I suppose it might be a good idea to provide some updates about what has been going on.

First of all, I’ve moved into a much nicer apartment, about half a mile from where I lived before. It’s a little one bedroom place with a tiny balcony, a real kitchen, and room enough to actually walk around. It’s also closer to the bus stop, which (with the increased cost of parking at school) ought to encourage me to take it a lot more often.

I spent the first half of the summer doing experiments and finishing up the paper for WiCon. Originally the notification date was the 15th, but it looks like it was pushed back to tomorrow. I’m a little nervous about it, because if it is accepted it’s a very nice step forward. If it isn’t, I have to look at it again and resubmit it somewhere else.

The second half of the summer was spent looking for a new apartment and moving into it. I didn’t travel anywhere except to Fremont to see Debbie’s family for the fourth of July.

As for school, I am hoping to finish my required courses this quarter. One day I will fill out my paperwork so I can officially have my master’s, too. I just hate getting stuff signed.

For more frequent updates, check out my other blog thing. I’ve been updating it pretty much daily.

Yesterday I finally decided to update my computer from Mandriva 2007 Spring (soooo old) to 2008 Spring. I had a feeling it would be a hassle, so I had been putting it off for a long time. But it was feeling really old, so I knew the time had come.

Fortunately, I was smart and backed up everything to my ‘storage’ hard drive. Typically when I upgrade Mandriva, I just wipe out everything but the home partition. I had planned to do the same this time, but I wanted to back everything up anyway.

Now, I don’t blame Mandriva for this, because I have had my main hard drives in a faulty RAID set up for some time. I’ve just ignored it. But it ended up causing some serious problems, so I finally deleted the array and wiped out one of the hard drives to start fresh.

One other thing was annoying. During the installation, Mandriva asked if I wanted to install the propriety nVidia drivers for my video card. I thought, “Sure! Saves me the hassle.” Supposedly it did so, but either it messed up or the driver was dog slow. So I had to remove it and then compile and install the driver directly from nVidia. Works great.

Everything else seems to be working right. I hate some of the defaults in Xfce now, but I’ve fixed them up.