bmabray's Journal: Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, Everybody! We had a nice holiday weekend -- we decided to stay home this year, since it was so cold and the roads were a little icy. So, we played pool, played darts, and toasted the new year.

We also rented Swordfish. Not bad. If you can shut off your brain for a couple of hours and just enjoy it as an action flick, it's not bad. As a programmer, I found the scene where the guy was writing the 'super virus' quite amusing. I'm no cracker, but I know enough to know it ain't like that... :-)

It was a pretty productive weekend. We got to do some more 'moving in' -- finding places for things that had not found homes yet. I got to work on the new weblog some. I'm pretty much done with the layout, I just need to add a few elements and decide how many 'features' I want the thing to have.

And I got to play with Audrey. :-) The ethernet adapter arrived Monday. Only 3COM's "official" USB ethernet adapter is supposed to work with Audrey, but a few others will, if you modify some of their internal settings. When I tried to make the changes using Gertrude, the program locked up, but it worked with no problems on Della. (Our two computers are named Gertrude and Della. They require names for networking, anyway, and it's easier for referring to them than "old computer" and "new computer." As you can see, Audrey fits right in. :-) )

So far, everything I've tried on Audrey has been easy. I updated the software so I could get shell access, and I've been able to tweak some settings, mount network shares, and play MP3s. A big round of applause goes out to the Audrey hacking community. They've found some clever ways to make these things fun toys that are actually useful. My next step is to do some exploring in the attic so I can find places to put network connections for this thing. I'd like to at least be able to connect in the family room & the kitchen.

There was one weird thing, though. When we checked e-mail Monday night, we had a message from AOL saying our message was undeliverable because the user was not found. But, we hadn't sent anything to anybody at AOL! It had the message attached, and it had a March 2001 date on it, and it said "This is an Ergo attachment." Since Ergo is another name used for the Audrey, I thought maybe something strange had happened during the software update. I looked at the e-mail program on Audrey and it did have that message in it's sent box. I noticed that Audrey also has a "Sending Later" box, which was empty. That's when I realized what probably happened: The person who owned this before us wrote the e-mail, saved it to send later, then stopped using the Audrey before that message ever got sent. When Audrey got a valid e-mail setting again, it went ahead and sent the message.

One thing I did not do this weekend is make New Year's resolutions. They may work for other people, but they don't work for me. Setting an arbitrary date of when I'll change something just gives me an excuse to put it off ("Oops, I wasn't supposed to do that anymore. Oh well, I'll try again at the Chinese New Year."). For anyone trying to keep resolutions this year, I wish you all the luck...

Hope everyone else had a good end of 2001, and that y'all have an even better 2002. Last year was pretty good for us, personally, even though it pretty well sucked for the rest of the world. Hopefully, everything will improve this year.