Jesus loves you. This I know.This page was written by hand.
Archived news items from September 1999
Since this is old news, some links may be broken.
Been busy with the end-of-six-weeks stuff as usual. Also I've been writing code like a wild man. I got mod_perl working on the hurricane mitchell router and have successfully written some CGI scripts in perl that allow the kids to take their six weeks tests online and not have to fool with scan-tron forms.
My students took up a collection to purchase a receiver for the classroom and collected $236.80 in just five class days! So last weekend I picked up a receiver at the new Best Buy which just opened a couple of miles from here. So I got VoteAmp up and running again at school. I moved the speakers to a different location, and the whole setup sounds really nice.
Also wrote a program to generate the famous fractal known as the Sierpinski Carpet. It took about twice as long as it should have because I didn't sit down to plan things first, so I had to spend a while chasing down logical errors.
Teachers got paid today, and this is the first paycheck on the new year's salary. It has the big raise that the Legislature voted for, so I'm going to start saving up for a new car. Well, a fresh car anyway. I don't think I can really save up enough for a whole new car in just one year. The raise wasn't that big....
Not much else going on. Behind on sleep. Cats are back to normal, except that they no longer can reproduce. Java is getting pretty big. He just keeps putting on weight. He's probably approaching ten pounds.
Today was See You At the Pole, where students around the globe meet around the flagpoles of their respective campuses to pray for their school, city, nation, and the world. We had a good turn-out at Leander; probably more than a hundred kids. I didn't try very hard to count, so I could be off by a bit.
There was a bit too much praise and worship and not enough prayer, in my opinion, though it was overall very good. I actually think I'm going to write up piece on this shortly, about how more praise and worship is not necessarily a good thing.
In other school-related news, I was on the radio (a guest on a call-in talk show) a few days ago defending about Leander's drug testing policy. It was pretty cool. It's been a while since I've been on the radio. One of these days I need to get myself a radio show or something.
Also, the Powers That Be have informed me that this page is now getting more than five hits a day! Wow! I know this is still a far cry from Slashdot numbers, but I think that's pretty good for a regular guy like myself. My thanks go to the unfathomable thirty of you who visit this page once a week.
Quite a bit has gone on since my last update. Over the Labor Day weekend a friend and I spent a long time at school getting linux set up in my lab with NIS and NFS. Now students can log in on any linux box they desire (or telnet from home, for that matter) and access the same home directory. Next on the linux list is to get CVS running so the students can have a central code repository. And after that, I'll make a pass at getting X windows to work with the video cards in those machines. Much as I'm a console junkie, KDE would make them more productive.
I also migrated the cs server over to a new machine, gaining a faster processor (from 166 to 350 MHz) but losing half the RAM (from 128 to 64 megabytes) in the process. I also gained an additional 3G of storage, and got to redesign the partitioning to something more reasonable while I was at it. The reduction in RAM made a perceptible difference; I'd have bought some more already if prices weren't so high right now.
Lakeline Church began holding two services today. We've pretty much outsized our current space, so two services is the only way to continue growing until we can get moved into the new, larger facility downstairs. Everything went very smoothly today (there was a lot on the plate, so we didn't know what to expect), and there were a lot of guests this week, which begins a five-part series on marriage (always a popular topic). We had about two hundred people on hand, not counting children or any of the teachers in the children's area! I was pretty pumped all day.
Yesterday I attended a wedding for Bill, the drummer at Lakeline. He married his high school sweetheart, whom he's been seeing for about nine years now. It was a really cool wedding, and it was good to finally meet all of their families, who live in the Chicago area. They came to see him play at church today, so they contributed to our large crowd.
And on an entirely different note, I had my kittens fixed last weekend. Perl was mad at me for a couple of days, and they were hissy at each other because they didn't smell like themselves after twenty-four hours at the vet, but otherwise they are doing fine. Java has no clue anything's been done; he didn't even need stitches. Both cats are behaving normally again, though Perl's in for a little more fun when she has her stitches out in a couple of days. It was a bit more pricy than I would have liked in order to do them both, but I don't want them reproducing. Two kittens are quite enough, thank you very much.
August 1999
July 1999
June 1999
May 1999
archive index (for dates back to August 1998)
Jesus loves you. This I know.
This page was written by hand.