I am tempted to buy a 60GB iPod but have set a goal of debit repayment for next weekend that if I don't make it I don't consider the iPod further. I got my PSP working with the eMac again.

Talking about confusion I am thinking that emacs(which are not eMacs) are an answer to my computer needs from the 1980's. I wanted a word processor in those days but could not afford one for our Vic 20.

I have been reading these critcal works about the internet recently:

Rose, Ellen. User Error: Resisting the Computer Culture (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2003).

Shenk, David. Data Smog : Surviving the Information Glut (San Francisco, Calif. : Harper Edge, 1997).

Stoll, Clifford. High Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don't Belong in the Classroom and Other Reflections by a Computer Contrarian (New York: Double Day, 1999).

Ellen Rose makes some interesting comments about hackers and how she can and can not say who these people are and what motivates them. I am curious to see this attempt being made at all.

on emacs: I think Richard Stallman must have been pretty smart of have assessed our needs as hackers in the 1980s and late 1970's by choosing to build a word processor but perhaps given computing needs of programmers this was not such a great move. He needed emacs for programming in other words writing code. But I cant even be sure that is why he made emacs that is just what I have read. Perhaps I should email him about this or check his web site. As opposed to writers and what we needed I am not so sure Richard Stallman the original author of the emacs software was really creating something free for authors and writers.

A sister worker sent me this link but I haven't checked it out yet. How to encourage women in computing
(http://infohost.nmt.edu/~val/howto.html")

I worked with Dreamweaver for about two hours last night. I also did some Perl research on the web and also on a Perl books CD from O'Reilly. I am updating my blogs regularly. I downloaded all my law course outlines as pdf's to my palm pilot. I chatted at Yahoo using both chitchat and yahoo messenger yesterday. I bought some DVD+R's to use at school where they have DVD burners. I will back up my files soon by taking my USB 20 GB drive to school with the files on it and then burn these files to DVD. I did some planning of this back up Wednesday morning. I also made some back up CD's on my eMac of web files and work related files. I tried the wireless internet at school with my PSP but need to use pop up windows on this wireless network for it to work.

I did not yet buy an iPod. I used the T30 Thinkpad to change the songs on the PSP.

I have my first rack now. It is case for 10 U on wheels and is totally covered but not fully weather proof. It is lockable to a limted extent. I now need a good power bar for this rack. A dual pentium III server for this rack would cost about 400$ US or about 500$ CND. A cheap laptop might be a better idea. I am thinking of writing a book about open source music workstations. I know nothing about Linux music workstations so would present it after and as I learned these workstations.

I am just installing pdf's from my eMac desktop to my palm. I would also like to change the songs on my PSP but it doesn't seem to connect to the eMac and let me access the folder. The PSP does not show up in the finder window when I connect it. I almost bought an iPod yesterday. Maybe I will buy a 20GB iPod today.

I clicked a link in a virus email but luckly I was on my eMac so the exe file did nothing.

I am just installing Debian 3.1 r0 on the T30 Thinkpad. I have WinXP working on the first 29GB. I have an 8 GB FAT partition which is the D drive. But realise that it is Fedora Red Hat linux that can see and write to fat partitions. I am not sure about Debian. I am installing Debian into a 19GB partition. I have a 750MB swap partition. So basically today and Monday/Tuesday I have reinstalled all the operating systems on the T30. If I could replace the screen I would have the cool laptop system back in use. I may order a 256 MB RAM PC2100 chip for this laptop today at the school computer store.

I am copying my user account on the eMac and all the files and folders to my back up hard drive. This is about 10GB. I will perhaps wait a bit to make my DVD back ups. But this user account would be one thing to back up. Also I would back up to DVD, the My Documents folder from my windows machines.

I have the credit to buy a new laptop from futureshop. I also have the credit to buy a refurbished IBM from HBC.com. But of these sources are selling these laptops at higher costs than elsewhere and also this would be on credit which would be costlier in the long run too. I am getting more into buying music equipment these days.

My eMac computer is still working ok although MS Internet explorer is a bit buggy these days. The broken laptop can be my windows machine. And my used iBook might be here this week. So there is really no need for a new machine right now. I have at least two more computers here that can surf the net. I am keeping all my email on the eMac these days and can also back up this email. I also now have access to DVD burners at school and will be buying some blank DVD's and making some DVD backups soon. I may do that this weekend. I would use my 20GB USB drive to copy files off the eMac and thern burn them to DVD at school on the Learning Commons computers now available in our library.

My windows XP CD's arrived. I got both WinXP SP2 and WinXP for 64 bit computers. I installed the WinXP SP2 on the broken T30 laptop. I updated it at microsoft.com. I also went to IBM.ca and downloaded and installed all the drivers for this T30 running WinXP. I used an automated software installer at IBM. I am just copying my old WinXP my documents folder over to the new install. I will now reinstall Debian 3.1 using the Debian net install CD. Then I will be done with this T30 for the day.

