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T minus 1 day and counting
Sep. 26th, 2003 08:47 amWell, this is it. I have one day of freedom, then I'm trundling off to Cambridge to start my PhD.
It feels strange. I should probably be panicking more, or feeling worse about leaving my friends and partner behind in Croydon. All I seem to currently be able to do is worry about whether I've packed everything! Have I packed the firewire cables for the external 250 gig drive I use on my laptop? Will I have enough network cables? Will the college actually let me plug everything in (see below)? Et cetera, and so on, ad nauseam. I wish it was over, and don't, all at once. I am already missing the people here, but I'm sure it will get a lot worse once I'm in Cam. Or better, because I'll be meeting lots of new people and socialising on a bigger scale. Eeek. The unknown. Won't be unknown for long, thankfully.
Plugging everything in
I am taking a relatively large amount of equipment with me. Being a geek and all, this is as necessary as it would be for most people to remember to take clothes, or (more accurately) a supply of some essential medicinal drug, without which shaking horrible withdrawal symptoms and ultimately death would ensue. Eddies, seemingly, limits you to one mains socket and one 4-way adapter. This is not going to work. I'm going to take enough 4-ways to do the job. They can moan at me later. My PC will need 6 on its own (monitor, external CD burner, system box, USB hub, Ethernet hub, scanner), laptop another 2 (charger, firewire drive), hi fi 2 (amp, CD player). Add a few more for things like mobile phone charger, DECT base station, a desk lamp or two, and we're talking lots of sockets... If I have enough room to take some audio equipment too, that list will nearly double. The fact that all of this equipment uses very small amounts of current (we're not remotely even in toaster territory here) will no doubt be lost on the college authorities.
Packing
Must make a packing list, especially concerning anything that I might need to extract from my housemates (e.g. 2 expensive, industrial grade staplers, a paper guillotine, my DECT phone, etc.).
Equipment not showing up
I bought a laser printer for the paltry sum of 24 pounds from someone on eBay about 3 weeks ago. It still hasn't turned up, although they claim they shipped it over a week ago. I'm not well pleased. I'm also waiting for an extra gigabyte of RAM and an extra 250GB hard drive to show. Which won't before I leave. Not good. Grrr.
Equipment that has arrived
I splashed out on a Dell 20 inch TFT monitor for the machine in my college room. It replaces a (huge) Iiyama 21" CRT monitor, which I could only run at 1280x1024 because I can't handle looking at a monitor using 60Hz refresh for long without getting migraines. The Dell does 1600x1200, is incredibly bright, ridiculously sharp, and utterly gorgeous. Coupled with the antialiased text rendering used by KDE 3, the result is quite astonishing. I like being able to get lots on my screen at once (I'm typing this on my laptop, which also has a 1600x1200 display), so that particular resolution is very necessary for me or I start getting irritated that I can't see enough at once.
x2x
I recently discovered (thanks for the pointer, Jim!) a really neat utility that ships with the X-Window system, x2x. If you have an extra machine on your desk that runs X, you can use x2x to allow a single mouse and keyboard to be used across both displays. In effect, you can move your mouse pointer off the edge of one monitor and onto the other, even though it may now be pointing at a completely different machine. It works extremely well. I can therefore use my laptop as a second display for my college room desktop machine (by logging on to my main machine via xdmcp under the cygwin port of XFree86). It will be extremely cool, for example, when hacking LaTeX to be able to keep kdvi open on the page I'm working on, on the laptop display, and have multiple text editor windows open on the main display, then have the kdvi rendering update itself automatically as soon as I've run LaTeX. I rather like the kate editor for this, by the way. If you haven't tried it yet, and have KDE installed, give it a go. It doesn't have the (over)sophistication of emacs or even vi, but the text gets rendered with antialiasing, it's really easy to use, zero learning curve, and you can open a terminal pane within the main window. I like it.
Summing up...
1 day to go. Feeling OK, not too bad really. Was expecting worse!
Anyway, I must get on with some last minute programming work, then final packing and a quick trip into central London to pick up my second TouchStream keyboard (which is currently in Vauxhall -- I wish I hadn't left it there!).
