Andrew Underwood

More point form blogging

• Both my Dad and I raced in the Birkie on Saturday. It’s a 55km cross country ski race, held every year out by the Blackfoot recreation area. He skied in the wooden ski with 15 lb pack category, I competed the ‘lite’ competition which was the regular ski without pack category. It took me 5 hours 50 mins to complete. My friend Aaron and his brother Tyler also raced this year. A more comprehensive account of this event later with pictures when I’m less tired.
• I’m back in the Crowsnest Pass for a few days. The list of things for me to do includes snowboarding or skiing in Fernie, ice fishing, and building my Canadian skateboard.
• Back in Edmonton my Primus voip phone went down on Thursday with no warning dragging our router down with it in a screaming ball of electronics on strike. What followed was a hair pulling excercise in updating firmwares that got our router back on line but the voip box still refuses to update despite multiple methods of update attempts.
• I was able to snap up andrewunderwood.com yesterday after waiting a long time for it to become available again after it had been parked by Tucows. I didn’t ever announce it before but I also have andrewunderwood.ca. Both adresses mirror aunderwood.com.

Since I’ll never be a writer in real life:

I am: Arthur C. Clarke Well known for nonfiction science writing and for early promotion of the effort toward space travel, his fiction was often grand and visionary.

I am the lizzard King!

After coming back from snowboarding in Montana I got really sick. I’m not sure if it was a really bad cold or a flu but it had me on the chesterfield for 5 days. I spent my time playing the original Civilization. I came upon it while rooting through my archived disks in my room looking for something my Dad’s laptop could run. I never actually beat the game so this is what I’ve been trying to do ever since I picked it up. My previous blog about marathon gaming with Gears of War pales in comparison to the amount of time playing this pixelated turn based strategy game. At the moment I’m very confident I’ll be able to take over the world soon. It’s just the slightly tedious process of ferrying in units to other continents that’s left to do.

Home for a while

I’m in the Crowsnest Pass until I decide to go back up to Edmonton and eventually find a job. Saturday I’m heading into the States with three friends for skiing/snowboarding in Whitefish. We will be there over new years. That’s the skinny on my schedule… On to complaining about Internet Explorer.

While I’m at my parents place I am forced to use IE 6 for browsing if I want to use high speed internet. Browsing with this thing is like having to sleep on a hard bed after being used to your usual much softer bed. Alright, I suppose there might be more imaginative analogies but it’s all I can think of spur of the moment. There’s no tabbed browsing, pages don’t render properly (even this page), and inferior autoscroll are the things that annoy me the most. In conclusion: IE bad, beef jerky good.

Funny

Comic

Man, I’m still tired. After I got home yesterday I went to sleep for 4 hours, longer than I planned since I slept through the meeting I was suppose to go to. As a result I couldn’t get to sleep when I needed to, again, so I got 6 hrs of sleep, more than yesterday but still not enough.

In other annoying news, my printer (Brother MCF) has died. For my open book exam yesterday I needed to print off some notes, and it printed the 53 pages just fine and as soon as it finished it beeped with an error. It displays “Error 41, please call Brother”. I looked up this code on the net and apparently my printer heads are broken, and it’s a common problem. It’s not easy to fix and I really don’t have time for this kind of thing.

Find her an empty lap, fellas

The gods didn’t want me to get to my midterm thismorning. All of a sudden we get all this snow, it made riding my bike very difficult. I’m running on 3 hours of sleep right now so I appologize in advance if this post is nonsensical. All I want to do is sleep but I have a class in an hour where I’m getting back a midterm so I can’t skip. After that I have three hours before I have to be at a UAARG meeting. My exam thismorning was open book, usually that indicates a slaughter. The “open book” premise lures students into thinking they don’t need to know everything because they can just look it up on the exam. However the concepts presented in the exam are on a level that is abstract from whatever the notes and books can show you. Only knowing the material well will enable you to know what the heck is going on when it asks you what address 0xXXXXXXXX is. You can’t look up how to do that kind of thing in a book. I didn’t open my books once during the exam, which hopefully means I did well. I dreamt up lots of blogging topics while I was trying to fall asleep at 4:30am, but alas I can not remember them so I shall stop here.

Da da DAAA! Up up and away!

I’ve just been busy with schoolwork lately. It’s amazing when you can sit down with a math assignment at 10:30 and work until 3:00 without getting up for anything. I wasn’t having fun, but boy, time was flying. I guess it piqued my interest…

The big news is that Jared and I bought our tickets to Italy tonight. It’s going to be a fun trip!

My Photoshop for today

I did this Photoshopped image of Duceppe for the Rick Mercer Report photo challenge

Floppy drive? Anyone?

Ok, so I went out and bought 2 200 GB hard drives today and installed them in a RAID 1 configuation. The sucky thing is that Windows XP needs to load RAID drivers off a floppy disk at install time. You might be wondering why this is so sucky, the reason is that I built my computer without a floppy drive. Not to mention that I have zero floppy disks. So if anyone can lend me a floppy drive for a few hours, get back to me.