short takes
Jun. 15th, 2003 04:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioA recent newspaper article described a (local) fire that started because "the occupant's lit cigarette burned a hole through the hose in her oxygen tank". Excuse me, but some people are just too stupid to live. (She did live; I hope the only damage she did was to her own property.)
Friday night the 20s/30s group at my synagogue had a dinner before the service, and then after the service a couple invited us to their house (across the street) to continue schmoozing. I stopped by for a bit; it's been interesting to get to know some of the people who are approximately my age, as opposed to 10-20 years older.
At the gathering I encountered a (new to me, old in reality) game on the Password theme. The rules were gone, and I'm sure we weren't playing it right (I suspect it's meant for teams), but it was cute. The deal is that you have a hand-held gizmo that provides a supply of words (on a cardboard disk inside); when it's your turn you try to elicit the word with the usual restrictions about what you can and can't say, and when you get it you advance to the next word and hand the gizmo to the next person. Now, concurrent with all of this is a not-very-predictable timer, and when it goes off the person holding the gizmo loses. It was cute, and I can envision ways to do it as a team game.
Even though you're unlimited in the length of your clues, and can also pantamime, I found myself playing in "25 Words or Less" mode. "Cinderalla" was "glass slipper fairy tale" (which I could shorten by 1-2 words with more planning), "lapel" was "jacket part" + pointing to the relevant position on my (unjacketed) chest, and so on.
Ever since my computer melted down in April and got its new motherboard, I've been having intermittent problems with peripherals. I'd been trying to collect enough data to deduce a pattern, but the warranty expires next week and no pattern has emerged yet. So I took it back to CompUSA, where it will presumably take them several days to determine what, if anything, is wrong. I'm betting that things other than the motherboard got fried when the fan died, but not catastrophically -- so they weren't caught in April. Joy.
So I am currently using our backup machine, which we got originally (cheap, used, minimal hardware) so Dani could set it up as a Linux box. Never succeeded at that, but it's useful to have a spare machine sometimes. However, things have changed since I last used this machine; Dani had in the meantime set it up with VPN to talk to the machines at work, which was completely incompatable with plain old ordinary internet access. (I'm sure that's not a requirement of VPN, but he doesn't know how to configure it and I've never seen it before.) He's not currently using it, though, so I blew it away and reinstalled all the network drivers and now it's fine.
Does anyone reading this remember how to remap the keyboard under Win98? It's been too long.
Having spent a chunk of the afternoon futzing with computers, I'm behind on my friends list. I'll try to catch up soon.
Friday night the 20s/30s group at my synagogue had a dinner before the service, and then after the service a couple invited us to their house (across the street) to continue schmoozing. I stopped by for a bit; it's been interesting to get to know some of the people who are approximately my age, as opposed to 10-20 years older.
At the gathering I encountered a (new to me, old in reality) game on the Password theme. The rules were gone, and I'm sure we weren't playing it right (I suspect it's meant for teams), but it was cute. The deal is that you have a hand-held gizmo that provides a supply of words (on a cardboard disk inside); when it's your turn you try to elicit the word with the usual restrictions about what you can and can't say, and when you get it you advance to the next word and hand the gizmo to the next person. Now, concurrent with all of this is a not-very-predictable timer, and when it goes off the person holding the gizmo loses. It was cute, and I can envision ways to do it as a team game.
Even though you're unlimited in the length of your clues, and can also pantamime, I found myself playing in "25 Words or Less" mode. "Cinderalla" was "glass slipper fairy tale" (which I could shorten by 1-2 words with more planning), "lapel" was "jacket part" + pointing to the relevant position on my (unjacketed) chest, and so on.
Ever since my computer melted down in April and got its new motherboard, I've been having intermittent problems with peripherals. I'd been trying to collect enough data to deduce a pattern, but the warranty expires next week and no pattern has emerged yet. So I took it back to CompUSA, where it will presumably take them several days to determine what, if anything, is wrong. I'm betting that things other than the motherboard got fried when the fan died, but not catastrophically -- so they weren't caught in April. Joy.
So I am currently using our backup machine, which we got originally (cheap, used, minimal hardware) so Dani could set it up as a Linux box. Never succeeded at that, but it's useful to have a spare machine sometimes. However, things have changed since I last used this machine; Dani had in the meantime set it up with VPN to talk to the machines at work, which was completely incompatable with plain old ordinary internet access. (I'm sure that's not a requirement of VPN, but he doesn't know how to configure it and I've never seen it before.) He's not currently using it, though, so I blew it away and reinstalled all the network drivers and now it's fine.
Does anyone reading this remember how to remap the keyboard under Win98? It's been too long.
Having spent a chunk of the afternoon futzing with computers, I'm behind on my friends list. I'll try to catch up soon.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-06-15 02:22 pm (UTC)Not technically required, but administratively required often enough that it's the default for many VPN packages and the only mode for some (e.g. Cisco's VPN client).
(no subject)
Date: 2003-06-15 02:37 pm (UTC)Life would be much simpler if I could figure out (cheaply) what's wrong with Doornail. It was downstream of a lightning strike or mega-surge -- through a UPS -- a year ago and now, even after a new motherboard and new power supply (and graphics card, but that's irrelevant here), its average uptime is around 10-15 minutes. Then it freezes or blue-screens. I'd rather be able to use it as the spare machine (and perhaps file server), but it's old enough that it's not worth spending $100 plus parts to have CompUSA figure out what's wrong. (Those things that I can check myself have been checked: which is to say, nothing's obviously loose or singed.)