I printed this blog in hard copy for the months of February to August and placed these printouts in my hard copy computer log book. I also have some R code and some C++ code and my XML dtd in this hard copy binder.

I bought a Belkin USB keyboard and Kensington USB mouse for the Thinkpad T30 so I can work comfortably at the external monitor with out the broken screen blocking the way. Both of these work fine in Win2K and Debian 3.1. I explored a little of the Debian net applications. Last night I installled R and SAS 8.2 on the Win2K side. R is already installed on the Debian side.

The clamshell iBook should arrive next week sometime. I will still need to buy it a larger hard drive and install Panther on it. I will also still need to install more memory.

If I get a new refurbished Thinkpad I will use the 60GB drive and reinstall WinXP and Debian 3.1 on the new Thinkpad.

I used the web today, not much email, some of my Palm and Dream Weaver. It is now Tuesday and I have not yet uploaded the pictures of my new PA but the pictures are taken and have been imported to iPhoto.

I installed Adobe Reader on the Macintosh and got some copies of book reviews from the journal The Information Society onto my palm W. I have been using my palm W for school email and have been paying 25$ a month for this. I am just about to install Avantgo on my Macintosh but actually I am installing an open source software to do this in Mac OS X which will work with the Avantgo web clipping service.

I have been making some web pages with dream weaver. I built a little bit of a fan web site for the TV show Stargate. I need to write a little more content for these web pages before Wednesday evening. I will do some of this tonight.

I am mostly working on my eMac for everyday work. I did get a 160GB external USB hard drive by Western Digital. I made four partitions and left two partitions free. I made one of the first ones 60GB and the other 14GB. These two are Mac extended journalling partitions. I copied the desktop, email and user to these partitions. So some simple copy file back ups have been done. I just disconnected the hard drive tonight. I will do this copy once a month.

So this goes back to my two 160GB drives with a network USB connector. I will wait until the Linksys USB hard drive network connector becomes a bit cheaper and also get two other 160GB drives for general (none back up) use but I will also wait until these drives become cheaper. The new 160GB drive cost about 280$.

Speaking of costs I have also been upgrading my PA equipment and that has cost hundreds of dollars. I am getting a rack case for this music gear and might buy some music rack cases for computers at some point. May be later this fall I will buy a small 1U or 2U HP server with Pentium III dual processors and about 60GB hard drives. This would be to do music on the server maybe as a Linux workstation may be as a WinXP or WinVista workstation. Maybe dual boot would work well. I would need at least one PCI slot on the server too for a music interface card. At least I can use the music store for a supplier of rack cases. I think I will take some pictures now of my new PA gear and place them on our musical blog.

The iBook is being shipped a second time. I am hoping I can use the older iBook for my laptop and not need to buy a new laptop. I am considering buying another refurbished IBM/Lenovo laptop near the end of the school term. I could maybe capitalise on Christmas sales.

Nothing much new with my computers. I did order a 160GB hard drive to do back ups for the eMac. As soon ago, as 3 years, a 20GB drive would have been enough. I don't have a DVD burner yet.

I sort of did some bidding on a replacement laptop screen for my Thinkpad, this evening. In the end the bidding got too high.

I then retired to work on my laptop hooked up to an external monitor. I installed some software on the Win2K side of the computer. I have installled WinZip, Adobe Reader, FireFox, Black Ice, Lotus Smart Suite, I had trouble installing Illustrator 8.0. I also installed the Palm Desktop on the Win2K.

Speaking of the Palm, I tried installing some Palm softwares I had paid 2$ for namely Chess annd Checkers on my Tungsten W but neither worked very well. Oh well 2$ down the drain.

More photos of Thinkpad T30

More photos of Thinkpad T30

more photos of Thinkpad T30

Photos of Thinkpad T30

I have been using the laptop with an external monitor and installed xcircuit, R, Emacs, ESS and a GNU Go game on the Debian OS. I also surfed a bit this morning in Debian but mostly this was window shopping surfing. I am writing my blogs and doing school work surfing this morning using my eMac. I could sell my thinkpad back to IBM. I am also thinking that using it with the external monitor would be ok and that it might be worth it to keep and even upgrade the RAM by 256MB for 50$. I read about the first half hour of Learning Emacs in 24 hours.

My laptop is still in the shop and so far they haven't been able to fix it. I am hopeful but it may be a lost cause. I was able today to fax using my Mac. So that functionality is ok on the Mac. So I may not need a windows computer for that.

I was able to get my PSP updated to system 2.0. I can now wirelessly surf the internet on my play station portable. I learned a little of how to use it and bookmarked my personal home page and my wife's poetry page. I will now test playing Apple iTunes files on it.

