Bill’s blog

It was almost 10 years ago now where I decided it was time I bought a cd burner. I splurged on a 4x model, which set me back almost $300.

In comparison, today, you can get a 52x writer that burns every type of cd and dvd made for less than $20.

I decided to see if I could actually make a mix music cd. Such things were very uncommon back then. I got the software I needed to do it, so I decided since it was close to Christmas I would send friends mix cds instead of cards. “siri’s non-xmas cd” was born, and the end result was pretty good. I got a lot of people saying they didn’t know you could do that (from home, at least)

Interestingly, Jane was one of the recipients of the original batch of cds. Who knew what the future would hold.

The burner came with a blank cd, which I used to burn the original copy. I bought a spindle of 50 cds and could not get any of them to burn at 4x. So I ended up burning 25 copies of this cd at 1x, which sucks at 75 minutes a pop. MUCH later I realized that the speed rating on a blank cd is not just a marketing gimmick but really does matter, at least to some degree.

I still have the original cd, and surprisingly it still works despite spending much of the last 10 years in my car. I’ve decided to make a 10-year anniversary edition of the cd with new songs. I’m picking out songs to put on it now. I hope to figure out who got the originals. I think I remember most of the list, but I don’t think I have it anywhere. The facebook version of this post will have the names tagged of people I think got one. Feel free to respond to this post here on sirinek.com, or on facebook, but not on livejournal, thank you, because I most likely won’t see it there.

If you got a copy of the original and want this new one, you are first on my list to get it! The new friends I’ve made in the last 10 years are welcome to get a copy too. Anyone interested needs to email me or jane with their address.

…and yes I did!

Here’s a grainy, blurry shot of the big event:

That’s Obama for President, and Jim Martin for US Senate! Yeah!

I set my alarm for 5am to get there early. Unfortunately I slept through it and didn’t get up until 610am. I raced to get dressed, stopped to get some caffeine and snacks and got in line. I was about 100th or so by the time I got there at 620am. The precinct (Fulton County 09A) is in an old folks home, rather large like 6-7 stories or so. And much to everyone in line’s dismay, the poll workers let all the residents vote first before any of the folks in line could go. So that slowed things up a bit. Once that got done, the line was pretty efficient. The line was however, out the door, through the parking lot and onto Marietta Rd. I estimate there were about 300 or so people by the time I got out at 845am.

In 2004, there were 1048 votes cast in this precinct. And lots of people probably voted early (Jane and Moon waited SEVEN HOURS on friday!!).

With the growth in this area and the excitement about this election, I estimate the vote total will be around 1900 for our precinct. The results in this precinct for 2004 broke 68-30 in favor of John Kerry, which warms my heart. The place I lived in 2004 had the opposite results.

This time around for this precinct, I estimate 73-25 for Obama with maybe 1.5% split between Barr supporters and the half dozen or so write-ins for Ron Paul.

Some guy in Finland posted a message to usenet about a project he was working on. The world has never been the same since.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-turns-17

It was just over a year later, around November 1992 or so, when one of my classmates at Tulane, Larry Butler, told me of some unix variant that you could run on your pc. I was certainly intrigued.

At that time, I still had the 386sx/20 that I had bought just before starting college a year and a half before, it was getting rather old at this point, though I did upgrade it to a whopping 4 megabytes ram earlier in the year. I really only ever used it to call BBS’s, since I worked in the computer lab I could just use those computers for my schoolwork… they were newer, had all had the latest software, and were hooked up to laser printers which I got to use for free since I worked there.

So anyway, I decided to load this thing onto my computer. The only thing close to a pre-packaged distribution was something called SLS, which eventually grew into what Linux folks know as Slackware. You downloaded disk sets and loaded them onto 1.44MB floppy disks. The only pieces I had at first were the two main disks.. the boot disk and the root disk. I loaded it up and was just blown away by the fact that I had a unix login prompt showing on my computer.

The next thing I did was get some more of the disksets and find some terminal software so I could call BBSs. Minicom proved to be a easy substitute to the Telix that I had been using in DOS. Yep, all text mode for me.

It was from then that I decided to ditch DOS and run this Linux full-time as my computer OS. My requirements were minimal, so this did the job, and hey it was unix, how cool was that.

For the rest of my sophomore year and through junior year I got a reputation on campus among my fellow computer geeks for being the Linux Guy(tm) which helped me get a job during senior year as the system administrator for the biomedical engineering department, where I managed servers running several different flavors of unix, including OSF/1 running on a DEC Alpha and UNICOS on a smallish Cray machine (by small, I mean it was about half the size of a refrigerator)

That on-campus experience was sufficent to get me a real system administrator job up in the Chicago area after graduation.

13 years and 5 companies later, I don’t know what else I’d want to do.

It seems like just yesterday I bought it in South Carolina on the way to visit Jane.

So I spent all day down at the Fulton County Courthouse after being summoned for Jury Duty. I wish I had known they have free wi-fi available. I sat for 6 hours before they told me I was free to go. At least we got a 90 minute lunch break. The weather was gorgeous so I walked a few blocks up to Rosa’s Pizza to have some of Atlanta’s best pizza for lunch.

Then when it was all over I decided to walk the 1.5 or so miles to Turner Field where they had us park. I still beat the shuttle bus that the other jurors were all standing waiting for.