I just got off the phone with rmi tech support again. Covad has indeed done another loop test. There appears to be line damage. People from US Pest will need to be sent out to repair the problem. No scheduled date just yet.

I was also informed that I am now entitled to a temporary dial up account, which I must call another number to get on Monday. That should be helpful for the interum while all this gets sorted out.

Meanwhile, Bitscape spent a portion of this morning, in between sleeping sessions and reading out of the first of my new books, puzzling over how to get the OpenGL drivers to take advantage of his video card's hardware accelleration. Not finding much documentation or help locally. The cd and manual which came with the card are zero help. No big surprise there. I know that if I had net access, it would be a couple of urls, search words, and clicks away. Just gotta have patience.

Maybe if I comb through the Mandrake cds some more, I might find something. I already scanned through the rpms and made sure the Mesa drivers were installed. The documentation that came with the rpm was quite sparse though. They're obviously using the software drivers by default. Less than optimal. Hmmmm...

Last night, just for kicks, I tried ripping a track from a cd, and encoding it into a 128bit mp3 just to see how long it would take. (Oh yes, and obviously I got my sound card configured and working, with virtually no effort on my part -- again, a big contrast to the IRQ pickin', kernel recompilin' days of old.) Damn, it was fast!

I didn't record the exact numbers, but I'm estimating that the 4 minute song ("Judith" by A Perfect Circle), took about 1 minute to rip into a wav (using cdparanoia, which is more thorough and takes longer than some of the other rippers out there), and just over 2 minutes to encode to mp3. Wowee.

This process used to take.... what? 4-8 minutes to rip, and 80-90 minutes to encode on good ole Dagobah? Believe in the power.... Mwahahahahaha!

If all goes as planned, there is a fest scheduled tonight at Jaeger's. As I believe I have stated previously, Dagobah and Argo will both be in attendance, as they are both vital components in Bitscape's quest for world domination.

Oh yes, and at some point, I also plan to try giving one or two of my DVDs a spin on this thing, just as a nice way to say Fuck You to the MPAA. (Although the viewing of DVD movies was certainly not the primary reason I purchased this drive. My dedicated player and tv are much better suited for that. The reason I bought the drive is because I have a strong suspicion DVD will soon become the preferred format for data interchange, due to its superior capacity. The complete Debian archive on DVD, anyone? :)

I'm pondering starting over and doing another Mandrake install this afternoon, cause I already don't like the way I partitioned things. Maybe I did it stupidly the first time intentionally, just so I could have the pleasure of running the install program again. lol.

Maybe tonight at the fest, I can leach off Jaeger's line to see about getting them 3d drivers (or at least instructions on how to properly configure my current libraries). Yeah....

Well, right now I think I could just use a shower. Yes, unfortunately, we must occassionally interrupt our joyous hi-tech activities in order that we do not turn into total ape-like animals, going without grooming for so long that we become appauled at the smell of our own stench.

And, up!