The WinNT would not see the zip drive and also the WinNT would not work with the IBM download for drivers. So I tried Fedora Core and it did both. It downloaded the drivers and also saw and worked with the USB zip drive. So I downloaded only the ethernet driver. I then copied it to the Win2K machine and installed this driver. I was able then to connect the Win2K to the Internet and updated windows first. I then use an automatic drivers update software at IBM and got all the drivers installed and even updated the bios on the laptop. I also completed copying the old My Documents folder to the Win2K.

I am taking the laptop to the school's repair shop to have it looked at tomorrow or today. I also need to install Debian again.

I installed Windows 2000 successfully on my new laptop hard drive. My Windows XP CD is no good. I will now reinstall Debian. I need to download about 20 drivers or more from IBM for Windows 2000 to work properly on the IBM Thinkpad. I can not download the drivers on the Macintosh, so I am going to boot up my server running Windows NT and see if I can download them to a zip disk. Then I will transfer them to the Thinkpad. This will also test the server running Windows NT and its USB connection because I am using a USB zip drive. I have never tried to get anything to work in the server's USB connections. I am at the moment copying the old My Documents folder from Windows XP to Windows 2000 using my USB hard drive on the Thinkpad.

I emailed the school's hardware repairs services and asked if they could fix the laptop's screen. They charge 35$ per hour. The new screen may cost a lot.

I got the X windows working on the T30 but have some problems still with the mouse. I used dpkg-reconfigure. I used information at this page on the web to learn about the xf86Config-4 file. http://ozlabs.org/~jk/docs/T30+linux/

I am reading about SGML, IP law, and e-business this morning.

Recovery of the laptop!

It is only the screen that was broken on the laptop. But this is a key part. On Monday I will call IBM and see if they can fix it. I was able to connect the laptop to an external monitor and access everything and keep it working. I took the entire My Documents folder off using a USB hard drive of 20GB size. I am able to access all the word processing documents on the Macintosh computer. These are most of my key school documents. The only other documents that might be windows only are SAS program files. I may not need these too dearly this year as I may not study much in the way of statistics this year. I also took the email off the laptop be exporting it to Netscape and then copying this folder full of email to the Mac mail program. In the end I had just bought a new 60GB hard drive for the IBM laptop and installed it and tried to put on the operating systems WinXP and Debian. Both failed at this point. With the Debian though it is just a matter of getting X windows working.

My laptop is broken

My laptop got knocked off the coffee table and is now unusable. Thus this linux plan is on hold now. I will have to use my Macintosh computer now. This accident will test my back up process. I did not yet make an end of July back up so I will be using my end of June back up CD. I did make a back up CD of email at the end of July. Now I need to decide what I will do for a laptop. Perhaps the used iBook will be my laptop. Perhaps I will buy another IBM laptop. For now I am using my eMac computer.

I got some help from our local Linux novice email list. Farrah Rashid sugested he had simply divided his drive into two patitions. In the first he had installed WinXP then simply rebooted and installed Debian from CD in the second partition with a swap patition of 1 GB. I would use a swap partition of 512 MB but I think I may upgrade the RAM at some point so a 1 GB partition should be good.

With this method I am wondering about the Grub or Boot Magic. In other words how do you handle the dual boot up?

The new hard drive was shipped from Vancouver yesterday. In terms of initial format and and partitioning, I know I am limited in the number of partitions I can make. I was thinking of making one boot partition and then two reasonably similar 30GB sized partitions for each of the two operating systems. The web page I meantioned below suggested that Grub will not work well with WinXP. This author suggested using Boot Magic in its own Win FAT partition of a fair size that both operating systems could view and access. Boot Magic comes free with Partition Magic. So this is perhaps undecided at present.

Researching the install of Fedora and WinXP

I found this page at a Linux on Thinkpads ring site http://www.phys.cwru.edu/~covault/linux_fedora_core3_x23.html I read most of the page. I would have to buy partition magic for this method and this guy kept his original WinXP because he did not want to buy XP. So two differences in my senario. I have a copy of WinXP from school that my tuition has paid for and two I am installing on a new hard drive. But I also learned from this web page that Fedora core is an easy OS to install on a Thinkpad in terms of drivers for the various Thinkpad parts.

I sold my old Duron chip and mother board and RAM. I got 18$ for these. Just two years ago the RAM cost close to 100$ and three years ago the motherboard and chip were about 300$. I got about one full year of use of these parts. The computer these were from was my 16th personal computer. It did not last long. It was frustrating later on in its life. I am left with the case, hard drive and floppy drive now. I can now buy it a new motherboard and chip and RAM, if I have time and money to do this.

Major project: install WinXP and Debian Linux on my IBM Thinkpad T30 laptop

My next major Linux install will be to get this Thinkpad T30 working as a dual boot machine. I will download and install Debian as well as WinXP on this laptop. I still need to research the Debian step. I also need to do back up with the 20GB USB drive but the My Documents folder on my Thinkpad is only some 6 GB in size so this USB 20GB drive will do this no problem. I must remember to do a Win Fat format on this USB drive with my eMac computer.

