So, today I feel like delving into one of the most overtalked topics around - poor driving.

Since the dawn of time and after a little bit of evolution, animals have mated. This abundantly simple instinctive fact has blessed all species since they’ve been in existence. The act of mating can (and should only) be said to be truely wonderful, as it is what allows animals to perpetuate and continue to exist. In most cases, mating is a very pleasurable act (as it should be!), and should be condoned by everyone and everything.

Well, it was coming time to renew intellectualistic.com, and I guess I was getting tired of how long it was. So, I opted to try to see if something that defined me a little better was around.

I encountered a problem with an application I was working on the other day that was running on a machine with an older version of PHP (version 4.2.3 I believe). Essentially, the problem was with trying to set the PHP ini variable error_prepend_string. What this variable is supposed to do is the following:

Well, Tom is finally here. Last night was his first night in our apartment and from what I can tell he enjoyed the futon we bought him. When we picked him up yesterday (which was 20 minutes earlier than his flight was supposed to get in - go American Airlines!), we went to eat at The Hobbit Cafe. They are a truly awesome place in downtown Houston and I recommend anyone go down to check them out. As you might imagine they are based on the Lord of the Rings, which is truly awesome. There’s only one other place I know kinda like that called Rivendell in San Marcos, but they definitely don’t serve the same things as The Hobbit Cafe. Rivendell is more like a bakery than anything.

This is for a Debian system, but should work for any Linux box. The essential problem is that whenever you run an update for the nVidia drivers or xOrg or your Kernel, you might not be able to get into X. After laboriously trying to figure out still why X doesn’t load, you go to Google and miraculously come here. Then, you continue reading to find the solution.

My best friend Tom King and I had been planning on the possibility of having him coming down if one of our Cerberus clients ended up signing a complete network, VoIP, and internet deal with us. A BIG score for our company - but we are still in the works with them. The head honcho (at least the manager, not the owner) is really against change - especially when it comes to technology. I got this tip from one of the elderly workers who really does like technology, seemingly, and is really excited about the possibility of getting a better internet connection, etc. She told me that he absolutely hates technology and sticks to a policy of

Well, I’m officially demoing Windows Vista Beta 2 and it was a serious pain to install on VMWare 5.0. For starters, when I initially finished the installation, there were not graphics drivers loaded, so it used its standard, which maxes out at 800x600 and 4-bit resolution - talk about yucky. Also, there were several other drivers missing, including ethernet, sound, and the aforementioned video drivers.

Solution

I tried installing the VMWare tools set, but had problems. I found a website online (access it here) that talked about a workaround, only to figure out the reason the tools were not installing were because I had a CD in my drive already. Aparrently, VMWare loads a CD into the drive if you try to install VMWare Tools, but if there’s already a CD in your physical drive (or if you have an ISO loaded), then it doesn’t start the installation. So, after I removed the CD from the drive and verified that I wasn’t using an ISO, I shut down Vista, closed VMWare, then started the entire thing back up again. Once I logged in and closed all extraneous windows, I finally was able to get the drivers installed and batabing bataboom - the usual Windows interface we’re so used to.

Okay, so day 2 more or less sucked, minus a couple of things. The sessions were more or less mundane and didn’t cover very much. For the most part, I was working on client webpages and trying to get them fixed. Occassionaly I’d pick up a couple of really interesting things, such as SPAM topics and whatever else seemed interesting at the moment.

So yesterday was the first day of the Training Seminar. It was not as shabby as I thought it might be. I was kind of getting pissed off with the lack of communication they were providing me, so I figured the rest of the conference was gonna suck. There were aspects of it that were rather uninteresting. I’m taking the advanced track, hoping to get a lot out of it (because the beginner track would have definately left me uninterested), but was rather disappointed that a couple of sessions included 5-10 minutes of presentations, then 25-35 minutes of Q&A- and most of the people didn’t have anything to ask.