It will feel very strange to turn on a newscast and hear a different story being discussed. I’ve heard that the rest of the world has had the temerity to continue to function while the US was busy worrying about the election; of course, I won’t know that it’s true until CNN tells me so.

Red Hat is up

This afternoon, I finally got my old weird PC Server 330 running under Red Hat 7.0. I’ve been fighting it for about a month; trying to install over the LAN was a total failure. Copying the CD images to the local hard drive and installing there almost worked — the install went OK, but then the system wouldn’t boot (I may just have been suffering from having the Linux partition above the 4GB line, but it was too painful to try to figure it out). So I burned CDs, and then the install went smoothly — except that I couldn’t get X to start. Eventually, I brought down XFree86 4.0.1, and now I can get by; I still don’t get a graphical login screen (just the plain old text login), but I can tolerate that.

I wish I knew what I was going to do with the machine, but I couldn’t leave it just sitting idle.

Oh — the reason the system is weird is that it has a RAID disk controller (but I think only one disk), and two video cards but only one display. This machine has, shall we say, somewhat unsavory parentage.

DVDs may be taking over

Jeffrey is doing a book report on a biography of Henry VIII (in the Famous Dead People series), and Diane happened to mention that the BBC series on the Six Wives of Henry VIII was good. So I went to Amazon to look for it; the VHS version was $70 and out-of-stock, while the DVD version was $68 and “usually ships in 24 hours”. Well, I can hope. But I don’t think I ever saw a Laser Disc more available than the corresponding VHS tape, so maybe this is a Good Sign.

I drove to Fremont (about 30 miles from my office) this afternoon to take the tests to upgrade my ham license. I am so glad I don’t have to make that commute on a regular basis — it took well over an hour, most of it on Highway 880 (the “Nasty Nimitz”, as they call it on the radio), most of it at very slow speeds. But I got there in plenty of time to have dinner and review the General Class exam book again before going to the test session.

I got to the session a few minutes late, but still in plenty of time to be tested — there were about 7 other examinees, several of whom were going for their first license, Technician Class (the old Novice class is no longer being issued. You don’t have to learn Morse Code for the Technician, but if you do pass the 5 words-per-minute exam, you get the old Novice privileges; 5 words-per-minute is all that’s required for any class now, which made it reasonable for me to consider upgrading).

I filled out the form (of course there’s a form!) and they gave me the exam for Element 3 (General Class). I was pretty sure I’d do well on it, since I’d read the whole manual over the weekend (not to mention reading through the entire question pool at dinner), but I took my time and double-checked everything before turning it in. The examiner took a quick look, decided I’d probably passed, and asked me if I wanted to take the Element 4 (Extra Class) test; even though I hadn’t studied for it other than trying a couple of sample tests, I had nothing to lose and said yes.

The Extra Class test covers many areas — I was ready for some (the simpler electronics and most of the FCC questions); for the others, it was time to dust off strategies from Test Taking 101. The mandatory Smith Chart question wasn’t too bad — they wanted to know what kinds of calculations you could do with a Smith Chart, and that was one I could answer (it’s impedance and SWR, in case you’re curious). In the end, I missed 11 questions, but that was few enough to pass the test, so now I have a Certificate of Successful Completion of an Examination for Elements 3 and 4 in my hot little hands, and very soon, my new Extra Class license will arrive in the mail. And who knows, I might even use it some day!