I am buying a 60GB hard drive, a 20 GB USB drive and a 16 channel mixing board.

I did a fair amount of shopping today. I won on ebay a 20GB USB hard drive for a fair price. I also put a down payment on a Behringer 16 channel mixing board. I also must now pay for a 60GB hard drive for my IBM laptop and from this same ebay seller I bought an iLife DVD. It is difficult to manage all this spending and money. The mixer will possible make money for me. I was able to make 40$ this past month with our PA system. I will have spent about 550$ on this PA by the end of the summer. But my original PA system has paid for itself. It originally cost about 1600$. I have earned this much with it from about 1993 to 1999.

I won on ebay.ca a 60GB hard drive I can use in my Thinkpad for the dual boot install. I have my school provided copy of WinXP. I will install either Fedora or Debian as the Linux OS. I will need to do some more research into installing Linux on the Thinkpad T30. I also won a copy of iLife 04. I am still bidding on a 512 MB RAM chip and another 60GB hard drive for the iBook with the same seller. This will cost approximately 350$ in total.

My computers are all running fine now except for a few of the Thinkpad project machines. My main Thinkpad is fine. My new used iBook should arrive via UPS this week. In about a week I will purchase a 60GB hard drive for the iBook with Panther installed on the hard drive by the seller of the drive. I will also buy from this same ebay seller a 512MB RAM chip for ths iBook. So in about three weeks just on time for school I should have two well functioning laptops. My old IBM PC server is presently up and running Red Hat Fedora in my office. This post is being written on my Thinkpad T30 in the living room.

I am just doing my back up process now. I am printing my blogs in hard copy. I will save my outlook store folder on a CD. The outlook store folder is soon going to be too big for a CD. I will probably be able to delete some email from this folder though. I will also back up the my documents folder and my school work folder to CD.

I installed Fedora core 3 on my friend's HP pentium III 500 MHz computer. It really had no problems except for some error messages perhaps because we were using a 65 GB hard drive.

I did not do my back ups yet. Instead I helped a friend by installing Fedora Core 3 on his computer. It took me about 4 hours to update the software.

I will start my monthly back up process tonight at about midnight. First I will copy and paste the past month's blog entries on all my blogs into word doc files. Then I will print them in hard copy. Then once these are saved I will burn CD's of personal data folders including these blogs.

I was able just this afternoon to update the ATI Radeon 7500 video driver. Also windows update checked my WinXP lisense this time with what they call a genuine windows checker or validator.

I successfully installed Firefox 1.0 and immported my Internet Explorer bookmarks. I am posting this using Firefox as my web browser.

I am ripping some CD's I got at a yard sale.

I am going to install the Firefox web browser 1.0.6. This will be my first use of firefox.

I put my PSP up for sale. I priced my PSP and everything meaning four movies and one game and the 512 MB memory stick at 400$ or 450$ CND. If it sells I might buy my self an iPod and portable DVD player/watcher.

I may be able to purchase a hard drive for the iBook but there is probably little chance of buying a large hard drive unless I buy one at Zellers rather than ebay. The plan is to get a 160GB hard drive and put it in a USB enclosure and then eventually get a Linksys ethernet hard drive connector box that allows the USB enclosure with hard drive to be accessed over ethernet.

I am probably not going to afford any hard drives this pay period. I usually buy something at ebay when I get paid but this week will probably not buy anything.

I must admit a business lesson here. I can not afford to buy a bunch of hard drives so that IBM thinkpad plan will have to wait for later. I should step back to completing the iBook planned upgrade or step back from that to the IBM 760 plan. I did get the base Debian 3.1 r 0 installed. Or even step back to the PSP stuff. The PSP is working fine but PSP UMD movies now take budget money. Seems I have been getting too far ahead with spending.

I should also do some more coding in C++ and also R's language needs reviewing and Grass needs learning.

I am shopping for various hard drives on ebay. My plan right now is to buy a USB pocket drive and use this for a massive back up of my IBM laptop. Then when that's backed up I will install a new 60 GB or 80 GB hard drive in the IBM thinkpad. Then I will partition the new drive into fat sections with about 40GB for winXP then install WinXP into this partition. Then once that's installed I will put the backed up data into it. Then I will run a Debian or Fedora install on the rest of the drive. Thus this is my plan to make the IBM Thinkpad laptop dual boot.

Tinkering

It would definitely be cheaper to buy a second hard or replacement hard drive for the IBM thinkpad than buying a second Thinkpad to run Linux. I wonder if I could run Linux off of a second hard drive in the laptop then use a firewire card I have to run a DVD burner to replace the CD/DVD drive that I would loose if I used the Ultrabay for a second hard drive. I think this is a good plan.

The iBook did not arrive at the end of the week so hopefully it arrives next week. My funds for fixing it up won't be available until the 11th of August.

