December 31st, 2003:

    Well, today's meeting will be the last meeting of 2003.  So far, Slam is trying to get our 350MHz PC up and running, and from what I can see, it'll be running Win98.  He's also working on a newly resurrected 40 gig HD we "acquired", trying to get the damned thing to format properly.

    Me? I'm fooling around on my Linux box, and setting up my Rec Room adjacent to the lab.  Me an' Slam hit Value Village again and picked up a few things, like a pair of end tables, a SVGA monitor (for EIGHT BUCKS! And it works! At 1024 x 768!), and a pair of stereo speakers, which are hooked to my old receiver/amp, which in turn has my Dreamcast and VCR connected to it!

    We also have a big-ass bottle of dark rum we'll be working on.  Ought to make things interesting in the lab... "Whaddaya mean this Zip disk won't fit in the floppy drive? Gimme dat farkin' hammer!"  "CJ! R'membr whad happened when you tried to put a CD in my 5.25 floppy drive! Or dat time you drank dat bottle of Gin and said you could read 8-inch floppies in your 3 1/2" drive by folding the disks in half twice?"

Well, at any rate, on behalf of myself and Slam, have a Happy New Year!  God knows WE will!
 
 
 
 
 

December 24th, 2003:

    Once again the Thugs have acquired another low cost computer. As Wednesday is our normal meeting night, we hit our favourite low cost computer store, Value Village, and obtained ourselves an Amiga 500 (stock rev 5).

December 22nd, 2003:

    Slam and I spent most of yesterday setting up the "recreational facility" in the Thugs' lab.  We split the cost of a 25 inch TV ($15 each) at Value Village, and set it up in an unused section of the lab.  Currently, we've got a mono VCR hooked up to the TV, as well as my Dreamcast and Slam's Commodore CDTV.  Surprised the Hell out of him when I played Dynablaster on the CDTV, I might add (he didn't know I had it!). Hudson ported Bomberman over to the Amiga, but for some unfathomable reason, they renamed it Dynablaster...  I tell ya, there's NOTHING like sitting back in my recliner, playing Amiga games on a big screen TV with a wireless remote controller, while drinking down an ice-cold Slurpee.  'Tis the life!

I also picked up a Macintosh SE from Value Village as well.  It's a cute little "all-in-one" Mac, with 4 meg RAM and a Motorola 68000 processor running at a blistering 7 MHz.  The 20 meg SCSI HD was dead, so we installed System 7.5 on an 80 meg drive I had left over from my Mac LC.  Unfortunately, my 7.5 disks are on 1.44 Mb floppies, and the SE has a low-density (800K) drive... No prob, we hooked the 80 megger up to Slam's SE (with 68030 upgrade and 1.44Mb floppy drive!), and used his SE to install 7.5 onto the 80 meg drive.  I'm happy to report that I am now the proud owner of a fully functional Mac SE, and Slam earned some valuable experience in Mac hardware.  So it was a win/win situation.  Of course, it took 2.5 hours to install 7.5 onto that HD, but, ahhh, who cares?  I was fooling around on my Linux box (my newly resurrected P166MMX, running Windows 98 and Storm Linux 2000) too much to really notice the time anyways...

Our current projects (as far as holidays are concerned) will be rearranging the Rec Facility, testing out CDTV software (I don't remember which Amiga games will run on it), and perhaps setting up Linux-Mandrake 9.2 on a 350 MHz Linux box.
 

Happy Holidays!

CJ and Slam

December 3, 2003:

  The Personal Iris is tonights project. With the Indigo2 (purple) up and running, the goal is to get PI

up. Of course this has become easier with the proper keyboard.
 
 
 

Nov 23rd, 2003:

  Another Project Up

CJ and I have gotten the Extreme Indigo2 SGI up, with my new SGI monitor!

Next step, get the Extreme on the net and get the Personal Iris keyboard going.
 
 
 

10/07/03:

   Yes! Success!

So far, so good! I managed to get my Sparcstation 10 project DONE!!! Will wonders never cease? CJ actually completed a project? Well, yes, I did... I can now surf the web, get and send email, and read all my fave USENET groups, from either the Sparc 10 itself, by telnetting to the Sparc from my Envizex X-terminal, or by null-modem from one of my older systems (such as my Tandy 2800HD laptop, etc) !!! However, since there's NOTHING more depressing than a finished project, I'm gonna do one more thing to liven things up a bit. It'll remain a secret for now, however...

The Thugs on Monday (October 13th) will probably see us hard at work in the lab again. I will be refining things further on the Sparc, maybe adding some slightly useful things like EMACS, GIMP, GTK+, and a few other GNU stalwarts. I imagine Slam will be working on one of his SGIs, maybe I'll talk him into telnetting into my Sparc, just for grins, then maybe telnetting into the SGI from the Envizex, then from the SGI, telnet into the Sparc, or something equally stupid. You know what they say, boredom motivates us to do strange things. The possibilities for stupidity are endless!

I also have a bit of research to do for my future Sparc plans. However, chances are, I'll be done that rather quickly. The one added bonus to both my projects and Slam's projects is both can be done for FREE!!! It's funny, but it seems lately that anything we need for a project, we already HAVE!!! It's either that, or we're subconsciously building projects with our old stuff in mind. Either way, it's all working out cheaply but well!

See ya!

CJ
 
 

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