Parents House

My parents are having a pre-fab house built, here’s a picture of the foundation.
Foundation thumb
The rectangle on the far side will be the front porch, the square to the right is the garage. The notch out of the garage is the utility room and crawlspace access.

No more Jaguar

Jaguar is leaving Formula One, and taking Cosworth with them. Ford is putting both operations up for sale, with a “number of potential buyers expressing interest“. Hopefully someone will buy them, fields with less than 20 cars would be even easier for Scuderia Ferrari to dominate. And if they don’t come back, there will be a wider gap between the haves and the backmarkers that are the have-not privateers. Though, without Cosworth engines, Minardi and Jordan are going to have a tough time getting around the track.

And I will definitely miss hearing “jag-eww-arr” from David and Steve on Speed.

ntfsresize

I wanted to keep the Windows 2000 install that came on my new laptop and install Windows XP, but Dell only created one large NTFS partition. After doing a little searching around, I found ntfsresize, part of the Linux NTFS Project.
After downloading and burning the SystemRescueCD, I popped it in the drive, booted off it and typed run_qtparted hit enter and happily pointed and clicked my way through resizing the existing NTFS partition to free up some space for XP. And maybe even Gentoo

New Laptop

My aging and well traveled Dell Latitude C800 is up for replacement, so we ordered 3 identical Dell Latitude D800s. Fully decked out, with the kickass video card and the giant monitor (1920×1200 baby), dual batteries, DVD+R burner, etc.

They were ordered with Windows 2000 preinstalled (for the tech support) and a Windows XP license, but I’m considering wiping mine and installing Windows XP and gentoo. I’ve only got a few things installed so far, so not a big deal either way.

Standards be damned

Just because something isn’t part of the standard, that doesn’t mean you don’t have to support it. Especially when all your competitors DO support it. Unless of course you are the 900 lb gorilla that is Intel Corp, then you can do whatever you want.

I might just be a tad bitter right now.

Update (9/15/2004): I guess I needed some sleep or something. After some clear thinking, I reset my SMC access point to factory defaults. Slowly turning features back on, I found the one that was making the Intel wireless card angry.

Sweetcorn Festival report

Day by day report:

  • Thursday night – Tractor pull I, not real good, attendence in the park wasn’t all that good either.
  • Friday night – Tractor pull II, a little better, much bigger crowd in the park. I had a deep fried Snickers bar, which was suprisingly good. (“Remember, if you rub it on paper and it turns clear, it’s your window to weight gain!“) After the pull was over, I, umm, had a few beers, went out with the parade route painting crew, and didn’t get home until after 4:30 am.
  • Saturday – After the late night, I was pretty much worthless until 5:30 pm or so. After Demo Derby I, we hung out in the beer tent listening to the tunes of XKrush and people-watching the crowd.
  • Sunday – After the standard brunch with the grandparents, I worked at Corn on the Cob, feeding ears into the husker. After 4 straight hours of doing that, time for Demo Derby II. There was another derby at Earl Park, IN, so the number of entries was down considerably.
  • Monday – Started at corn early in the morning, husking before 11 am to try to stay ahead of the rush when we started serving at noon. We husked , cooked and served the entire 8 tons of corn that was delivered that morning.

I’ll try to get thumbnails of the few pictures I took up soon.

And a parting thought: “Git ‘er dun” is not english.