break the chai--- [ahem] wires

this weekend was pretty interesting. the part that shocked me the most, though, was that i actually managed to get the pci wireless card that i bought to work with my computer.

it started as just another hairbrained scheme to deal with the fact that the phone jack (ergo, the dsl) is in the hallway, and the computer is in my room... so i went out and bought the cheapest pci 802.11 card that i could find. of course as soon as i got it home, i remembered that i probably should have done a driver search beforehand, but even trying to do it after the fact, i learned that it's basically a lottery anyway, since the name on the box doesn't really have any correlation to the actual chipset used (which is what requires the driver). i guess they just throw chips on at random in most manufacturers, for some stupid reason. the shake-n-bake of computer components. anyway, i decided to just open the box and get it over with. seems i may have gotten semi-lucky; it claims (according to lspci) to be an rt8185, and realtek does actually give a linux driver. however, it's not in portage, and i'm not sure how the system will react if i start managing some stuff on my own (thus far, it's been fantastic to just let it take care of everything, and not have to worry about stepping on its toes or vice-versa).

anyway, i was able to get the driver to work in userland, which proves that it's possible (yay!), but i'm still investigating possibilties for actually adding it neatly into the normal control scripts. we'll see how much of a mess i end up making...

saturday was just plain goddam awesome, since christian stefansen (danish guy from five [yikes!] years ago at caltech) and his girlfriend sumi (who's working as an opera singer in zurich) came to lausanne to visit me. fantastic. i guess it might be to be expected after five years, but we basically just spent the entire day walking around talking, interspersed with sitting down in restaurants talking. honestly the most fun i've had in a pretty darn long time. seriously.

sunday, well, it was back to the slave pits. between re-editing alcherio's snf report/proposal and pulling a poster out of thin air for the mics shindig in zurich next week (which was due at 8:00am this morning), i lost pretty much the entire day (well, from 12:30 when i started until just before midnight when i decided to sleep a little). then i still got up at around 4 this morning to finish up the poster before the deadline. which basically just means that my brain is fried, and i'm ready to go home now, but it's only the middle of the afternoon, so i don't think it would be acceptable, therefore i'm still at my desk accomplishing next to nothing. completely ridiculous.