Nosbig.net

I am very proud to be able to at least announce that Richland Habitat will be very successful this year.

Due to ongoing negotiations, I cannot disclose the identity of the generous benefactors that are allowing RCHFH to be more successful this year than they have been in the past. However, I can say that there are donations available to build up to four houses, including a new benefactor just today.

We are only at February, and we are now at the stage where we can get started building as soon as the weather breaks. In fact, new property will likely have to be purchased soon to keep up with the supply of donations.

In the meantime, the modernization of the office is progressing slowly. Networking supplies have not arrived yet, but the computers themselves are there. In fact, they include network cards built onto the motherboard, 100Base-TX (3Com).

Yesterday was a rather bland day until about 6PM. Of course, we had a nasty snow here in town. For anyone who isn’t in northern Ohio, it is the largest of the year, leaving about 5 inches in Mansfield. Cleveland was worse, with whiteout conditions and almost a foot of snow, from what I have heard.

Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised to have heard that the national news covered a rather large crash that took place near Erie, PA. Over 100 cars were involved in the crash, with at least one death. That is just a phenominal thought, that many vehicles crunched and the dozens injured. It’s actually fortunate that more people were not hurt more seriously.

Now, I have gone into a tangent…. I almost ended up staying last night until 3AM. Two of the three 3rd shift cashiers called off work, and I volunteered to stay until Gayle could have her lunch, so that she could eat. They found another solution to the problem, but I was sure that I would have ended up staying. It had been a slow day, and I was feeling good. Three hours of overtime would have been really nice.

My car was astonishingly clean considering the massive amounts of blowing snow floating around.
The howling wind from the west helped, of course….

Over the last week or so, I have been putting together a network for the Richland County Habitat for Humanity.

Today, I configured Samba to allow for storage of the critical files on their network to occur on the server instead of their Windows 9x clients. I was able to use smbclient on the server and get logged in and browsing around with that.

So far, no actual network gear has been donated or purchased, but I hope that will come soon. A few more phone calls will have to be made, and then a decision as to where to make our purchases (Staples ).

After the upgrade, I started playing around with DOSEMU, a full-fledged DOS emulator. The FreeDOS kernel is a little lacking, so I threw my copy of the Windows 95 DOS on there, and it is working to a degree.

Anything that seriously changes the screen resolution or bit depth don’t seem to work, although I probably can tweak the configuration to fix that. Duke Nukem 3D and Liero won’t run, but I did get ZZT and Commander Keen functioning…..\n\n