My Archives: November 2002
Wednesday, November 20, 2002
A few years ago, Heather bought an HP LaserJet IIP from Duke surplus for $50. We spent about $50 more on upgrades on it. Though it is 12+ years old, it shows no signs of giving up the ghost any time soon. It is still faster than an inkjet and more economical as well. It is also well supported by Windows.
I decided to try an experiment. I bought a PostScript cartridge off of eBay for $5.00. My hope was to make it play nicer with Linux and possibly print faster. Well, the cartridge finally arrived (from Spain) and I tried it out last night. It worked, but its performance was abysmal. It took several minutes to print a page of simple graphics. I guess the printer's 10Mhz 68000 processor w/4MB of RAM really can't render graphics all that well. On the other hand, Ghostscript running on a 233Mhz PC took less than four seconds to convert the page to PCL, which the printer printed at its normal 4 ppm rate.
Anyway, that's why I only paid $5.00 to start with :-)
Sunday, November 17, 2002
I flew my first IFR solo flight today. I guess it wasn't really a solo because I took my dad, but he's not a pilot. We flew from Sanford (TTA) to Franklin County (LHZ). At Franklin County, we executed a practice ILS approach to runway 4. Then we went back to Sanford and did an ILS approach and landing. My dad recorded our track on his portable GPS. Click here to see our path.
Saturday, November 16, 2002
I assume by now everyone's seen the latest pictures of Michael Jackson. Here's another "striking resemblance":
Friday, November 15, 2002
Wednesday, November 13, 2002
After literally 2 months of weather delays and other scheduling problems, I finally got my instrument rating today. Yay!!!!
Monday, November 11, 2002
Pretty boring day today.
Here's another math challenge for you math geeks out there. What is the smallest set of coins you can carry in your pocket to be able to make exact change for any amount between 1 and 99 cents? Give the numbers of each type of coin (penny, nickel, dime, and quarter). Prove that your solution is optimal with respect to the total number of coins.