upon boot, something happens to the network card. I’m not sure exactly what goes wrong, but when it does, the computer knows it HAS a network card, but is unable to do things like acquire an IP address from DHCP. The problem seems unfixable once it’s occurred; the only solution is a reboot. However, this isn’t a big deal, since it usually only takes 3 or 4 reboots to get working again, and I can identify the problem early in the boot phase.

So, tonight I opened up my PC to put in a new video card (which then came back out; another story entirely), set everything back up, turned on my PC, and there was the error. Not even thinking, I just hit reset, because that’s what I do when I see that error. The next boot, error again. I rebooted about 10 times and the error kept happening. At this point I got worried, so I powered the machine off and decided to let it rest a little bit. I spent the next 5 hours messing with the computer, on and off.

I tried everything I could think of: I opened it up and reseated the cards, I did software reboots, hardware resets and hard power downs. I let it wait a little while, I let it wait a long time. I left it on for an hour and then did a reset. I reconfigured the network card, I read through the logs for hints. Nothing worked. Then I looked over, and saw it. The network cord. Was not. Plugged. In.

At least I’m back online now.

You know what I’ve realized; since moving to the West Coast, I don’t have anybody to talk to late at night any more. I used to be able to chat with my west coast friends since they were 3 hours behind of me, but now they’re all in the same time zone and go to sleep way too early. And of course the east coasters… only if I stay up VERY late do I get to talk to them.

I need to find some interesting Australians to chat with or something. anybody know any interesting Australians?