The Design and Implementation of laffer1

Microsoft Bob was a software application developed prior to the launch of Windows 95.  It is very similar in some regards to Packard Bell's Navigator software from that time period. 

This site has screenshots of BOB in action.
http://www.winhistory.de/index_ENG.html

There is also some information about different Windows releases, although much of the site is in german. 

On tuesday, I left at 8:38 which is 8 minutes later than I like to get to class.  With good traffic conditions, I can still make it ontime to EMU.  However,  a bus and a car decided that they wanted to occupy the same space.  It took me 50 minutes to go from exit 175 to exit 181 on I-94.  Obviously, I was late for class.  The best part was that after I got past the accident, traffic sped up for about half a mile and then stopped for no apparent reason.  I was not a happy camper.

Caryn just sent me an IM that says dell is going to sell computers at walmart.  They've sure turned into Gateway. 

Anyway, the air conditioning has been broken for several days.  Its very unpleasant in here.  Its been running about 78 degrees on average in the computer room.  stargazer is staying up OK, but my desktop isn't quite as good with air flow.  My iBook would be unusuable in these temperatures and the PowerMac is a bit touchy.  I'm happy to report that caryn's new box seems to handle it very well.  I'm just glad we don't have two "servers" going anymore.  Midnight and Henry are getting a little mad at me about the air conditioning.  Funny thing is they sit in the sunlight.  They are real smart cats. 

Monday I had my car in for one of the many repairs they recommended.  There is no way I can afford the head gasket repair right now.  The transmission is working better at least.  I hear this weird clicking sound sometimes that concerns me.  I really hate my car. 

Caryn just sent me these.  I found them rather amusing error messages.

Microsoft XBOX subscription error...

http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/My-Friends-Just-Call-Me-Error.aspx

News at 11?  DST error...

http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/Film-At-1100.aspx

It is illegal in the state of Michigan to use a wifi network that is public.  A law revised in 2000 was used against a man who was checking his email outside a coffee shop with signs that say "Free WIFI"  This is on CNN's website today.  He faces felony charges with 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. 

That means its also illegal to use a neighbors wifi network.  The problem is the police have to catch you in the act. 

My dad (finally) sent me an online birthday greeting. Its only 8 days after my birthday. :(

I started the process of migrating from an iBook to Caryn's old PowerMac. Even though this Mac is 5 years old, its still loads faster than my newer ibook. I think the dual 867mhz G4 chips and near 2GB of ram have something to do with it. I decided to initialize the disk. Caryn's upgraded since 10.2 on this thiing and there is a lot of cruft on it. I've been debating wheither to install OS 9 or not. I think I will dual boot OS 9 and OS X just for gaming purposes. Classic can be fun.

I spent most of the weekend cleaning out closets. We've got a lot of crap to put on ebay. I'm looking forward to it.

My father just sent me 9 forwards in one day!  Not one real e-mail and I still haven't received a happy birthday from him!

Took my car in for an oil change. Found out the head gasket is leaking and the axel seal is broken. A new head gasket is $1430 and the seal is $220! My car isn't work $1000. How annoying. I decided to purchase some Bells after hearing that lovely tidbit. I haven't had bells since last year and Oberon is out again. I don't know what caryn will think of it since she's on a diet and alcohol can be bad on that front.

It is a good thing I believe strongly in freedom of speech.  Sometimes blogs on Just Journal personally rub me the wrong way. 

I don't typically read other blogs on JJ.  Actually I avoid it unless they are public.  It is important to realize that any developers or employees of blogging services could read your private thoughts.  Anyway, I saw a post today with a sentence something like "Actually this blog is really cool.  No one will actually see it so I can write about anything."  At first, I thought ouch.  I mean that really strikes at the community based site I was hoping to create.  I've read that big sites like MySpace are having trouble reaching outside their current niche too.  I guess I should be happy.  Some people are using this site as a quiet haven, well as much as the public Internet can be anyway.

