Jeffrey’s World

Archive for the ‘Software’ Category

I couldn’t sleep tonight, so I decided to take on a mission in Star Trek Online… seems I bit off more than I could chew on that one.

Oh, it started off just fine. In fact, I had no problems at all until the end of the mission, when one of the Klingons turned out to be an Undine shapeshifter and it sent me up against an Undine dreadnought and four frigates. Alone. In a light cruiser. Oh, yeah, that ended well… after getting my @$$ thoroughly kicked about a dozen times, I finally dropped the mission; I’ll have to try it again once I’ve got a (much) bigger ship.

But, alas, I couldn’t end the night like that. Despite the fact that it was by this point nearly 2 am, I still couldn’t sleep, and I didn’t want to end the game on a sour note. So I took on a simple patrol mission. Patrolled four systems. Simple stuff. Ended up getting promoted from Lieutenant 4 to Lieutenant 5. Unfortunately, now it’s 3am, I still can’t sleep, and my alarm’s going off in 3 hours so I can be awake by 8, out the door by 8:30, and in class by 9…

Today, I installed and began playing Star Trek Online, which is in Open Beta until the end of the month. I’m very impressed; Cryptic has done an outstanding job translating the world of Star Trek into game form. After only a few hours playing the game, I’m already willing to shell out the cash for a Lifetime Subscription when it goes live in a couple weeks. It’s really that good.

Because it’s Open Beta, our settings won’t be retained when it switches over, leaving us to be somewhat whimsical with our name choices if we desire. One of my friends, Winston, decided to use the opportunity to name his ship the USS Lollypop (It’s a good ship, he insists). I decided to give a nod to the Original Series by naming my character Captain Dunsel. TOS fans will get the joke immediately. I was somewhat more serious with my ship name, the USS John Rodgers; there have been two US Navy ships with that name, in honor of one of my ancestors. I may reuse it when STO goes live; I haven’t decided yet.

Anyone who’s also playing in the Open Beta, I invite you to send me a friend request. My username is @jharlan1977.

Qa’pla!

I’ve downloaded the WordPress for BlackBerry app, so updating my blog will now be nearly as easy as tweeting. Hopefully, this means I’ll update the blog a little more often in the future. Time will tell, I guess.

Well, the wireless modem on my laptop is dead as a doornail. HP’s “customer service” wasn’t much help. I really wasn’t inclined to send my laptop in to them for two weeks, particularly due to the stories I’ve heard of them reformatting hard drives and resetting everything back to the way it was when the computers were first purchased… Instead, I just bought an inexpensive USB wireless modem that works with Linux, and I’m back online NOW, with no risk of someone wiping all my data.

I got the screen on my laptop working now. Turns out I had to use the vesa driver instead of the ATI driver. As always, it’s something simple that trips everything up. I’m still working on getting the wireless and ethernet connections working, but that’s a less pressing matter. At least until the movers come and take my desktop system, anyhow.

Last week I bought an old IBM Thinkpad A22M on eBay for $150. Damn good deal. It’s an older system, but $150… Seriously. 900MHz Pentium-III, 128MB RAM, 10GB Hard Drive, DVD drive…

So what’s the catch? No operating system installed. Like that’s an issue for an alpha geek like me, right? Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve installed the WordPress blog software… my own attempt at creating a blog wasn’t too successful, unfortunately.

Here’s the posts from my old blog: Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published in the Fullerton College Hornet, Vol. 78, Issue 17; 3 Mar 1999

In the midst of the Microsoft antitrust trial, a true competitor has arisen.

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Originally published in the Fullerton College Hornet, Vol. 78, Issue 15; 17 Feb 1999

Exactly 317 days are left in the millennium. This could spell disaster for anything computer controlled that is not prepared for the turn of the millennium.

What is the Year 2000, or Y2K, problem and how did it come about?

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