10:00 AM And it's a wonderful Monday. Well, except that it's hot. And because it actually rained last night, it's humid. Oh, and it's Monday. And I'm at work. And there seems to be an intermittent problem with the VPN to San Mateo that disappears when I try to actually look at the problem. But other than that, it's a beautiful day. <G&t;

Space Cowboys was actually pretty good. Technically, of course, they were way off, but they were a lot closer than the average for Hollywood. The story was pretty good, well written with a fairly interesting plot - again, for Hollywood. <G> Generally speaking, I liked it, Keri liked it, and most of the people in the theater seemed to be enjoying it as well.

On the computing front, I played with my laptop; reinstalled Linux to deal with a few issues I'd been having and resize my partitions. (I know, I know, I shouldn't have to do that with Linux. Yes, I understand that, and I COULD have simply gone through and spent 8 or 9 hours tracking down the problems (mostly self-inflicted while experimenting) and gotten things running. Instead, I elected to spent a little under two hours reinstalling. How silly of me.

While I was playing with that, I had a thought; I use Windows 2000 more than Linux, but mainly because of two applications, Outlook and Visio. Everything else I have pretty well duplicated in Linux, and many things that I need for networking work better in Linux than in Windows. Or, at least, I understand the Linux applications better; YMMV. So, I spend a fair amount of time rebooting; this laptop is not a speed demon on rebooting.

I think I'm going to try a little experiment. I have another laptop of the same model sitting here on my desk; it's currently unassigned. I'm going to try loading Mandrake Linux on it as a graphical workstation, but create a large (approx. 5 GB) partition that I will install VMware on. In the VM, I will install Windows 2000 with Visio and Outlook. Well, OK, Visio and Office. If I can run Windows in the VM and keep it up and running without complaining too much about the terrible performance in either, then I just might move my production environment over to that setup. If. I've used VMWare on dual processor systems and never noticed it even running. On the other hand, this is a 500 MHz laptop - considerably less powerful than that workstation I had. Still it has enough RAM for the job; 386 MB. I could split off 128 into the VM, keep the processor usage fairly low, and should have plenty of capability for Linux. Hmmm. Yes, this will be interesting even if it doesn't work, I think.

In other news, I'm experimenting with low-end digital cameras. I eventually want something fairly decent, but for now I want a very cheap, fast way to take low-res pictures of hardware for my inventories and play around a bit with some other things, as well. The experiment started yesterday with a "Oregon Scientific" little toy picked up from Fry's for $50. Now, it looked nice, and the box seemed to imply without ever stating that it took pictures at a resolution of 800 x 600 pixels and 16 bit color; more than Good Enough for what I wanted. It uses flash memory, which holds 15 images; you offload the images through a serial connection to your computer. Not bad for $50, right? Well, let's see...

First of all, the case is very nicely shaped; the camera fit my hand well. On the other hand, replacing the battery requires a jeweler's screwdriver, and with a battery life of 3 hours or less, this is not acceptable.

Second, although the color depth is indeed 16 bit, the image size is 160 x 120 pixels. Yes, pixels. Not good enough.

The bundled software also draws down some wrath. Windows 95/98 only, no upgrades, no plans for NT or Windows 2000 support. The software did WORK in Windows 2000 - sort of - but it was buggy and error-prone. From the few reviews I was able to find online, this is about the same as the Windows 95/98 performace.

All things considered, the image quality wasn't too bad; as a test, I stood on our porch in shadow, and took a picture of a neighbor's car. The car is sitting in the shade of an off-white carport; strong sunlight not only between the camera and the picture, but also the white sidewalk and roof of the carport are in the frame of the picture. The result, here, is surprisingly good. Colors are about right, although the details of the carport and sidewalk are washed out. Details of the car are, of course, lost in the poor image size, but all the same it's quite recognizable. I did do a little cleanup to it; nothing fancy, just a few basic image filters from Paint Shop Pro in Windows.

The camera goes back to Fry's today; there was another camera for $10 more with a built-in flash, explicit mention of 800 x 600 image size, and so on. The only reason I went with the Oregon first was the smaller camera size and the $50 vs. $60. Foolish, but hey, I wanted to give it a shot.

So, we'll see how that camera goes tonight. Hope you all had a good weekend, and have a good week. Later.

10:00 AM Sort of, I think. Maybe. <G> Daynotes, weeknotes, whenever-I-come-up-for-air-notes.

Today promises to be busy; I'm moving. Up until now, I've been in an executive suites office with everyone else in the Tempe branch of the company. Not exactly uncomfortable, but crowded; and when you literally have stacks of computers on your desk, you take up more than your fair share of space.

Plus, this room gets very warm when the air is turned off, which it is every evening. With all these super-efficient heaters - I mean, mutli-processor servers - around, no wonder. So, the solution is that the computers, the servers, - and I - will be moving down the hall to a smaller, one-person office. That room can be cooled more easily and efficiently than this one, it gets me and my piles of computers out from underfoot, and I have a private office again. Or, as my boss puts it, "we can hide the geek when VIPs come to call." Yeah. Love you too, Tim. <G>

Other than that, there honestly hasn't been much going on. I installed Mandrake 7.1 Oxygen on that spare laptop, but I haven't yet tried VMWare on it; too busy. Doing what? Good question. I could look back at my notes, let's see...

Hmm. Redesigned the server room for the permanent office; there wasn't much else wrong with it, aside from the lack of emergency / night lighting. Or security. Or fire supression. In this case, it was a simple error; those things had been planned in, but somewhere in the design process, they were dropped from the construction documents. Apparently, no one had noticed it until I brought it up. Ooops.

Oh, yes. What do MCI, an ISP called WinStar, and Qwest all have in common? I didn't know either. But apparently, they all have something to do with the data lines for the new office. We placed the order with WinStar, who ordered the actual lines from MCI. OK, reasonable. So why is Qwest calling to confirm the address for installation of T1 circuits? Well, it seems that MCI farmed it out to Qwest. Why? We don't know. Qwest doesn't seem to know, either. Oh well, that one's not my problem, at least not for the moment.

Digital cameras... well, that other one was a bust. After much discussion, we've decided to hold off a little bit and pick up a decent Olympus; it's just not worth it to mess with a cheap camera when a good quality camera can be had for less that $400. So that's on the "RSN" list. Unfortunately, many things are on the RSN list. <G>

One last point before I go back to productive(?) work; Friday