Imablog

June 22, 2009July 17, 2024

Hunting for immunization records

As part of the admission requirements at Clemson, I have to provide them with a record of my immunizations. The last time I saw my immunization record I had sent to me from Alberta Health was 10 years and 3 moves ago, when I started working at MUSC and had to provide them to Employee Health.

A trip to Employee Health yielded some questionable results. It shows that I received the immunizations they’re interested in, but it’s not clear if EH just recorded the date that I provided my records to them, or if I got a whole new set of shots. One of the sheets they provided suggests the former, the other suggests the latter. Aside from the initial TB test, I don’t remember getting stuck with any other needles during my pre-employment screening.

Somewhere in the house (I hope) is a box containing a folder with a fax of a photocopy of my shot records from 35+ years ago. Haven’t managed to track it down yet but the search continues.

Next step: Contact Alberta Health and see if I can get another copy of my shot records sent to me.

June 15, 2009May 22, 2023

Southeast Linuxfest recap

Went roadtripping out to Clemson for the first annual Southeast Linuxfest with a few of my fellow CSCLUG-ers. The drive up there was pretty uneventful, and also doubled as a preview of what to expect when I head back up there for orientation.

The conference turned out quite well, with attendance numbers that far exceeded what was expected. Last numbers I saw said 455 registrations with a little over 360 actually showing up. Pretty awesome for a first year conference. Of course now the bar has been set pretty high for next year’s conference.

Meeting the people I’d been working with online to plan the conference was pretty cool. In typical fashion, I ended up taking on the task of photographer and spent most of my time wandering around taking photos of everything. I did stop long enough to catch a few very good talks, and bounced around from room to room catching snippets of other talks.

The talk by Richard Weait on the OpenStreetMap project was one of the more interesting talks that I made it to. Completely open mapping data that you can do pretty much anything with. And it’s not limited to just street data either. What’s really neat is that almost all of the map data comes from user contributions. Browsing around Charleston, SC shows a reasonably complete map, but there are gaps here and there that could probably be filled in with a few mapping parties. At the beginning of the talk, Richard asked the audience what else maps were good for, and I shouted out “finding out when the train is coming”. It was a reference to a Flintstones episode (“The Story of Rocky’s Raiders“), but I don’t think anybody got it.

Another talk by Brian Leonard on developing for platforms beyond just your own computer was pretty interesting. Showed off some pretty simple but interesting things that can be done with Netbeans and VirtualBox.

The performance by DualCore at the after-party was pretty good. Rap/hip-hop usually isn’t my thing, but their nerdcore style is something I could possibly get into.

Very soon planning for the 2010 Southeast Linuxfest will begin. I’m expecting it’s going to be a lot of work to make it at least as good (preferably better) than this year’s event.

June 11, 2009July 18, 2024

Hard Drive Dissection Part 5

While I was doing the final disposal of junk out of my old office, I found an ancient Dell Latitude XPi with a Pentium 120MHz CPU in it. From it, I harvested the next victimhard drive to be dissected: a 810MB Seagate ST9816AG that probably dates back to the mid 90s.