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Today has been a generally good day. I'm fairly zen.
Some days its good to be a geek. I somehow managed to give off the genius vibe. I just think I'm a little too happy about playing with techie stuff. The first bit of tech stuff for the day was essentially cracking the Administrator account on a donated computer. One of my employers was given a bunch of surplus computers from another company and one required a login. I basically used a brute-force Linux boot floppy with a password replacement script that let me blank out the admin password in the SAM file. Voila! One useful computer for free!
The second bit of tech stuff actually was a blast from the past. Kathy's employer has a Dell at home with WinME and MS Word 2000. Word kept freezing. They struggled with it for a couple weeks to no avail. They called me. I came in, deleted the normal.dot template and had it working again in five minutes. Voila!
I'm excited about tomorrow. I've had a couple minor complaints about cablecasts of the Town meetings because the lighting is too dark when someone from the public speaks. I came up with a partial solution that was inspired by Change A Light Day. I proposed to replace the incandescent 60-watt bulbs in the side lamps with 100-watt-replacement fluorescent bulbs that use half the energy and produce more light. It was approved! So tomorrow on Change a Light Day I'll be replacing not one but ten incandescents in Town Hall with fluorescents, and they're 6500K color temp, too, which is great for video! I'm a little concerned that there may be a blueish tint, but to be honest the room tends to be heavy on the orange-red so I think it will all balance out. We'll see. Right now I don't have cameras that can be properly white balanced so I'm not too worried.
I can finally breathe a sigh of relief. I finished the grant writing for the big equipment upgrade project so now its just a matter of waiting for the answer. I'm going to take a week to just chill and then I'll begin outreach to the neighboring towns.
Things are going well at home. Its good to be back on track financially. I've been playing a lot of games lately. In fact, it's been averaging at least one a day typically, but some days as many as seven. I'm still waiting for my copies of Ticket to Ride Europe and Nuclear War to come in. I got a great deal on them. I got them both "used" from a gent selling them to raise money for charity. Both are unplayed and TTR Europe is "unpunched," so that's very sweet! One of my former TV Club students is really getting into Go o I've been learning to play from him. He completely and thoroughly decimates me whenever we play, but I'm slowly picking up strategy. I just need to do some reading and see some examples to understand the bigger picture of what's going on.
Other than that, I don't know what else to add. I pulled out some old sheet music from pieces I composed either before or during college. I found Terra Mortis and I'm thinking of finishing the second movement to submit for the PSU Guitar Ensemble to study and perform if they wish. We'll see. If I get a chance I'll pot a MIDI file of the piece thus far. It's got a bit of a Baroque or barely-post-Baroque feel/sound to it so I'll probably oblige with some cliche pedal tone action. I'm a sucker for pedal tones. The piece doesn't have much guitaristic moments so I want to do more to give it a reason to be a guitar ensemble piece rather than any other piece or a four-voice chorale.
Oh, on the music topic, I started learning new songs on bass again. I was listening to Disturbed's album Believe and heard some cool bass lines that were relatively easy, so I started learning them by ear. My ear needs the exercise so I figured it would be fun.
Well, gotta go. It's time to go shopping and go home.
Some days its good to be a geek. I somehow managed to give off the genius vibe. I just think I'm a little too happy about playing with techie stuff. The first bit of tech stuff for the day was essentially cracking the Administrator account on a donated computer. One of my employers was given a bunch of surplus computers from another company and one required a login. I basically used a brute-force Linux boot floppy with a password replacement script that let me blank out the admin password in the SAM file. Voila! One useful computer for free!
The second bit of tech stuff actually was a blast from the past. Kathy's employer has a Dell at home with WinME and MS Word 2000. Word kept freezing. They struggled with it for a couple weeks to no avail. They called me. I came in, deleted the normal.dot template and had it working again in five minutes. Voila!
I'm excited about tomorrow. I've had a couple minor complaints about cablecasts of the Town meetings because the lighting is too dark when someone from the public speaks. I came up with a partial solution that was inspired by Change A Light Day. I proposed to replace the incandescent 60-watt bulbs in the side lamps with 100-watt-replacement fluorescent bulbs that use half the energy and produce more light. It was approved! So tomorrow on Change a Light Day I'll be replacing not one but ten incandescents in Town Hall with fluorescents, and they're 6500K color temp, too, which is great for video! I'm a little concerned that there may be a blueish tint, but to be honest the room tends to be heavy on the orange-red so I think it will all balance out. We'll see. Right now I don't have cameras that can be properly white balanced so I'm not too worried.
I can finally breathe a sigh of relief. I finished the grant writing for the big equipment upgrade project so now its just a matter of waiting for the answer. I'm going to take a week to just chill and then I'll begin outreach to the neighboring towns.
Things are going well at home. Its good to be back on track financially. I've been playing a lot of games lately. In fact, it's been averaging at least one a day typically, but some days as many as seven. I'm still waiting for my copies of Ticket to Ride Europe and Nuclear War to come in. I got a great deal on them. I got them both "used" from a gent selling them to raise money for charity. Both are unplayed and TTR Europe is "unpunched," so that's very sweet! One of my former TV Club students is really getting into Go o I've been learning to play from him. He completely and thoroughly decimates me whenever we play, but I'm slowly picking up strategy. I just need to do some reading and see some examples to understand the bigger picture of what's going on.
Other than that, I don't know what else to add. I pulled out some old sheet music from pieces I composed either before or during college. I found Terra Mortis and I'm thinking of finishing the second movement to submit for the PSU Guitar Ensemble to study and perform if they wish. We'll see. If I get a chance I'll pot a MIDI file of the piece thus far. It's got a bit of a Baroque or barely-post-Baroque feel/sound to it so I'll probably oblige with some cliche pedal tone action. I'm a sucker for pedal tones. The piece doesn't have much guitaristic moments so I want to do more to give it a reason to be a guitar ensemble piece rather than any other piece or a four-voice chorale.
Oh, on the music topic, I started learning new songs on bass again. I was listening to Disturbed's album Believe and heard some cool bass lines that were relatively easy, so I started learning them by ear. My ear needs the exercise so I figured it would be fun.
Well, gotta go. It's time to go shopping and go home.
