Waiting on the printer...

Printing from the desktop via Acrobat takes forever, or so it seems. Especially when the file being printed is so big, the spool is too big for whatever free disk space is left. So, while I send the document 10 pages at a time and wait for Acrobat to arthritically push the bytes through the printer cable, let me catch up on things.

Installing RH9 from images on the disk obviously involves not formatting or otherwise disturbing the partition on which the images are found. What that appears to mean is that the partition occupied by the images is no longer available for use during the installation. In my case, the only partition capable of handling three ISO images was my largest one, which is about 6.5 GB in size, or about 2/3 of my disk's overall real estate.

Scratch that idea.

If I try to do a network install, the boot floppy asks for a disk with a network driver. Although I cannot say I have exhaustively searched for the path to enlightenment (and a driver), I did look around for something for a 3C905C controller (which is on the Optiplex GX50 motherboard), and though I found some source code, I'm not at all clear as to what I must do to make it work with RH9 (what? compile it on the 7.2 box? as a loadable module?). I am simply not that much of a techie (not to mention I have a translation deadline looming over my head).

(BTW, the print quality of some of these pages is terrible... I wonder if it's intrinsic, due to Acrobat, or to the computer it's running on...?)

Back to work.

Cheers...

Getting ready for Leo and his pals...

According to a table titled Leonid meteor rates for selected cities: Nov. 19, 2003 (a NASA site, scroll down the page), a noteworthy time to observe the Leonid meteor shower in our neck of the woods (Denver), will be 12:45 am, or a little less than 4 hours from now.

The same table is also posted at StarrySkies.com, but there is another page on the same site that implies there will be a peak at between 3:23 and 3:47 am, owing to a "second debris-laden cloud."

At last glance, the skies seem clear and the weather maps give every indication of it staying that way.

On the way home from the store, Drew noted a bright object falling in the sky in front of us. I managed to see only the tail end of its course, which seemed too slow for a meteor and way too fast for an airplane. Perhaps a fireball? Definitely a UFO, in the precise meaning of the term.

At any rate, I've processed 41 of 63 pages today, for a nice payday (even if the pages were lightweight), so some of the pressure is off from that direction. I've got the rest of that document to finish by Friday - which should not be much of a problem - plus a back-translation/edit job due Thursday morning for a new direct client. So it would appear I have my work cut out for me for the next couple of days.

Time to spend a little time cleaning, maybe cook a few days' worth of food for Ming, and get ready for a really cold tour outside tonight. This is the third year I'll be out looking at the Leonids, and the first in which there is snow on the ground, so I'm sure it will be particularly frosty out there.

Cheers...