With about 250$ or less for a larger iBook hard drive, a similar amount for the Thinkpad second hard drive, plus 100$ or less for an ultra bay hard drive holder, plus 150$ for more iBook memory; I am looking at about 750$ in computer expenses in the near future. Then might have to pay 100$ for an external DVD burner. But if I buy the hard drives on ebay I can save about 200$ and also I can save on the ultra bay hard drive holder maybe getting it for 30-60$. The memory cost is about as cheap as it can get right now so costs might be more like 600$ for everything.

As we use computers longer they get broken with software conflicts and less hard drive space. I was updating windows and did as I said get Intel networking updated but updating an IBM PM device software caused me to loose my stand by and hibernate functions on the winXP laptop. I was also not able to update the ATI radeon 7500 card. I am thinking of buying a late model pentium III thinkpad with CD burner to install Debian on.

In the past week I have been cleaning up my windos laptop. I deleted iso images and also deleted downloaded program install files for free software or software I can download again for free. I also defraged the hard drive and cleaned up the hard drive with disk clean up. I uninstalled the weather channel which got downloaded with Netscape and made for such a terribly slow start up. I also did a windows update but had installation problems with some hardware updates from third parties. My ATI Radeon 7500 video card in the laptop could not be updated. I was able to get new drivers for Intel 10/100 networking.

I finally got an email saying that my iBook 300 Mhz laptop has been shipped and should arrive at the end of this week. I had been worrying because the person who sold me this used computer had not contacted me for weeks. Now I can find some parts for it with more confidence.

I am starting to pick up some parts for my iBook which still hasn't arrived in the mail. Right now I am trying to win a 10GB drive in ebay.ca.

I am just completing my email transfer using dotmac to the eMac from outlook on my PC. I also found my "lost" netscape email and copied that over ethernet to my Mac and imported it to Mac OSX mail. This means most of my received mail from March 2001 until today is now on my Mac.

I listened to David Suzuki on the bus. His lecture was colourful but he admits to taking a purely scientific world view. I am against this. I am not against good science I just believe Suzuki does not crtique science the way it should be these days. The basic knowledge needs more thought. Also science as a world view and as a way of knowing nature is not really the only or best way.

I heard a Yukon artist on the TV arguing that we could not have a pure state of nature but we could temper our use of resources and justify our use and control and use less of nature and still survive. I like this view better than Suzuki's.

Suzuki is very famous and has probably done a lot of good.

I downloaded some mp3's from www.oneworld.ca David Suzuki spoke recently at the National Farmers Union Convention held in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He spoke about biotechnology. I just downloaded his lecture as mp3 files. The mp3's were provided by http://www.makingthelinksradio.ca

I am just about to burn some back ups of my own computer files and email. I will also be burning some CD's for a community group I keep records for to give to other members on Saturday at our monthly meeting.

My computers are working fine now. I kept some minutes at a meeting today on my Palm W and emailed them to the office upstairs from the meeting. I have yet to do my CD back ups but I have read all my paper hard copy back ups of my blogs. They seem ok.

I have now transfered all my outlook express mail from 2001 April to 2005 March. This is not all the email I received. And I have yet to transfer sub folders and sent email.

I printed my blogs out in hard copy for the month of June. This was three blogs. I also saved the entries for June on all three of these blogs as word 97 files using Open Office 1.1.4.

I paid for the iBook today. An old friend contacted me through yahoo messenger. I helped a friend use the bus companies schedule on the web. It is one hour now until I do my back ups. Our internet service was down today a bit nation wide. I have been reading about the success factors in a silicon valley. This book I am reading this in was written here in Ottawa.

I need to start thinking about monthly back ups again. This time I think I will burn two CD's for the PC one with email and one with my own files. Second I will burn one CD or two for my Macintosh. I will also print out my blogs on Canada day. I need to buy some more recycled paper and will pick that up today at Staples. I have plenty of ink that I bought at school.

I started to download podcasts. I tried the inside mac radio show and searched some Canadian podcasts. There was an interesting graduates podcast in Canada but I could not get it to work in the iTunes music store. I am only trying free podcasts so far. The inside mac podcast lead me to some mac support sites that I could buy memory at.

I bought a clamshell iBook on ebay. It cost 250$ CND. I managed after about a week or surfing, searching and bidding to get an iBook that is in good shape and costs less than others that were sold this past week. The seller's feedback is only 1 though so I am taking a bit of a risk but the person seems alright and the deal will be paid for tomorrow. The delivery will be by UPS. This iBook will need more memory and also perhaps I could install a 40 or 60 GB hard drive. I would also need a copy of Mac OS X Tiger to put on the new hard drive. That is my next big mac software upgrade to my Macs.

I just updated iTunes to 4.9 on my Mac and on my PC. It won't run on my other computers.

