The other day, I visited my parents. My mother was complaining that her computer (Win XP) was naging her to death, and could I look at it.

I turned the thing on, and sure enough, there was "Windows Update Manager", complaining that the virus scanner, AVG, was out of date.

I'm totally confused by recent experiences.

let me back up a few steps, and give some history first:
My brother, a non-linux non-geek hard core gamer wanted me to set him up a small server for a couple things he and his 'clan' could use. Teamspeak and Neverwinter Nights stand alone server were two of the things he wanted.

Recently, I installed a new kernel for my Debian-Testing box.

I have been using a 2.4.26 kernel that I got from backports, way back before I upgraded to testing. This kernel works well enough that I still use it, and keep it as the default bootup, as there are a couple of non-linux Lusers that also use this box, and I'd like to give them a stable and well tested platform to do their work.

But I have a couple of periphrials that have verry good support in the 2.6 kernel (ATI Remote Wonder - RF remote, to name one), and thought perhaps a 2.6 kernel'd be great...

I'm quite happy with my HP PSC 1350v Printer/Scanner/Coppier/Card reader, but I'm not so happy with the way things are woking on my Debian Woody system.

I'll explain, but this will be quite a long Blog, I think

As I recall, it was quite an ordeal getting all this stuff to work. The printer was all I hoped to get working, and the scanner/card reader would be the icing on the cake.

I started by downloading the hpoj driver from sourceforge... ummm version 0.91

Well, as far as new years go, this one started out just about like the others, except for one marked departure from my normal new year cellebration.

You see, with all the Y2K bug hype and all, in 1999 I stayed on IRC chat thru the transition, hopeing to see all the servers crash, and My Linux box still running - That would have been a hO0t! But instead, the internet didn't crash! I even sync'd my system's time clock to my ISP's clock, hopeing to catch the very second things went to hell. No alcohol, no party favors - I wanted to be sober for this.

Well, It's been a while since I last wrote here, and I was bored. So, here it is.

It's 9:13 PM on Dec.26, 2004, and I'm bored as hell. I even went to MSN to see if I could play one of their on line games. No such luck. something about activeX controlls not installable or similar. stupid people (or maybe stupid me???)

Well, any way - I've checked the weather (http://weather.yahoo.com), Read Groklaw, Slashdot and Newsforge, I got bored with LinusQuestions.org, played some java games from ummm forgot the addy!

Yesterday, I was chatting on with a friend in California, and he seemed delighted thet California was no longer on my time (Arizona time). So, I did a couple of /CTCP TIME's one for his machine, the other for mine, and noticed his machine was 1 hour and 2 minuites behind mine. I bemoaned my difficulty in getting NTP to syncronize over dialup connections.

My friend suggested clockspeed, by D. J. Bernstein, available here: http://cr.yp.to/clockspeed.html.

Today, I got a call from my brother, an un-willing Windows user. He wants me to teach his 12 year old daughter Linux. I'm viewing this as a really good chance to make an impact on someone that is willing to learn.

This evening, I ponder curriculum and course content. Where to start? what to teach? Those are the questions I have.

I've been looking for a good POP account for quite some time now, and when Gmail notified me they were offering POP access to my Gmail account, I jumped on it, but had limited success until... Well, let me tell the whole story, with some background to start.

My desktop system, a PII-500 with 512 megs of RAM runs Debian Woody just fine, and I like this distro, even though most apps are slightly out of date. I use backports from http://www.Backports.org for those situations where I need something more up-to-date. Especially when it comes to web browsers.