Thursday, June 23, 2005

Motorcycle Madness

Here's a bit of history

I took my motorcycle skills test Tuesday morning. My 'father-in-law' came by at 8am and I went for a 20 minute ride. He left me at the motor-vehicle department where I was to take my skills test, around 8:30. I was scheduled for 9:45 so I got to see people take the test before me.

Honestly, it wasn't a hard test. But I wasn't practiced. I hadn't done enough slow-speed maneuvers to really have control. And my balance sucked when coming to a stop. My break foot kept coming down and I kept relying on my hand break to keep me still. A mark off every time.

Then came the controlled quick stop. Accelerate to ~25 km/hour and slow down for a corner. Accelerate out of the corner and follow a white line. Watch the inspectors hand, break when it comes down. I think I did alright once. The other two times... nah. Not so good. Skid. Whatever, it was on a painted white line. Slippery.

She failed me and said come back in a week. So tonight I was practicing in the same parking lot with the same painted lines. I was doing alright, but I wasn't taking it seriously. And you know what, I still sucked. I stuck out my foot (my right foot) to catch myself when I was unbalanced. I did have better control over my quick stop. But that was because I did it enough times tonight. Many more times I sucked with the quick stop. I even had my rear tire locked up for 6 or 7 feet once. Not good on the official test.

And to bring the house down, my battery died. 20 minutes trying to hunt down the problem. Checking all the cables, making sure they are all good. Gas was at a half tank. The headlight would die when I tried the starter. Push-start, sure. Try that, no luck in second gear. Try third. Try fourth. Try fifth, oh my bike doesn't have that many gears. Finally, second ended up starting it. So I took off back to my place, leaving my supervisor back in the parking lot. He showed up shortly, behind me. He's got my battery now,

-Charging it up. 5 days to my retest.

Still too slow

I've found my second hard drive

I've two hard drives in my computer. One is a 120Gb with WinXP currently installed on it. The second is the 15Gb with Kubuntu (that I still need to configure). I've found my windows hard drive from my Kubuntu installation. Here's how I did it:

start a terminal window,

create a folder in /mnt
> sudo mkdir /mnt/win
> Password:

mount the physical Win hard drive to that new folder
(My Windows hard drive is hda1, Kubuntu is hdb1)
> mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/win

from here you can start Konqueror or Nautilus and navigate your way to /mnt/win to view the contents of that hard drive. Or within the terminal,
> cd /mnt/win/
and browse that way.

-More for my reference than any body else's

From the safety of Linux

Blogging from my home computer

I've done it! I'm writing this blog from my fresh install of Kubuntu Linux. Windows is still kicking around, as I've got some files I'd like to transfer over before I lose windows completely, but Kubuntu is here.

It's really slow, though. And that's all my fault. I'm thinking I didn't properly set up a swap partition. It takes 15 minutes from reboot for the computer to even load up a text login screen. Another 5 to log into the GUI. 3 minutes to open a Firefox browser.

-Will be reinstalling/partitioning today

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Anti-Corporation

Some kind of bullshit

My girlfriend is the most qualified person for any job at her place of work. She was a shoe-in for the assistant manager position when it opened up. The manager was going to do her best to make sure my girlfriend was appointed. Recently the manager went on stress leave and has decided to never return. My girlfriend picked up the slack, without the title of manager or assistant manager.

Administration decides the store needs people that can be called "manager" and "assistant manager" so the rest of the employees have someone to look to. My girlfriend should have been made manager at that time, but you know what? She wasn't. The girl who's been working for the company two months longer was appointed. And you know what, that girl is from another store. She was a transfer to this store and my girlfriend had to train her in proper store procedures when she arrived. This other girl is not anywhere as qualified as my girlfriend. But still, this woman was assigned the manager position, and assistant manager went to my girl.

A month and a half later my girlfriend is still helping out this other woman when she gets stuck. My girlfriend is taking it upon herself to help this other person keep her job (making her look competent). I'm going a bit overboard here. She is competent, but still manages to get stuck or take her time or generally just not think her way out of a problem herself.

Well, now! Administration wanted people to be the 'official' managers of the store. An advertisement was placed. My girlfriend was still the most qualified for the job, but no. They've decided to replace her again. She's been bumped. I don't know the details, but I wouldn't be surprised if that other girl is now the assistant manager.

-Looking for a fair workplace

Monday, June 20, 2005

Set the path to java in your /etc/profile in Linux

'javac' and 'java' commands in Linux terminal

Those two commands above weren't working for me this morning after a fresh install of Kubuntu Linux on my work machine. I understand that normally Kubuntu would modify the appropriate paths to make the compile and run commands work. However, I needed an older version of java, and to hunt for that package through Kynaptic would have been more trouble than it was worth (maybe). So the file was downloaded by itself, and installed. But that left the paths in a state of non-existance. So in order to get them working I had to do the following:

1. Open '/etc/profile' as super in a text editor. In Kubuntu it would be:

> sudo emacs /etc/profile
password:

2. Just before the last two lines of the file (your version of java where appropriate) add the following line:

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/j2sdk1.4.1_08/bin

where the last two lines are:

export PATH

umask 022

3. Refresh your /etc/profile by either logging out and back in, or in a terminal type:

> source /etc/profile

[EDIT]: After setting up a new install it would appear that going through the package manager makes this job so much easier. You can, of course, do it manually if you like. But using a package manager like apt-get sets up all paths for you.

-And that should do it

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