Posted: June 24th, 2005 | Author: ralphhogaboom | Filed under: life | Tags: communityactivism, maybethiscanhelp, rants, sometimes i'm a dick, vounteer, without ME it's just AWESO | No Comments »
Only 7% of the world’s population has type O negative blood. It’s not the rarest; Wikipedia points out that AB- is the rarest at 1%. Still — the thing about O- is that I get treated better than everyone else. At blood drives, anyway.
What some of you plain blood folks may not know is that we get special calls.
“Is this Ralph Hogaboom?”
“Yes.”
“Hi Ralph, I’m Denise and I’m calling from the Puget Sound Blood Center. How are you today?”
“I’m good.”
“I’m so happy to hear that!”
“Thanks!”
“You’re in Port Townsend, right?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s the weather up there today? I heard you guys are in a rain shadow…”
“Oh, it’s balmy here Denise.”
“Lucky!”
“Yeah.”
Eventually we get ’round to scheduling a time for me to come in. See, when your blood is as valuable as mine, they respect your time a little more.
They also do reminder phone calls, ’cause they want my blood.
They’re also unfailingly nice at the blood center. They know I’m different than others because the check-in lady says “And here’s someone else for you … he has a 10 AM appt.”
That’s code for “He has an appointment, that means he has valuable blood. Treat this one well.”
I don’t love getting treated this way. It’s more accurate to say I looooooooooooooove being treated this way. I’m over a half gallon for the last 12 months; when I hit a gallon of blood donated, I get a new pin! I’m pretty excited.
Posted: June 8th, 2005 | Author: ralphhogaboom | Filed under: life | Tags: getoverit, maybethiscanhelp | No Comments »
I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.
- President Abraham Lincoln
Posted: June 23rd, 2004 | Author: ralphhogaboom | Filed under: technology | Tags: freedownload, maybethiscanhelp | No Comments »
I’ve been seeing a lot of articles lately about Linux, and whether or not Linux Torvalds is the creator.
He’s not the creator. I wrote Linux.
It was way back in the early 90’s, and I’d just gotten my first computer: a TRS-80. It included the BASIC language, a quick how-to-program guide, and hookups for the TV. I whizzed through the book. Programming quickly became so much to me.
But BASIC was too limited. I began to study some of UNIX, but I was in 8th grade – other than aging texts at the library and some rudimentary access to it on the local college campus when I could sneak in, I couldn’t really get much experience with it.
I needed to start programming in C, and I needed a compiler. A guy I’d met online named R_STALLMAN1989 had a C compiler he let me use, called GCC. It was great! Although working in C on that old TRS-80 was rough, I was able to do it. But it had so many bugs!
That’s why I was so embarrassed when I finally released an OS kernel to emulate UNIX; I called it Ralnux 0.1.
I posted it to a newsgroup, and a young hotshot named Linus was there. He wrote me an email about what license it was under, and then — zap! — my computer was gone. The motherboard fried right out from under me. I couldn’t get back on the BBS’s for two years. My parents were too broke to buy a new computer… and by the time I was able to, and checked the newsgroup, my crummy OS was gone. Linux, written by Linus Torvalds, was all the rage amongst my old crowd, and I felt left out. Besides, I was starting High School. I didn’t have time for programming that was going to lead nowhere.
It wasn’t until 2001 that I looked at the source code to Linux. It was clearly mine. Even some of the same mistakes I made were there.
But I see the contribution that Linux and Open Source has made to the world; I wasn’t going to do anything with it anyway. I’m glad that somebody was there to take the ball and run with it.
But what was so wrong with Ralnux?
Posted: February 19th, 2004 | Author: ralphhogaboom | Filed under: technology | Tags: maybethiscanhelp | No Comments »
That was easy … too easy. I just got a USB pen drive from work (Kingston 64 MB DataTraveller) for convenience of file transfers (hot fixes, .ini files, etc). Plugged it into my linux box and it worked. Here’s how I did it.
Checked that the USB modules were loaded
# /sbin/lsmod | grep usb
Looking good. Next, created a mount point.
# mkdir /mnt/usbdrive
Then, edited my fstab file.
# vi /etc/fstab
and added the following line:
/dev/sda1 . . /mnt/usbdrive . . vfat . . user,noauto,umask=0 . 0 0
Then saved the file, and quit the terminal. Lastly, I plugged int he drive and opened a command line.
$ mount /mnt/usbdrive
Voila! Nicely mounted.