InfiniteTides

My brother doesn’t know that I’m installing openSUSE 10.3 on his daughters’ PC. I honestly don’t think he will mind once he sees all of the cool applications and games on it. Hell, he’ll probably want to use it himself. I’ll tell the girls not to let him use it, because it’s the kids’ computer, not for adults.

He’ll still be able to boot to Windows XP if they need to, but I really think that they will like openSUSE better! This will be an interesting test, to see which OS his two little girls prefer. They’re smart. They won’t have any problem figuring out the KDE desktop. Now I just have to hook up a CAT-5 cable and update the OS.

Linux is the perfect OS to install on an older PC, but first you have to get the damn thing to read the CD! I don’t know why, but the PC I’ve been working on today for my brother refuses to read my OpenSuSE 10.3 or 10.2 install CD’s. I can’t figure out if it’s a problem with the CD drive itself or something wrong with the CD’s.

Okay, never mind. I’m retarded. The “CD’s” that his computer wouldn’t read were actually DVD-R’s. Unfortunately, his computer does not have a DVD drive. My bad! Even smart people like me do stupid things sometimes.

According to NASA, there is currently a 4% chance that Mars will be struck by an asteroid on January 30, 2008. This got me to thinking: How high would the probably of an asteroid hitting Earth need to be before the masses would begin to panic? Putting aside the idea that NASA probably wouldn’t tell us that the planet were in grave peril, at what point would people stop going to work, start drinking, start stocking up on canned goods, guns/ammo, praying, etc?

I think that for me, the probability needs to be upwards of 75-80+% before I would start modifying my behavior as far as missing work, though I would probably start stocking up on canned goods and bottled water as low as 25-30%. There’s nothing wrong with hedging your bets by getting prepared, and there’s really nothing wrong with having a disaster plan and supplies any way.

I’m strange, so my idea of having fun on New Year’s Eve is probably vastly different from yours. Tonight I’ll be watching movies and installing stuff on my nieces’ computer. It has Windows XP on it, but I very much want to install openSUSE on it as well. I’m sure that there are loads of educational open source games that they would love. That’s my project for tonight.

Last night I went over to my brother’s to get his new wireless router to play nice with his DSL modem. I have some experience with such things, having my own home wifi network, but my experience didn’t prepare me for glitch we hit setting his network up. If not for Bill pointing out to me that the router’s connection to the modem wasn’t lighting up the LED on the modem, I never would have figured out that his new router came with a defective CAT-5 cable.

For some reason, the router gave itself the address 192.168.2.1 instead of 192.168.1.1 and it wouldn’t accept the default username and password. Once we replaced the defective cable, it didn’t take too long to get into the web based interface. The wizard that comes with the router was completely worthless and locked up half the time. Needless to say, I got it working. Bill gave me food for my trouble, and his daughters’ desktop to setup (because I love doing stuff like that). It was fun.