It feels strange. I should probably be panicking more, or feeling worse about leaving my friends and partner behind in Croydon. All I seem to currently be able to do is worry about whether I've packed everything! Have I packed the firewire cables for the external 250 gig drive I use on my laptop? Will I have enough network cables? Will the college actually let me plug everything in (see below)? Et cetera, and so on, ad nauseam. I wish it was over, and don't, all at once. I am already missing the people here, but I'm sure it will get a lot worse once I'm in Cam. Or better, because I'll be meeting lots of new people and socialising on a bigger scale. Eeek. The unknown. Won't be unknown for long, thankfully.
Plugging everything in
I am taking a relatively large amount of equipment with me. Being a geek and all, this is as necessary as it would be for most people to remember to take clothes, or (more accurately) a supply of some essential medicinal drug, without which shaking horrible withdrawal symptoms and ultimately death would ensue. Eddies, seemingly, limits you to one mains socket and one 4-way adapter. This is not going to work. I'm going to take enough 4-ways to do the job. They can moan at me later. My PC will need 6 on its own (monitor, external CD burner, system box, USB hub, Ethernet hub, scanner), laptop another 2 (charger, firewire drive), hi fi 2 (amp, CD player). Add a few more for things like mobile phone charger, DECT base station, a desk lamp or two, and we're talking lots of sockets... If I have enough room to take some audio equipment too, that list will nearly double. The fact that all of this equipment uses very small amounts of current (we're not remotely even in toaster territory here) will no doubt be lost on the college authorities.
Packing
Must make a packing list, especially concerning anything that I might need to extract from my housemates (e.g. 2 expensive, industrial grade staplers, a paper guillotine, my DECT phone, etc.).
Equipment not showing up
I bought a laser printer for the paltry sum of 24 pounds from someone on eBay about 3 weeks ago. It still hasn't turned up, although they claim they shipped it over a week ago. I'm not well pleased. I'm also waiting for an extra gigabyte of RAM and an extra 250GB hard drive to show. Which won't before I leave. Not good. Grrr.
Equipment that has arrived
I splashed out on a Dell 20 inch TFT monitor for the machine in my college room. It replaces a (huge) Iiyama 21" CRT monitor, which I could only run at 1280x1024 because I can't handle looking at a monitor using 60Hz refresh for long without getting migraines. The Dell does 1600x1200, is incredibly bright, ridiculously sharp, and utterly gorgeous. Coupled with the antialiased text rendering used by KDE 3, the result is quite astonishing. I like being able to get lots on my screen at once (I'm typing this on my laptop, which also has a 1600x1200 display), so that particular resolution is very necessary for me or I start getting irritated that I can't see enough at once.
x2x
I recently discovered (thanks for the pointer, Jim!) a really neat utility that ships with the X-Window system, x2x. If you have an extra machine on your desk that runs X, you can use x2x to allow a single mouse and keyboard to be used across both displays. In effect, you can move your mouse pointer off the edge of one monitor and onto the other, even though it may now be pointing at a completely different machine. It works extremely well. I can therefore use my laptop as a second display for my college room desktop machine (by logging on to my main machine via xdmcp under the cygwin port of XFree86). It will be extremely cool, for example, when hacking LaTeX to be able to keep kdvi open on the page I'm working on, on the laptop display, and have multiple text editor windows open on the main display, then have the kdvi rendering update itself automatically as soon as I've run LaTeX. I rather like the kate editor for this, by the way. If you haven't tried it yet, and have KDE installed, give it a go. It doesn't have the (over)sophistication of emacs or even vi, but the text gets rendered with antialiasing, it's really easy to use, zero learning curve, and you can open a terminal pane within the main window. I like it.
Summing up...
1 day to go. Feeling OK, not too bad really. Was expecting worse!
Anyway, I must get on with some last minute programming work, then final packing and a quick trip into central London to pick up my second TouchStream keyboard (which is currently in Vauxhall -- I wish I hadn't left it there!).