I acessed the green party web site and wrote a reply about a web based database of the gun control registry. Someone wanted to estimate the costs. I posted something about the requirements possibly needed.

I am using my PSP regularly now. I now own four UMD movies. There are about 50 movies or so for sale at amazon.com and this is growing all the time. Like other corporate money making schemes it is designed to get bigger and produce more trash for our planet. I caught some news about AMD suing Intel today.

The dot mac IMAP server is taking some getting used to. I have transferred to my eMac Mac OSX mail, all 2001, 2002 and 2003 email from my inbox on my Outlook Express on my WinXP laptop.

It is the end of a long day. A lot has been achieved this morning. I was finally able to transfer email to my eMac and Mac Mail application from my Windows Outlook Express email application. It will take maybe another 20 hours to complete this task.

I am following exact instructions given at Apple support pages. I using a trial account at dot Mac to use dot Mac's IMAP email server to upload from windows then download email to the eMac. I have 600 MB to transfer. I have to do this in small portions as the IMAP server account at dot Mac has a 30MB limit.

I am making a lot of copies of email stores on the eMac and need to delete these backups and organisational tools after I am done. By orgainsational tools I mean I am seperating large inboxes to temporary folders to make it easier to sort the uploaded and then downloaed emails into the eMac inbox and not miss a single email. Back up store folders are just a standard precaution.

I was also able to help a friend back up his email in Win98 and next week I will help him install his new 80GB hard drive. I will not loan him my copy of Windows. He will still run win98. I have given him a linux computer as well. There is a balance there.

I installed my new colour ink cartridge on my Espon 440 in the office. I am also working in Open Office and Word to write a brief legal paper for my spring term work in my public law course where there is nothing to learn about computers and the law. I am happy with this. But in fact I did learn to download the professor's power point slides from last term then when this terms slides are posted I "save target as" and then as I save, I delete last term's power point file and replace it with the fresh download all in the same "save as" dialogue box.

I bought new ink cartridges for my printers today. I almost bought an iSight camera for my eMac but did not. It was too much money for the use I would get out of it. Also I do not have a spare 165 dollars to spend on this or any computer thing right now. The other things I bought today that were computer related was a Linux magazine and also a UMD disk for my PSP although that is really entertainment related. I also bid on about five iBooks on ebay but did not remain the winning bidder on any of them. I also can not afford the going price of an old clamshell iBook. So I am not getting an iBook soon. I also got a shipping quote on an old HP workstation X500 with dual Xeon pentium III 500 processors and would need 95 dollars US for the shipping. One of these could be my linux box and my next computer.

I used the local for sale computer newsgroup to try to raise some funds by selling some computer parts.

I have had to use Microsoft's Word to count words in my legal studies paper.

I am printing using my Epson 820 photo stylus.

I paid for my wireless email today. It cost 81 dollars for a month and a half. This was mostly the initial set up charges for the wireless carrier. The Palm platform was 270$ last Christmas. The email software was 65$ this past weekend. It has already helped me with my TA work to be able to access my school email account while traveling to school.

I have watched a movie while going home from work now. After giving two labs on minitab last night I was taking a later train and needed to wait half an hour. I watched Spiderman 2 while waiting for the train and then watched it on the train.

I downloaded some Java software to view a map collection at http://www.davidrumsey.com/.

I backed up my present school work files that are on my PC to my eMac using my home network. I am becoming slightly more attracted to the Apple platform this past week and this week. I might save up and buy a 20GB iPod and could use this iPod for remote file storage as well as music.

I had to stop the debian 3.1 install again on the Thinkpad 760. I am going to put the win98 hard drive in this computer and give it to a friend I think. I will first need to fix the power switch which is now broken.

I am redoing the Debian 3.1 install and this time will not install a whole system in one step but instead go package by package.

I would now like to explore R and all the new R and Debian features. This past year I downloaded and installed R for the first time. This year I have learned to use R and have completed some formal training in the use of R for data mining. Next winter in 2006 I may be able to use R for other statistical techniques and also theoretical statistics.

The Thinkpad 360SC is running KDE alright. It is using virtual screens so my mouse moves the screen around. So far I can access all buttons. I went through KDE setup tonight. I changed the time and then shut down. I also checked to see what applications had been installed and there were enough for basic computer operation, word processing, spread sheets, slide shows, and also a few other editors. There is no graphic web browser but there is lynx.

I am installing Debian 3.1r0 on the Thinkpad 760ED right now and it going very smoothly. Except that just now I ran out of space installing a desktop machine. I should have done it package by package. This is a new installer in 3.1.

I am well fed after my wife and I cooked supper. I am going to mark some statistics labs done in Minitab after I boot up the 486 Thinkpad and see if KDE is still there. I will only test it a little then mark the student's home work for a couple of hours. Then I will record a public law lecture on TV from a loaned tape then if I am still awake I will install Debian 3.1 on the pentium 133 MHz Thinkpad.

