my isp..

SuddenLink, formerly Cox has decided to make things difficult for us cox subscribers. They are doing away with the cox web hosting as of today and I think email will follow very shortly. It only really affects me since I have my profile pic hosted by cox. Well, now its bye bye to members.cox.net. Thats basically it for me, I moved over to my old geocities site that I created back in the old days, 1999 that is. Becky on the other hand is gonna get the email shaft, I think. I tried to stick to a free webmail that won't go away any time soon for my online ordering and other mostly important crap. Too many internet companies get gobbled up by other internet companies. To name a few, Cox got eaten by SuddenLink, Geocities by Yahoo, and the latest and greatest Youtube by Google. As long as Excite doesn't go under, I should be good for a while. Its the email I use on my resume :)

School - I HATE ART CLASS!

So last December I finally got my AAS in Information System: Network Administration and Support (long title isn't it?) and well, it hasn't done anything for me. At where I work they could care less about my degree and the IT market in the Greenville area is pretty saturated. So Becky convinced me to go to ECU and put my 2 year towards a bachelors degree and well damn, I actually had 64 credit hours that transferred. So this semester I wound up taking 3 classes: trigonemetry, health, and an art class. Trig is OK, I'm not real good at math but got a B on first test, so I think I will survive. The health and art classes are online. Health is pretty easy; read some stuff, do some fill in the blanks, post some stuff on a discussion board, and take some quizzes, done.
The art class is insane, Becky keeps telling me its for NON-art majors. Could of fooled me. This woman that teaches it is crazy. I have to do 4 projects and for the first 2 I've done it has taken at least 6-8 hours to finish one; to someone who works full time and has a kid, thats alot of damn time. I figured out when I was real young that I wasn't artistic at all and this class just kills my appreciation for art. I told the teacher pretty early that I'm color blind, so hopefully she'll cut me some slack in the end. But damn, I think this is the class that I have dreaded working on the most....

ubuntu, kubuntu, schmubuntu

I think I spent part of thursday night, most of friday evening, and too much time saturday getting ubuntu installed on my computer. I suspect a flaky dvd burner drive. I painted it black when i got my coolermaster case last year and I guess it didnt like it. I also think for some reason ubuntu doesnt like my nvidia raid 0 setup and constantly complains about some i/o buffer error crap. The live cd would never boot for me and the new cd's dont include an old style installer anymore, that requires the "alternate install cd". Nice. I finally broke down and burned a dvd iso I had recently downloaded onto a dvdr and that one seemed to of worked for me. It seems if ubuntu was one of those "easy" linux distros, they would make installing the ati video driver easy. That took way too much tweaking. Ati has been lacking in the linux support. But anyways, got Gnome up and running. I can always install KDE later as I see fit. XGL still eludes me.
Here's a screenshot from my 19" widescreen in all its glory.
Suprisingly the only icon on the desktop is our external 250 gig usb hard drive to keep all them pics that Becky keeps taking. We thought it would be best since even now cdr's have a lifespan of about 3-5 years and this is so much more quicker and convenient, and its good for backing stuff up.

Mountains

Ok, time to play catch up.
For the weekend we went to the NC mountains. In particular, Grandfather mountain and Tweetsie railroad. Evan had a blast at the railroad since he loves trains, I got to be a mile high, and Becky got to take half a bazillion pictures. It turned out to be a pretty good family trip. The motel we stayed at even had wireless. I'm actually suprised the didn't use the default password for the router too, I checked. My most memorable part of the trip was when Evan & I were waiting to ride the go-carts at Tweetsie railroad and Evan tells me "No daddy, you can't drive. You too big." Who am I to argue with a 3 year old kid, geesh.

Punkin'!

Today we decided to take Evan to get a pumpkin for Halloween. We went to a place called Briley's farm, where coincidentally Evan went to for a week earlier this summer for 'montessori on the farm'. I think I saw colors of pumpkins that I've never seen before. They had green, brown and white pumpkins; the green pumpkins were crazy, they looked like giant green apples.

They had some cool animals there to check out too, like rabbits, a peacock, a turkey, chickens, a donkey, and a llama to name a few. Plus there was a pony there that Evan rode during his week there and as soon as he saw it he says "want to ride horse!" Sorry Evan, not today. The donkey was kinda cool, I aint never seen a donkey rolling around on the ground before. I missed the chance to take that picture and of course I only had my phone for these shots. Just doesnt have the quality of a 6 megapixel Canon for some reason, but gets the job done in a pinch.