Archive for the ‘Computers’ category

Yay

October 24th, 2009

Yay for Windows 7!

Writing….

January 19th, 2009

So, as most of you know, I’ve been working on my thesis. Well, the background section at least. Currently, including references, it sits at about 30 pages. I feel like that’s all I’ve been doing lately. It’s kind of starting to drive me insane. But I know the sooner I get it done, the sooner I can defend it and get out of school (finally!). I also know that this section is the one that is going to suck. It’ll probably be the longest section, but everything else is explaining what I did (e.g. results) or how I did it (e.g. experimental) or transitory sections (e.g. introduction and specific aims). So I hope that the bulk of my headache will disappear once this section is more polished.

Before I started writing I thought I had a pretty good grasp of what I was talking about when it comes to this receptor. But, the more I read to get the facts precise, the more I realize it’s so much more complicated than I ever believed. And thus, I get more confused so I have to read more to understand what I don’t understand.

But on a different note, we managed to get a download of Windows 7. Naturally we didn’t put it on one of our main rigs, but still one that would get enough to use to find out how well it works — my laptop. Luckily it’s not laid out much differently than Vista. It’s similar to experiencing Office 2007 when you’re used to Office 2003 in terms of XP to 7. The hiding all open windows features is nice. And with the themes it rotates through a stack of pictures for the background (which for someone who likes to change backgrounds often (i.e. me) it’s nice). Oh yeah, and the jumplists! /smile

Well I’ve wasted enough time here, back to re-reading what I’ve written to expand upon it further.

Oh Where, Oh Where, Have the Alix’s been?

November 10th, 2008

Where have we been?  That’s a pretty damn good question.  We’ve been busy.  I’ll try to fill everyone in, but I have to start from the beginning. . .which I guess would be sometime around October 1st.

Well, to start off, Katie on the other hand has been busy almost every waking moment with her research.  Her animal studies have been completed, she is working on her final target compound, and is nearing the finish line with her computer modeling.  Only thing left is that gigantic paper she has to write.  It has become clear that she won’t be officially graduating until May, but she should be able to defend her thesis come January and after that she can get a job.  She just won’t have that piece of paper that makes everything official.

Me on the other hand, I’ve basically been working and then relaxing on my evenings and days off.  I have found time to finally get a decent file server setup at the house.  It has a 1-TB RAID-5 array, which should be plenty for us.  We’ve currently only filled up 23% (approx. 230 GB), but that frees a lot of stuff off our of computer drives.  The best part is that I have it setup to backup to Carbonite, that way if anything happens all of Katie’s important research and all our pictures are safe.  I highly recommend it to everyone.  I have also spent time cleaning out the spare bedroom and slowly getting rid of the stuff in there.  We donated our old waterbed frame to Goodwill and gave MJ a lot of stuff too.  It feels nice to have an almost fully functional spare room again.

» Read more: Oh Where, Oh Where, Have the Alix’s been?

New Project

April 8th, 2008

Oops, been a little while since anyone has written anything.  We have been pretty busy with wedding stuff.  Well that an playing WoW and going out with friends.  No excuses though.

I’m stating a new project at home.  Going to write a program to keep track of our vehicles.  Installed Options, mileage, MPG,  maintance, after market parts, and probably much more will be stored by this program.  I have a begun thinking about it.  I know it will be written in C# with a SQL database attached to it.  I’m thinking of using SQLExpress since it is free and I can tie it into the install program. » Read more: New Project

Ubuntu Purtiness!

March 13th, 2008

So, after messing around with an attempt at installing Mac OS X 10.5.2 (using the OSX86 project as a guide) on the laptop, I gave up. Certain things were just not working. Namely sleep, fan control, and the wireless card. Also, it took a lot of work to get the network card and sound working. After all this, I decided to give Ubuntu a try. Katie could really use a linux distribution on the laptop to help with her modelling anyway.

I have been running Ubuntu 7.10 (Gusty Gibbon) on the server for a while and it runs flawlessly. I really didn’t have high expectations when installing it on the laptop, but I was impressed. Everything, except for adjusting the screen brightness worked out of the box. The screen brightness was just a quick python script install and then that worked too. I decided to make it look and partially function like Mac OS X to a degree and I am very satisfied with the results.

For starters, the visual effects seem to run flawlessly on this machine. Really fast and not using many resources. Good job on the Compiz team in creating an excellent piece of software. I enjoy eye candy, so having my windows fold up into airplanes and fly away when I close them is fun.

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» Read more: Ubuntu Purtiness!