Scott Nicholas

i just got back from snowmobile training. we didn't ride long, but boy was it fun! my only complaint is the full face shield didn't work so well for me. either it or my glasses were fogged up, so i kept it open, and wasn't wearing anything over my face. so next time, i think i'll elect for the open face helmet with tinted goggles and my ski mask:) so i've not blogged anything because i've only been online since yesterday, and with the work computers. i got my laptop back just now from the IT folks who checked it …

It's 4:41 Monday here in New Zealand. Almost noon on Sunday back home. I guess I'm not use to to time change yet. Actually, I'm just boring and went to bed early... heh. 7deg Celsius ain't as bad as it sounds. Went walking with just my inner jacket on, got to the first intersection and turned around. It was raining. I guess it does that a lot here. I bought a pack of cigarettes at the hotel bar. =\ I got NZ$50 from airport ATM (Visa is more fair than the exchange booths, silly people). I paid just under …

Tomorrow I'll board at 12:36pm in Charleston on a 2h14m flight to Chicago (ick!). I'll be there about an hour, and head to Los Angles, CA at 3pm on a 4h31m flight. Then, four hours later, I'll leave to Auckland, NZ. This flight will take 12h55m. I'll arrive at Auckland at 6:25am on October 4th. Woo that's some time travel. Then it's just a skip on over to Christchurch at 7:25am for 1h20m and I'll be chillaxin there for a couple nights.

Definitely a lot of flying. The round-trip ticket was purchased yesterday for nearly $2400. :)

So if all goes well, I will be leaving Friday for Antarctica. I don't yet have the time of the flight, nor anything packed, but I know what's going, and it shouldn't be to painful. I hope to find a digital camera to bring, of course.

I will be travelling with my netbook. Charleston Airport to LAX to Auckland, New Zealand to Christchurch, NZ. I should spend two nights in Christchurch. I will get issued my cold weather gear there. They're about 17 hours ahead of the Eastern USA. We'll use their timezone on the ice. After all this I …

Preliminary speed test, 3G came online this AM. It's not stable, and the signal strength was weak (in my garage) - 2/5 bars.

OKAY, I got it working. PagePlus has great voice rates, Verizon has great data. About $0 for it HEHE.

Problems, signed up for pageplus on their site, didn't know how to activate. Called customer care and they told me to dial *22886 i think. Done.

Verizon *22888 didn't work. So I put my ESN into their online site, then dialed *22888 and it worked. Yay, had to add $15 and then --

wait.. ran it again at work. definitely had stronger signal (was indoors at home first run)

wow !!!! :)

compare with t-mobile egprs (had to put phone outside to get full …

Google how to run Vista or Windows 7 from USB, and you'll probably find nothing (you'll find lots on how to install FROM usb tho!). I changed the registry keys like the manual method for XP after install (pre-install is .inf edits) and no joy. Might have been a CPU error, and may have worked otherwise, but I re-tried as follows.

Ingredients:

VMWare Player Windows 7 Beta DVD Toshiba 250G External HDD vdk (to mount vmdk image) Drive Snapshot usb_boot

I hope to edit this later, but basically, install Windows onto a virtual harddrive in VMware, mount with vdk in …

So it takes 30min to install the first DVD, and 30min for the Burning Crusade expansion. Then, you have to download about 6 patches. These total about 1.5G themselves, and I've no access to setup port forwarding so the Peer-to-Peer in Blizzards Downloader doesn't help at all! I upload a little bit, and get nothing. I get 64KB/s from the HTTP connection. You can't set it and forget it, you have to click OK at the end of each patch. You have to install each individual patch released since the DVDs were made. They should roll it up …

I wanted to try stunnel on my cell phone. Not sure why, the real prize would be dynamic ssh tunnels, but I did. The binary available is stunnel-4.15-arm. Works okay, came with an old openssl-0.9.8a, but did not work when using a proxy. So I went through all the crap of downloading the obsoleted development tools it suggested and made my own! i'll post binaries later if anyone is interested. i really really wish i could figure out windows api stuff because i'd love for it to work on smartphone better. it never shows a window and …

My son noticed a neighbor was throwing away an xbox and shouted to me, "Daddy, he's throwing away an xbox," all the way across the courtyard and in the house I heard him. He's a loud 7 year old ;)

The neighbor said yeah it's broke. It stopped reading some games and then wouldn't start at all. It says to call customer service. He was kind enough to go inside and grab the video/power cables and let me have it, free. My son then followed him to his jeep and asked if he had controllers, because we'll need them once …