Tuesday, April 16, 2002
Ugh! This morning I resolved a problem with my Cobalt Qube 3 that has stumped me for months. The answer was provided by Malcolm McLeary in a message he wrote on October 2, 2001. I write it here in techie format, because only the nerds will understand it.—Problem: When checking for new software and updates in the administration panel in a Qube 3, the following error occurs: "BlueLinq was unable to retrieve a list of packages from the BlueLinQ server located at http://updates.cobalt.com/packages. Please check to make sure that http://updates.cobalt.com/packages is a valid BlueLinQ server and that you can query it from your web browser." Solution: Do one or more of the following: (a) Set the Bluelinq server to "http://updates.cobalt.com/packages/" instead of "http://updates.cobalt.com/packages" (i.e., include a slash at the end): Click the Bluelinq tab, then click the Settings button, then click the Advanced tab, then change the Bluelinq Servers field appropriately to include the final slash. (b) Provide DNS settings for the Qube 3: Click the Administration tab, then click the System button, then click the TCP/IP button. Set DNS Servers to working DNS servers. (e.g., if you can download packages.gz from http://updates.cobalt.com/packages/ from your Web browser, then copy the DNS settings from your current TCP/IP properties (in Control Panel & Network) to the DNS Servers field.—Cobalt and Sun support for my Qube 3 has been so bad that I vowed never again to get a Qube or RAQ. I again worked on the password protection for one page of the Web site because Chris wanted it to time out after a certain number of minutes. I updated some PharmAdMIT workstations to Build 0005. (Some others were still giving errors when checking for updates.) I also added code so that the page wouldn't be stored in the Web browser's cache. I worked more on my presentation of the Web site for the University's Web developers. After work, dinner at Howard's Cafe on Irving: Patrick had the chicken fingers with fries (after debating between the chicken parmagiana and the pot roast special) and I had the quarter pounder, plain, medium-well, with the turkey noodle soup. The soup tasted like it came out of a can, but the other parts of the meal were tasty. Our server forgot to bring the mayonnaise, but otherwise served us well. We met our new landlord George and his daughter (but didn't get her name) and signed the lease for our new apartment. George is originally from Strausbourg. We got 10 days of overlap to make our move a little easier. Patrick and I took measurements of all the rooms—we always map out our living space in Adobe Illustrator at one-tenth scale to see where our furniture will fit. We're worried that we'll have a hard time getting the couch and the mule chest in the apartment. Other than that, we're happy we made the choice we did. It's a bit of a side-step in terms of bang for the buck: we're trading a garage away for more luxuries in the apartment for a bit less that we were paying before. We took bus 66 to get to Norita and George's place. We took the L-Taraval MUNI train home. It was my first time riding both of those lines. On the train home, we saw a heavy metal kid practicing yoga, legs crossed and palms mirrored. He was listening to music, but it wasn't loud enough to hear. He wore a black leather jacket, the forearms of which were each set with an array of metal spikes. When we got home, I called Mary to let her know we've taken a different unit. Mary's unit at 1475 18th Avenue #1 was an appropriately sized 1-bedroom apartment (about 600 square feet). It was clean, on a quiet street, and would have been easy to move in to since it was at the front of the building and you only had to deal with about 5 or 6 steps. The unit had linoleum in the kitchen, either tile or linoleum in the bathroom (I can't remember now—probably tile), hardwood floors elsewhere, street parking only (and there wasn't much of that), coin-operated laundry at the end of the building (which was okay, but you had to deal with steps and if it was raining you'd get wet), garbage and water included, 1-year lease, "backyard" comprised of what seemed to be hundred-year-old concrete with weeds growing through it. (She claimed that the owners were planning to resurface the area soon—with new concrete! Somehow I had forgotten that concrete is more charming than a small garden.) She was asking $1150 (with a $1200 deposit). With only garbage and water included, this was a little higher than the current market rate for a 1-bedroom, even for a unit as clean as this. We said no to this one because the stove was unbearably tiny, the kitchen's floor space was about five feet square, the laundry would have been less convenient than we wanted, and because in talking about the other tenants in the building Mary had let on that our upstairs neighbor had been renting in the building for 20 years and this scared us the most.