2002 Remembrances

[Matthew Carpenter]

On Wed, 01 Jan 2003 18:05:44 -0500
Jerry McBride <mcbrides9 at comcast.net> wrote:

> On Wed, 01 Jan 2003 15:09:44 -0700 Collins <erichey2 at attbi.com> wrote:
> 
> > Memorable moments for me in 2002 included:
> > 
> 
> Mine...
> 
> * layed off and called back to work, before I even left the building on
> two separate occasions. What a night mare! A age 46 I've learned alot
> about human foibles and frailties and how cheap some humans appear in
> the eyes of other humans. I'll never be the same.
 
I'm still having to cope with these lessons...  Not laid off or fired, but
sometimes I wonder how far I am from it.  Then again, if I ran Windows at
work like everyone else I'd probably annoy my boss less...  

> * compiled kde 3.10 on a whim and fell in love with the pig... Really
> nice.

I can hardly wait...

> 
> > * On the cusp of the new year I slayed the CUPS dragon and put up an
> > lprng printing system (thanks to Joel's help)
> > 
> 
> * ditto... CUPS sucks so bad that your ears pop when you install it...

Ok, now I can't sit by and let this one slide...  lprng is a great daemon
for sharing a local printer.  CUPS is great for printing to non-PS
printers.  Sure, you can make lprng do it, but it sure ain't nice and
friendly.  Biggest problems I've had with CUPS is setting a wrong printer
driver and getting NOTHING printed as the print jobs evaporate, and:
remote print server goes away temporarily, and CUPS stops the local print
queue... not to start back up without manual intervention.
But my nightmares with lprng on a desktop machine still live, burned
eternally into my memory.  CUPS is a good desktop system.


> * Built my first real performance computer; msi kt3 ultra, xp 1600 at 2000+
> water cooled.
> 
> * Paid off the mortgage on our house... It's like being born again.
> Imagine having an extra $1000.00 a month in your pocket. :')

This is where I get SUPER jealous on both counts.  You must have done
something right to have the house paid off by 46.  My wife and I are
refinancing taking the 26 years on our mortgage and rolling them into a 15
year, paying off one piece of land and the school loan.  At 29 years and 4
days, we're working on it :)
As for the performance machine, I'm still subsisting ona Celeron 300A
(overclocked to 450MHz) and a Diamond Viper 330 which doesn't accelerate
in X (I bought it before I met Linux), a mammoth NEC 5FGp 17" boat of a
monitor, and several other lesser machines which make great servers.

Happy New Year and Merry Christmas (day 10)

Matt