My laptop and my Fedora workstation are both working fine. Also my eMac is fine and was used for ordering printing of photos over the web. My palm is also working fine and I will buy Snapper professional for my email on this unit this coming week. My PSP is also working fine and I put some video on it that I made on my canon sure shot 100 digital camera.

I have started to rip CD's or in real words to make mp3 files from music CD's I own so I can play songs on my computer and other digital music devices. I am just getting into mp3's that I make myself using windows media player and my Cd collection. I am thinking more about buying an iPod.

I am about to back up some folders on my computer. This is the regular monthly back ups. I will also save and maybe print my blogs out.

I have just copied my outlook express email folder to a folder and will burn it to CD now. This will be both a back up CD and a way that I will try to transfer my email to my eMac. I will read Apple.ca's switch guide may be to help me with this.

I completed my fiscal 2004 web work for the Eastern Regional Network of consumer survivor organisations. I built them this web site and maintain it.

www.eastern-regional-network.org

I did an hour of webmastering for pay just now. I caught the release of confidential information and got a public document to post to the ERN web site rather than the confidential document. I had to view as source as well as composer made some errors in the html source file. All is well now and the fresh updated web pages are on the web. I must draw up a contract for this web work for fiscal 2005.

I got Grass to open the Spearfish data today and used some command line code from a book to produce some maps. I then explained somethings about GIS and Grass to my brother in an email.

I just loaded my palm up with pdf's of journal articles and also lecture slides from my spring/summer public law course.

I succeeded to get Grass working on both my Macintosh and on my Windows computer but do not know how to use Grass yet. I have gotten it to launch the sample Speafish data on both computers now. I also was able to borrow a book from the library on how to use Grass and read the first chapter now.

I changed the background on my blog.

My eMac apple macintosh computer. 

an old IBM that I installed Red Hat 9 onto. 

My Linux monitor 

I finally beat my auction over spending. I bid a few dollars on three items and did not go back and raise my bid on any of the three. I won two out of the three. This is really the way to buy by not spending more than a few dollars. I can not make the mistake of raising my bids anymore.

I spent about 4 hours surfing my high school's web site and communicating with other former students.

I am about to burn a cygwingrass CD from an ISO image.

I downloaded Grass 6 for the Mac and got it to work. I also am trying to put it on my windows computer. I may not succeed at this as my windows computer knowledge is not as deep as might be needed.

I did not use the Palm actually in the field. We used printed copies of our book inventory. I had some problems with the inventory file on the palm. I transfered some lecture power points to the palm but needed to install power point 97 onto my laptop. I now have installed the complete Office 97 on the laptop.

I got a free DVD at the Montreal Anarchist bookfair about the terrorist attacks in the USA. I got a 512 memory stick duo to listen to songs on the PSP. I also got a new SD 256MB card for my palm.

I have not really used Snapper much but it is my choice for an email application on the palm. I had some tech help from them to get it working on the palm.

I checked out the new Life Drive from Palm. I will have to wait until the price drops but am actually not interested in the featues of the newest palm. I prefer to have a mini keyboard so my upgrade path will be to the Treo 650 in a year or two.

I am using my Palm Tungsten W in the field today. We will be using it to monitor and record inventory as we sell books at a bookfair. We are using documents to go and an excel spread sheet to do this.

I got the palm a wireless account with Rogers A T & T. I am testing out Snapper for email on the palm and it seems to work fine. This will cost me about 25$ a month.

The power switch on the IBM 760 may be broken. So that is about 160$ down the drain. I am now trying to sell the Thinkpad to recover my costs. I may try to attempt this hardware repair myself.

I received the 32 MB memory chip for the IBM Thinkpad 760ED. It worked fine. I was able to install Debian 3. My mistake was with mounitng hard drive partitions. Still even with the added memory Red Hat 9 would not fit on the hard drive. I need about a 2 GB drive to work with Red Hat 9. I tried using a boot manager suggested by some linux helper but was not able to get it working. Also I could not find a boot floppy image on the Fedora core 3 CD.

Last night I tried editing the XF86Config file but no luck getting X working yet.

I got the other things I bought for the 760 Thinkpad yesterday in the mail. Both the hard drive and the CD drive work fine. With the CD drive I was able to install the win98 drivers for the Linksys ethernet card and managed to get high speed internet to this pentium 1 laptop. With the second hard drive I was able to start both a Red Hat 9 Linux install and also a Debian Linux 3.0 install. But the Debian Linux kept crashing at the end of the base install. Also the Red Hat 9 needs more memory so I will have to wait for the 32Mb RAM to arrive and should proably afford another 32M RAM chip in the future.

I made my monthly back up CD for April. This time backing up school work and a sub My Documents folder. I did not yet back up email. I also have now hard copied my two blog spot blogs. I just need to hard copy a couple of more blogs and I am done for April.

