So I’ve been practicing for my Navy PRT. After taking a two day break, I go to the gym again today and start running again. I was finally able to manage to beat my required time of 13 minutes and 30 seconds by running 1.5 miles in 12:40. The catch is that my feat was performed indoors, on a treadmill, listening to some very driving music for motivation. But at least I know that it can be done.
On a completely unrelated note, my grandmother has been completing her move to near where I live, and recently had an old computer of hers brought up. Wanting to put it to good use, she was trying to see if it could be connected to her existing (broadband) Internet connection. Her son (my uncle) said it couldn’t be done, it was too old. I kind of suspected as much myself, as the computer looked to be so old that it had nothing but ISA ports, and I had no clue where I could buy an ISA network card besides Ebay.
Having nothing better to do while my wife was chatting with the other women, I took apart the computer to confirm what kind of ports it had so I could start looking for a network card. So my great surprise, it was a dual PCI/ISA type of motherboard, with quite a few extra PCI slots. Although it was very late at the time, I told my grandma that I could get the Internet going this very night. Walmart is open 24 hours, and I knew for a fact that they had good ol’ el cheapo NICs. I run down to Walmart and pick one up ($15), and go back to the house and install it.
It includes a driver disk (3.5 in. floppy… talk about retro) for Windows. Of course, even after following the instructions to install the driver, Windows can’t find some required file or other. So I had a nice Q/A session with my grandma.
Me: Grandma, you wouldn’t happen to have your Windows 95 CD from 10 years ago, would you?
Her: Uhhhh…
Me: Yeah, I didn’t think so either. Hold on a second…
I grabbed the Knoppix CD that I “accidentally” left there earlier, and proceeded to boot up Knoppix into text mode to save memory, just to see if it would detect the NIC. Of course, it had no problems, and I was rather surprised to notice that it actually detected all of the important hardware, including video and sound. I even played an .ogg file from the /usr/share/sounds directory to prove that Linux had sound support. :-)
My grandma’s being a good sport about this as well, and doesn’t mind the idea of using Linux, especially since I already have her using Firefox (she loves the conspicuous lack of popup ads). It’s her old computer after all, it’s not as if she’s be using it all the time. So I’ll be going back tomorrow and probably making the Knoppix installation permanent. Or I might pick up a copy of SuSE Linux and just install that. The computer is old enough that I doubt I’ll be running KDE on it, but I’ll double check just in case, as 3.2 is rather fast, and 3.3 is shaping up to be slightly more optimized as well.
My worry is that she isn’t going to love the whole root/user separation idea, but I figure that even if I simply put up a post-it note, that’s still much better security than a no-password account. So uh, yeah, score +1 for Linux.