Unrelated, I recently heard that people are asked what they eat now at the border.  I guess if you are a vegetarian, that is a security risk now!  I wish they'd hit something typical republicans care about.  I also wish congress would do something. 

http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/8e9a/

This is a device that makes emoticons using LEDs with remote.  You put this on the back of your car to signal if someone is a nice guy, asshole, riding your ass, and so on!  My favorite part is the disclaimer about it not being legal in some states!!!!!  I have a feeling one might get rear ended with this on their car. 

Well I had class today. I ran into Jessica after class in the lab. I wanted to see if Kirk has been around lately. She's doing OK. I guess she's starting another Bachelors degree. I got caught in the storm earlier, but I did surprise Caryn with a Starbucks.

All the sudden its starting to get sunny. I've still got quite a bit of homework to do. Just turned in my eng 328 website.

Yesterday was my birthday.  It did not go as well as I hoped.  Typically there is great drama on my birthday.  Often my father makes things difficult.  This year things were a bit different.  On Friday, Caryn took me into downtown and we had a lovely day.  I got a phone call from my aunt in the morning, but I missed it.  She left a voice mail asking me to come to her house on Saturday.  I decided to take the offer.  Caryn and I had nothing to do on Saturday.  Well, I had had homework due.  I did get that done before the party.  I went to the party.  It went OK.  My aunt bought veggie burgers for Caryn and I.  My grandmother was there. 

About halfway through dinner, my grandmother asked if my father called.  I realized my cell phone had been off for a few hours so I turned it back on.  No calls.  She claimed he was going to visit me and had been several times.  Neither of my parents have every visited me in this apartment.  We've been here since last July.  Actually we started our lease in June, but not quite moved in.  Neither of them visited us in our previous apartment in Kalamazoo.  We were there for two years.  In total, my mother has visited me I think four times since 2000.  My father has visited 2-3 times.  I'm counting our wedding as a visit!  I explained that my father had not called and has not visited me once.  She was shocked.  She also didn't believe me.  Earlier in the day, I showed her a picture of the outside of our apartment.  My aunt suggested she call my father and ask him about the red bricks on the outside of our apartment building.  (there are no red bricks!)  He said they were lovely on the phone.  Ouch!  She caught him in a lie. 

This sort of thing is somewhat normal in my life.  My family sucks.  Well, I don't want to include Caryn in that.  Anyway, I just got thinking about that last night and today.  My mother sent me an e-card for my birthday.  I can deal with that.  She's had problems at work and they did a temporary layoff so she doesn't have funds to do more right now.  I get that.  My father didn't even send me an e-mail!  My mother explained today when I saw her that he bought me a gift and planned on stopping by "maybe" on Saturday.  Well that did not happen.  Needless to say, my feelings are very hurt. 

I'm really hating my birthday and any holidays.  In fact, my aunt and grandmother are the only people to give me gifts on or before my birthday.  Caryn did buy me something from the cats at the mall I guess.  She *will* get me something nice that I need, but she doesn't even buy gifts on the day of events now.  Granted, she did take me out to lunch and things so I don't feel totally boned.  However, its not like Christmas, my birthday or our anniversary change days each year!  The date stays the same. 

Wow, the more I think about his the angrier I get.  I feel so dumped on.  Oddly, I forget my aunt and grandmother's birthdays sometimes and they are the nicest to me.  Perhaps I should correct that this year. 

I didn't do a lot for my mother's birthday this year, but I did build her a new computer for Christmas and they are so close together. 

I think the real issue is that my father and I have a real problem with our relationship.  Its been bad for years.  Every time we start getting a little closer all hell breaks lose. 

I'm mostly just trying to vent with this post.  I don't want to make Caryn feel bad.  My father sure as hell could I suppose.

I just found out my second cousin moved to Chicago.  We lived in the same town for almost a year and then she moved away. I never saw her.  We were so close until junior year of high school. 

The more we post tidbits about MidnightBSD future work, the more the FreeBSD project duplicates it.  I just read a post by someone describing a system near identical to ctriv's implementation for mport.  (minus the make package changes) 

Caryn made me a lovely cake.  My birthday is tomorrow, but we've done most of the celebrating today.  I guess my aunt is throwing a schindig tomorrow. 

