And so begins my final full day in Boston for a long while. It's a feeling that I knew was coming since last year, but finally set in. I'll be making my last rounds around the city in the morning, and plan on finishing up the packing in the afternoon, leaving Saturday morning for the 6.5-hour, 400mi / 650km trip to college. Hopefully it won't take me all that long to get situated there so that I can come back and detail the move-out and move-in.
Anyway, the past few weeks have been rather eventful:
My rooming situation has been up in the air for some time now. At first I was placed into a quad room, that is, with four people instead of two. Later I was placed in a standard double room, with a new roommate that I wasn't able to contact. Just last week I found that my roommate had surprisingly vanished from my housing confirmation, and that I apparently would have the double room tentatively single, awaiting reassignment of someone else. And on Sunday I was reassigned a new roommate that I haven't had a chance to contact yet, so I'll most likely meet him once I there.
On a similar note, since I'll be living in a dorm, having a large number of PCs is out of the question. Instead of simply compromising on one, I shoved the components of my primary desktop and my NAS into one machine with three hard drives and three CD drives, using a Promise ATA controller in SCSI mode to attach the extra two CD drives where the limitations of standard IDE wouldn't let me. I ran out of space to mount all the drives, so I ended up with something a bit like this:
The bootloaders for FreeBSD and Linux don't get along very well, so I selectively boot either OS using a SmartBootManager floppy. Better than having to rewire the drives every time, I suppose.
I spent a few hours last night packing the car with all the things that could be packed early, which essentially came down to everything fitting the description "not clothes and not cleaning stuff." My video game console decision came down to just taking the Xbox (to Antony: I do NOT love Microsoft) and leaving the GameCube and PS2 behind. Though I originally considered taking the GameCube along as well, my lack of a multiplayer library for it defeats the purpose, and in the case of the PS2 I've since broken (to Antony: accidentally, not because I hate Sony) both of the controllers. I'll also only be taking one monitor instead of both, using a 4-port KVM to switch among my laptop, desktop, and TV input box. I decided to take my Model M instead of getting a quiet keyboard; I'll replace it if my roommate complains. Speakers are coming with me after all, instead of just headphones. My printer will be coming, with the scanner detached to save space. My VHS and CD libraries are staying home; some good DVDs will be coming with me but without the jewel cases. I think that accounts for most things. The end result looks like a Tetris game - and yes, I'll be padding the loose space with clothes to prevent things from rolling around:
In other news, I obtained an old circa-'99 Compaq P3 laptop from a friend of mine a few months back. Since I was going on a 6.5-hour drive, I put the laptop in my car and ran a microphone cable up to the front, then connected the laptop to the tape deck. More recently I installed the Media Player Voice Command software, part of the Windows XP Plus! pack, on it. After loading on some MP3s, I can now boss the stereo around using my voice - "DJ, play artist Led Zeppelin" will play Led Zeppelin and so forth. Neat stuff, and hopefully it'll reduce the risk of getting into an accident because I was trying to tune the radio or select a track with my hands.
Though I've long prided myself on hosting my blog such that I can physically access it if need be, it looks like that will be coming to an end. The server is staying at home under the couch. I'm not yet sure what this means for getting content onto it, but we'll see.
To leave on a humorous note, my first work with features specific to the .NET Framework 3.0 turned out to be at a party - in particular the SpeechSynthesizer class. I used it to create what's possibly the nerdiest Twister spinner all in attendance had ever seen. Probably not a good sign for Microsoft if the first time I use it is for something like this.
This will probably be all until Monday. I'll be sure to follow up with a log of the move-in and perhaps some photos if I'm so inclined.