MOM! =)

last week my mom took the train out to reno and visited for the week. i had a super good time and love having my mom around. we did some shopping, hung out, and made curtains for the dining room.

they came out really well and make the room look way cool. my is an awesome sewer and i'm glad that i learned a little bit of her knowledge this trip.
yay for my mom!

Linux to the rescue

there is a computer at work that interfaces with the flourimeter. i collect data but how, oh how, can i get it off? the computer runs windows 98 (not se and probably never patched). for some highly curious reason it recognizes one memory stick that a person in the group has, but not others (and when i try to load drivers for my memory stick using the other memory stick and transportation, i get a big fat nothing). so back to good old floppy you say. good idea. it worked once. and then the floppy drive didn't eject my disk and after retrieving my floppy disk with a pair of nice tweezers, the floppy doesn't read disks anymore. oh ya. no network card. not that it matters since there isn't a network drop in the room anyways. sooo how to get my data.
keith came up with the brilliant idea: boot to linux on cd and then copy to usb memory stick.
so yesterday i found and burnt my copy of knoppix and then called up my linux brilliant brother to help me out. the computer didn't have enough memory to load the gui (kde) so i used the terminal. so he stepped me through mounting the hard drive and my memory stick and then copying and unmounting. it was kinda fun.

moral of the story, get yourself a good bootable copy of linux (preferably include tools to reset windows stuff) and keep it at work. you never know when you'll need it.

Misc References

i love it when i recognize a misc. reference as part of a film or tv show. last night i was watching star trek: DS9 and the crew on one of the ships started quoting poetry and another filled in a couple of lines. i remembered the lines and realized i haven't read "Charge of the Light Brigade" in quite a while, which is what they were reciting. sad, but good.
read it here.