I’ve been neglecting this…
Arghh… it’s a sham[e]. I use this site as my own personal home page because it’s got my favorite links and such on it. I’m here at least 20 times a day. Looking at it. Not updating it. And clicking right on by to something else. Almost every time I pause for a second and say “I should post something on there” and then I click on by. Well it’s been almost 2 months now, and actually quite a bit has happened.
Linux Certification - LPI 101
August was a busy month for me. The LUG that I’m a member of, LUG/IP, hosted the LPI 101 exam. The program consisted of 2 full-day study sessions, plus a half-day review and the exam. It was a good deal of fun, and a very educational experience. I learned an aweful lot of new stuff while preparing for the test. And, believe it or not, I passed! Now all I have to do is pass the 102 exam, and I receive my Level I Linux Certification.
Bought a New Laptop
On August 11, I listened to my wife for a change, and it paid off big-time. Best-Buy was running a special deal on a Toshiba Laptop, and I was interested in taking a look. But she pointed out that the store only had 11 of them, and that I should really haul ass on over there and grab one. I got there 15 minutes before opening, and there was a huge line in front of the building. I got lucky and was one of the last people to actually get the offer. I got a Toshiba Satellite A65-126. The deal came with an extra 256MB of RAM, a laptop bag, and a printer. There were over $450 in rebates and a bunch of forms, and the case and the memory were on backorder. But I’m happy to report that I received my last rebate check last night, and the laptop is happily running on Suse 9.1 Professional. I had intended to keep WinXP on there, but I just couldn’t get used to it. Plus, the rescue disk that Toshiba gives you is one of those where you don’t just get a WinXP CD. You get a CD that can only reimage your drive. You can limit the partition size, but that’s about it. And my first instinct with any big box (retail) computer is: wipe it clean, do a base install of the OS. Put only what you need on there. With the re-image you have to go through and remove all the crap you don’t want… and at that point there’s no way to guarantee that it was all cleanly removed.
Caught Some Fish and Fixed Mom’s Laptop
Over labor-day weekend, my wife and I went to visit my parents in Grand Rapids, MI. I was really on the fence about going (don’t like to travel much), but I was getting pretty tired of listening to my parents complain because their computer wasn’t working correctly. I had set that up for them last March, and for some reason a couple of goofy things were happening. First off, it wasn’t able to connect to the computer downstairs and use the printer share. Secondly, it wasn’t letting my mom save pictures from her netscape mail. As my neice is just a few months old, and there are some lovely pictures, this was driving my Mother crazy.
The first issue ended up being a fairly easy one. I had set up a little “net use” batch script to connect to the downstairs computer on my last trip. This was because a.) Microsoft has crippled the reconnect at login for mapped drives in XP Home, and b.) the wireless drivers were the last things to load on boot. I couldn’t reliably imbed the script on the boot process… half the time it would run before the wireless connected. Anyway, to make a long story short, my father had changed the password to his computer downstairs, and the batch file would no longer work. That was an easy one.
The second issue was a little more difficult to place, but I finally found a thread on google groups suggesting that a particular windows patch had broken download functionality in Netscape 7.1. Sure enough, that’s what my Mom had on her laptop. So all I needed to do was download and install 7.2, which had just come out.
I was well rewarded though… My father took me fishing on their little lake, and I caught 4 large-mouth bass and Pike. 2 of the bass were decent sized (14 inches) . The Pike was about 16 inches… kind of small for a Pike, but fun to reel in. We support catch and release, so those fish are back in the wild, ready and waiting for someone else to catch them who isn’t so nice. My wife also caught a large-mouth… about 8 inches. She’s not really the sportin’ type. But I think she had fun.
GIMP 2.0 Presentation
My OSS adventures didn’t stop with the 101 exam. A week and a half later, I presented GIMP 2.0 at the LUG/IP September meeting. I started with a little slide show based on some of the more awesome images in the gallery section of GUG. My thought was to quickly dispell any kind of rumor or misconception that you can’t do quality graphics GIMP. I then proceeded to show the basic tool set, and then I went through several of the tutorials. I also did some demonstration of techniques that I had learned from some of the Photoshop tutorials of old. I tried to make a statement that the tutorials were kind of universal. That is to say that a good tutorial will show you both artistic techniques, and the method for achieving them in a particular application. If you know both applications well, the artistic technique part of the tutorial is universal.