Both the Thinkpad I bought used, and the Zip drive work. I bought them both on ebay. I got the Thinkpad connected to the net earlier this morning and am updating its Windows software. This old thinkpad was not connected to the net by the previous owner and the thought occured to me to keep this computer off the net but first I will update it. It might be possible to only use it on the net when installing software updates.

I have discovered some issues with installing Debian on it concerning the rescue boot disk and can not find a previously ftp available version of the rescue floppy for this model Thinkpad. There is another way of installing Debian from CD and the instructions on how to boot into the CD are available but I will have to wait for the CD drive to arrive. I will also wait for a second hard drive to install Debian on and wait for a 32MB RAM upgrade.

I did not work on this laptop project much yesterday. Mostly I worked on it this morning. Besides a short break for legal studies and one for reading today's newspaper I have been working on the computers for most of what is now almost a 20 hour day.

Yesterday I tried out the Iomega zip drive in my Thinkpad T30. It works fine. This means I have saved 200$ on the purchase of this IBM accessory. From there I copied files off a zip disk then tried to get my old back up 20GB IBM drive to work in my USB external enclosure. It worked a little but the Thinkpad T30 would not see the format on the hard drive. In my attempts to get this working I used the installed Virtual PC and installed Win98 on the virutal PC. This didn't work and I spent time updating this virtual install of Win98. I had yesterday morning tried to install Debian on the virutal PC but was unsure about partitioning so stopped myself.

I then put the DVD drive back in the T30 and explored old back up CD's. I had some success in importing email from old email stores from April 2001 to April 2002. I also copied lot of old work files to the newer T30. So back ups were proving effective. I also want to do this email process with my Mac so I can have all my email on two newer computers that I use regularly.

I got my IBM 20 GB drive to connect in the USB box but it could not be read on the winXP laptop. Also on the laptop I used Microsoft Virtual PC to install win98 and then updated this.

This somehow led me to trying old back up CD's and I restored email from April 2001-April 2002 to my present copy of Outlook Express. During this time I was using my Aptiva computer. After April 2002 I used Win98 on the duron computer. In April 2003 I got my eMac and all the email on that machine is still accessible but not backed up. Also much of the email from September 2003 until now is on the WinXP laptop. I am just investigating old back up CD's tonight and copying some files to the T30 laptop. I might repeat this on the eMac.

I installed the 250MB zip drive on the IBM T30. It works fine and cost about 20$ a savings of about 200$ over the IBM store price. But now I need to manage two disk drives when I travel with the IBM.

I am waiting to install Fedora Core 3 on the Thinkpad 760ED until I get another 32MB RAM for this machine. For now it has win98.

I failed to install Debian on either the laptop or the duron. Today I got the IBM Thinkpad 760ED in the mail. It has Win98 installed right now. It seems to work fine. I also got a 250MB zip disk for my IBM Thinkpad T30 and will now try that drive out by installing it.

I am attempting to install Debian 3 r2 on the duron computer again. This OS has successfully been installed recently so I am trying again. I will also try a microsoft virutal PC program and install Fedora core 3 on the laptop with win XP.

I am again attempting to install an operating system on the clone Duron machine. I failed to install Fedora 1 core today. Now I am trying WinXP pro.

There is a computer book store closing on one of our main streets here. This past week they were offering three books for five dollars. I bought these three books:

LeVitus, Bob. Mac OS X Panther for Dummies (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004).

I am running panther right now on my eMac

Hall, Jon 'maddog', & Sery, Paul G. Red Hat Linux Fedora for Dummies (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004).

I am running Fedora Core 3 on my IBM PC sever right now.

Pouge, David. Palm Pilot: the Ultimate Guide: Mastering the Palm Organizers from Pilot 1000 to Palm VII (Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 1999).

I have owned a Palm IIIxe, a Palm Vx and now a Palm Tungsten W.

Yesterday the same store offered fifteen books for five dollars and the clerk threw in an extra book AOL for Dummies. These are six of the sixteen books I bought:

Pouge, David. Palm Pilot: the Ultimate Guide: Mastering the Palm Organizers from Pilot 1000 to Palm VII (Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 1999).

The copy I bought earlier in the week was missing the CD so I bought another copy with the CD this time

Pouge, David.The iBook for Dummies (Foster City, CA: IDG, 2000).

I have wanted an early model iBook. I have used someone else's iBook for surfing while on holidays.

Claverie, Jean-Michel, & Notredame, Cedric. Bioinformatics for Dummies (New York, NY, Wiley, 2003).

I have a passing interest in Bioinformatics and Biostatistics

Tejkowski, Erick. Cocoa Programming for Dummies (New York, NY: Wiley, 2003).

I have not programmed Macs much.

Kaufeld, John. AOL for Dummies (New York, NY: Wiley, 2003).

Wolinsky, Howard, & Wolinsky, Judi. Healthcare Online for Dummies (New York, NY: Hungry Minds, 2001).