The problem

I have a very old (legacy 7500) Alienware Area-51. I wanted to keep the motherboard and cheaply upgrade the processor from some Intel Core 2 Duo to the Intel Core2 Quad Q5550. Despite the Q550 being from the same era (2007-2008), the motherboard would POST but freeze on the BIOS load screen. Flashing the motherboard with a new BIOS was the key to a now successfully, and cheaply, upgraded legacy Alienware Area-51.

This post will summarize my findings and process for flashing the Alienware Area-51 motherboard from its old BIOS to the EVGA 680i SLI Motherboard p33 BIOS update

This is a summary of Michael Mateas’ Interactive Storytelling class in the Spring quarter of 2016 at UC Santa Cruz. The topic of this day’s class was a schema for content selection architectures, or a really general framework for categorizing the way systems select which/when content they want to display.

The ever-cheery Bita met me at the door and launched into yet another one of her adventures she has been having in L.A. We walked up a few flights of stairs and eased ourselves into the office’s kitchen. Most of the Carbon Five volunteer’s were already present and we all talked casually amongst one another as we waited for the other “juniors” to arrive. I grabbed a Clif bar out of the big jar on the counter and made coffee as I continued chatting with the people around me.

The comfort I was feeling made it easy to forget this would be my last day with people I now considered friends.

Ahh, that feeling of your first For Real Pull Request To An Open Source Project(tm).

The young fellow who opened the office door did not notice the scruffy kid with beat up shoes sitting out front. The kid jumped to his feet and proclaimed “Oh, you must be one of the mentors from Carbon Five!”

I was the scruffy kid, and I was eager to keep working with my mentor to burn through the beginning projects I was assigned.

Junior Jump Extended is a program run by the folks at Carbon Five where we pair with Carbon Five employees to contribute to RailsBridges’ scheduling webapp called Bridge Troll. I heard about it from Katherine, a friend and co-officer from the Coders Club at City College, practically the day before the deadline to apply. “I don’t know Ruby [the programming language] or Rails, but I can learn it for this series,” I frantically typed into the application form, hoping to reassure both them and myself.

Tips, facts, experiences, and reflections on Open Hatch’s 2015 “Open Source Comes to Campus” event.

Before we head off, a short history.

I have been a student at City College of San Francisco since Fall 2012. In the Fall 2014 and Spring 2015 semester, I had the good fortune of working with Katherine and the Coders’ Club to put on Open Hatch’s ‘Open Source comes to Campus‘ event. A day long workshop, OSCTC is a place for fledgling or expert programmers and non-technical but interested individuals to learn the fundamentals of open source technology and beliefs by participating in a curriculum developed by Open Hatch and taught by local open source hackers. This was the Coders’ Club’s fourth time hosting this workshop.

Wow. No way.

That’s the feeling I had today when the Coder’s Club officially ended. Well, I was done with it at least. Soon I will be gone, off to UC Santa Cruz to “Do the Right Thing” and get a degree. I feel pulled in two directions about leaving: its “Right” but there’s so much else that I do not want to leave behind here.

But enough with that, as I have a deeper hungering to share my experience of the Coder’s Club. Not the coder’s club as it was in the immediate experience, but the Coder’s Club I had envisioned.

When attempting to login to my late 2011 MacBook Pro today, I found my screen acting just like the screen in this video:

Jeez.