I've still got a few things to do yet. 

I'm having frequent crashes with my iBook now.  I've got 1.08GB of disk space left on boot.  Odd thing is that this time Backup and iChat were the only processes.  Backup was doing iDisk stuff.  I'm not sure its low disk space related as originally thought.  Its getting VERY hot.  The fans are actually kicking in. 

This topic came up on slashdot yesterday.  I decided to share some of my experiences starting MidnightBSD. 

I could have written pages on the topic, but I think this is enough. 

Caryn got the day off so we could celebrate my birthday a day early. We plan on going downtown tomorrow. The original plan was to visit Kalamazoo, but I wanted to put that off a little.

I just caught up on my eng 444 homework. I still need to get my 328 homework done. I've got a few things left to do with that. Normally, it would not be a big deal but with my birthday plans its more difficult this weekend. As skullyhead used to say "Its teh suxors".

I posted an entry on my lj blog and I think Jenny might have taken it wrong. Things don't come out right online sometimes.

A certain person on the OS X Server list actually claimed I don't know much about UNIX. At first I had a bit of a Theo reaction in my head. I realized it was funny. I asserted that OS X is not very UNIX-like. At first glance, some people might look at that strangely. Basics like mounting file systems are different. launchd is very different. Apple pushes the GUI. I pointed out these items in my response. I also pointed out that I carefully used UNIX instead of unix. One is an Open Group trademark after all. I used to argue with people that OS X is unix. Then I had to administer an OS X server. Everything people love about Macs is missing in OS X server. Nothing just works. You are even more limited and must drink the kool-aid to get it working perfectly. In UNIX, you can do things almost anyway you want and still get interoperability with different components. Even counting differences between "flavors", its not safe to say that Mac OS X is as unix-like as say Linux. He actually argued that BSD is not UNIX but that OS X is. How on earth does that work out? The userland is from BSD. The reality is that the definition is not clear anymore. It hasn't been since the late 80s.

On a side note, Macs do crash. If you've never seen it in 10.4, it looks like a giant gray power button. That is the Mac equivalent to the blue screen of death. My Mac experienced that today. I had a few apps open and ran out of swap again. It sucks having 1.08GB open at boot up. Mind you, I have 640MB of ram which is the maximum for this iBook model.

I've always thought that a hyphen is a general purpose tool on a computer. It was used to seperate compound words, number ranges and a slew of other things. I was wrong.

http://alistapart.com/articles/emen/

According to this article, in UTF-8 encoding, an em or en dash are distinct. In fact, using the minus key to create a hyphen is wrong in most cases.

This one might take a little time to wrap my head around.

I installed boot camp on Caryn's Macintosh. I didn't actually use the wizard though since that's what does changes to the Mac. Its not my Mac after all. I was curious as to the procedure to run Boot Camp. The new version supports Windows Vista, web cams and various other Mac features. Caryn's already got the latest Mac Pro firmware. It appears to only support 32bit versions of Windows. Caryn can't run x64 Vista on this. That's probably a good thing anyway. I personally think she should get a second disk and allocate say 20-30GB to XP and the rest to a BSD. Of course that's something I would do. Since Blizzard games run in Mac OS, she probably doesn't see a point to XP. I think she forgets that she has several Windows games like Vampire the Mascarade and so on. She's played those about as much as I've played Civilization III so far. I've only had that game less than a week. Its very complex. I wish it was easier to dual boot Windows versions. I'd love to reinstall XP for gaming. Actually now that I know the Just Journal client works in x64 vista, I don't technically need Vista.

My birthday is coming up quickly. I'm not totally looking forward to it. I had a lot of goals by 28. I think I've completed two of them. I had hoped to be in a serious relationship and since I'm married that qualifies. I also had hoped to start an open source project or begin work for a company on either an operating system or a web browser when I was younger. Since I started MidnightBSD, that qualifies.

There are so many things I haven't done. I had hoped to start having kids around 28. Since Caryn doesn't want children, that one is an obvious problem. I wanted to have a bachelors degree by now. I wanted to travel more, and leave Michigan.