I finished all the levels of Katamari Damacy the other night, and managed to improve on my scores for a couple of levels. I get the songs stuck in my head, which would normally be a bad thing, but for some reason, none of the music in the game really bothers me (which doesn’t usually happen with music that gets stuck in my head.)

I managed to get my email migrated last night too, as well as setting up GAIM in place of Trillian. The jury is still out on GAIM in my opinion, but it’s free software, so I’m sure I can cope.

The fog has finally lifted, and it looks like the sun is out today. All in all, it looks like a gorgeous lead in to the weekend. Here’s hoping it will be a good one.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Excellent all the pieces of my plan are falling into place.” - Mr. Burns

In an event unheard of previously in Saskatoon, the weather has remained the same for two days in a row. It’s quite foggy here - not as foggy as it was yesterday (I couldn’t see the theatres a block away out my window) but today I can’t see much beyond four blocks away from here. I know there are lots of places in the world that have fog all the time, but I don’t think I could put up with it — it makes me claustrophobic.

Speaking of my window… I was offered an office (with a door) at work yesterday, but I turned it down, in favour of staying where I am, and keeping a window. I was actually the second person to turn down the office on the same grounds (though the other guy has a corner cubicle, so he’s got three times the windows I do.) It would have been nice to have an office, but since we’re headed into that time of year where I wouldn’t see the sun for six months without my window, I didn’t want to give it up. The guy who eventually took the office wanted to make sure that he would still have the option of “downgrading” to a window cubicle in the event that one opens up, since he’d basically be first on the seniority list.

So, that was my major decision for yesterday.

I managed to get Erin’s email and stuff migrated properly, but accidentally copied my mail profile the wrong direction, so I had to do the whole knoppix thing again. This time I just hooked the hard drive up to the desktop internally, along with a second HD, so there were three HD’s in the box. This time I just copied over the entire contents, and I’ll try to re-migrate (the right direction this time) tonight.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Maybe for once someone will call me ‘Sir’ without adding, ‘you’re making a scene’.” - Homer

Last night, I had one of those experiences that makes me really wonder how the average person manages to get stuff done with computers. As you know, the old laptop had some water poured on it, and ceased it’s functioning. I was pretty sure that the hard drive was still fine, so I ordered a connector to enable me to hook it up to a regular IDE cable, in order to extract the information off of it - stuff that hadn’t been backed up to an external device recently.

So, I hook the hard drive up to the Windows 98 machine, and Win98 didn’t recognize it. At the time, I thought it was jumper related (I don’t have any jumpers that will fit a laptop harddrive) and so I thought that I wouldn’t be able to hook it up to the desktop. I’ve since revised that assessment, and I think the reason was that it is NTFS formatted. I honestly thought that it was FAT, but that’s really immaterial to the story.

So anyway, instead, I hooked it up to the external HD enclosure, and connected it to the laptop via firewire to attempt to copy the files over. Small problem - the profile directories are protected by NTFS security, and XP Home has no way to override those security settings, other than dropping into Safe mode (no external HD access then…)

Fortunately I knew that Linux would let me do what I needed, so I downloaded an iso of Knoppix and burned it, managed to get into Linux without too much trouble. Well - there was the fact that I couldn’t copy files from the old drive to the new one, because it’s unable to write to NTFS drives, but I just hooked the external drive up to the old desktop, popped in the CD, and copied away (at a very slow rate.)

Tonight is the moment of truth, when I try to copy the files over to the laptop :)

Simpson’s quote of the day: “If something’s hard to do then it’s not worth doing.” - Homer

See, that Katamari Damacy theme is stuck in my head. I beat the game last night - it’s a little short, but it has a lot of replay value still left in it. I don’t know why though, because on the surface, it’s such a silly concept, but for some reason I really want to spend more time with the game, making my katamari ever larger.

Then I hear that they’re releasing a sequel (in Japan) next Monday. Heh…

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Behold, I am the Collector, and I have come to add you to my collection.” - Comic Book Guy

I picked up Katamari Damacy on the weekend, spurred on by the fact that Jason mentioned he’d seen it in the store. Initially I bought it as a Christmas gift for Darren, but apparently he didn’t seem to keen after having seen the video of it. Instead, I decided to keep it, so I opened it and played it a fair amount. It’s an interesting little game, and kind of addicting.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Human roaches, feeding off each others garbage, the only thing you can’t buy here is dignity.” - Mayor Quimby

I accidentally screwed up my port forwarding for a few minutes last night when trying to set up a bittorrent client to download the now infamous Jon Stewart “Crossfire” appearance. Anyway, as a result, there were a few minutes, maybe as long as a half hour where this web server would have been unavailable to the outside world. Sucks, but that’s the dangers of playing around with a new router I guess.

The guys at Penny Arcade are doing their second annual “Child’s Play” charity drive. This time around they’ve expanded to 5 children’s hospitals around the US. It’s a great thing, but I wish there were a Canadian hospital or two on that list.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “This year, buy her emglish muffins.” - Homer

As mentioned earlier, the laptop died a while back. Well, no so much died, as was killed, but that’s enough guilt trip for one post.

Tuesday night, we bought a replacement. It’s a nice system - 2.8 Ghz celeron, 15″ widescreen, 512Mb ram (-64 for the shared video ram) and built in 802.11b/g wireless.

That last bit is nice, but the built in card couldn’t see my network. I called tech support, and they couldn’t help me either. I took advantage of that, and convinced Erin that we needed a new router, and since Futureshop had one on sale with the same chipset as the built in card, I thought we couldn’t go wrong. Luckily, for a change, I was right :>.

The funny thing is that while the router was listed on the futureshop website as $129.99-$20 instant rebate - $50 mail in rebate = $59.99, the price on the shelf at the store was still $129.99, and no mention of any rebates, or sales or anything. It still rang up at the $109.99 price though, so everything was as it should be. I managed to get it up and running with only minimal interruption to this website (and others that are hosted on this server) and now I can connect to the internet with excellent signal strength at 108Mbps as opposed to the 11Mbps with poor to good signal strength. Plus, it’s more secure - no more WEP for me.

The sad thing is that I’m still waiting on a cable to extract the information from the old laptop’s hard drive, to get the profiles set up closer to how I like them, and bring all the old emails over (etc.)

Simpson’s quote of the day: “So, it was pretty okay, huh?” - Homer