Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

The latest spacecraft to join LJ: eo1_sat.

I had to get out and do something early, so I left the house without pausing for breakfast. So I picked up a snack at an ethnic convenience store I'd spotted in Charles Village before but never been into, named "Ziad Market". The sign in front lists a handful of different food ethnicities. I thanked the proprietor in Greek, and he responded in that "you said something in an unfamiliar language but I know what you meant from context" tone of voice, then a few seconds later he looked up and said, "Greek"? My guess is that it sounded just familiar enough for him to think he should recognize it, and he had to remember where he had been when he'd heard it before. Then he pointed to photos on the wall from a trip to Athens. I'm not sure where he's from; for some reason I want to guess Egypt. Maybe I'll remember to ask the next time I go there.

I'm hoping to make it to misia's talk at Johns Hopkins this afternoon, but that depends on whether the next couple of hours is enough to feel rested from having gotten up too early and done several errands this morning. I can remember a time when I just didn't have to think about things like that unless I tried to live three lives at a time for more than a few days in a row.

The cranky Win98 box I'm supposed to fix remains cranky. Currently the problem I have is that it can't see any packets on the LAN. It sends ARP packets but never seems to notice the replies (or respond to ARP requests from other machines). If I insert ARP table entries manually, it sends ping packets that the other machines see and respond to, but it never sees their replies, nor does it ever respond to pings from the other machines. This means any video drivers I want to copy to it will have to go via floppy, and I can't just point it at Microsoft's web site and say "see what's new".

Speaking of copying via floppy ... I've gotten so used to doing anything with a command-line via telnet to a Linux machine, and all files (Windows, Mac, or otherwise) being on the file server, that last night (admittedly pretty tired already) when I went to copy a file to the floppy I'd just stuck into the front of the NT machine (I had to move a stack of stuff out of the way to reach the drive), I spent a little while staring at a Linux prompt trying to figure out the syntax for "format the diskette in the A: drive on that other machine" and "copy this file to the A: drive on that other machine" before I remembered that I wanted the MS-DOS Command prompt under NT, not the telnet window. Whoops. Though I guess I could configure Samba to at least let me copy files to/from the NT machine's diskette drive from a Linux shell, if I thought I'd need to do it often enough.

(I know I can do these tasks from the Windows desktop, but it takes less time to type a command I've known since 1980 than to figure out how to format a diskette via the GUI; and once I've got the DOS window open, I may as well type the copy command as well.)

The other Win98 box has revealed the source of its intermittent VERY LOUD NOISE on power-up: it's the CPU fan. It still doesn't seem to want to clock down its scan rate to something the monitor I've got available will handle, but for the time being I've got it plugged into the monitor that's supposed to go with the cranky box I'm trying to fix. For some reason one of its CD drives refuses to stick out its tongue and say "aaah". Odd.

Must remember to scrounge another hub someplace.