ThinkBlog

… But in the short run, it’s great. I’ve taken a clinical dose (1000mg per day) of DMAE (2-dimethylaminoethanol bitartrate, but the significant part is the dimethylaminoethanol itself) for around eight weeks or so now. It helped me concentrate at first, but by the sixth week or so my system was completely calmed back down, and when I stopped taking them, it was as though nothing had ever happened. Placebo effect or did it just stop working? I think the most notable effects were within the first two weeks–I felt tight in the neck and was highly alert but uncomfortably so, as with a headache. Ah well. The search for viable nootropics continues.

I haven’t been able to update this much lately, but soon I should be back in action. This coming Tuesday (20/04/2004) I have a paper due on Kantian epistemology and how it ties in with Wallace Stevens’ poetry, viz., “Sunday Morning,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” and “Emperor of Ice Cream.” I’ll be posting more thoughts on those subjects as they come along. If anyone has any suggestions as to where to find good examples of synthetic a priori knowledge, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

Apparently 3com 3c59x/90x (in my case, 3c595 I believe) network interface cards (NICs) with Linux kernel version 2.4.x are simply not too friendly with excessive transfers. I have done enough research on the error message in the subject line of this post to know that, essentially, this is an error because this particular 3Com card is incompatible with the kernel I’m running when it gets up to very high levels of transfer rate. I’m not sure if this is caused by the firewall script I’m running (Dr. Bob Sully’s version, from malibyte.net and updated frequently, is really top-notch) with the Celeron 466MHz proc, or the NIC itself. Looks like a problem with the latter wholly, though. A video transfer, streaming at 300kbps is find with my cable modem connection, but the NIC just can’t handle it. If you’ve had this same problem, speak up! The easiest way I’ve found to fix this is the following (as root):

# ifdown eth0
# ifup eth0

(My external interface [extif] is actually eth1, but I genericised it for those of you who do it the normal way.)