Saturday - not much to say. Back still pretty stiff and painful.
Not much of a storm, at least here in the AV.
I decided to re purpose my old 3.2Ghz P4 box as an Xubuntu server for Sage.
It had 1.5GB of ram already, and I had a spare new drive, a 500GB SATA
disk that I bought some time ago - last year or the year before, that
I'd never installed. It was my first SATA drive but was a pretty
painless install, except for the connectors on the D865GBF motherboard
being mis-identified in the manual, so that at first it wouldn't boot
because it connected to the 2nd SATA port, not the first.
Similarly Xubuntu installed fine, except for a failure caused by a bit
of gunk on the CD. Cleaning that and I had a nice shiny new install.
The Dlink WUA-1340 wifi adapter was sensed and configured easily to the
network, using WPA-2.
Why Xubuntu, rather than Ubuntu?
Well, the Canonical people who run the Ubuntu base distro apparently
tossed all the old window desktop manager stuff, and replaced it with a
dumbed down manager that is supposedly suitable for smartphones,
tablets, and desktops. Only everyone who has used Linux or Windows or
OSX before hates it. Even the
Ubuntu release before this had various issues, and was a bit of a
resource pig, using a previous type of desktop environment.
Xubuntu replaces this new Unity interface with XFCE, an older but lighter weight manager, and is similar to what I've used in the past.
Tomorrow: installing Sage.
Friday 11 November
2011
Friday
- Veteran's Day. I put the flag out. There was a parade, but it was
last week apparently, so I missed it (it never occurred to me that it wouldn't be this weekend).
Dad was a vet, as was Grandpa Hahn. Mom worked in a bomb factory in
WWII, somewhere in the Midwest. On her side of the family her brothers
Bud and Ray both served, and, I think, Jim. Her sister's husband was
"shell shocked" in Europe, and never the same afterwards - we call it
PTSD these days. They are all gone, just memories now.
Dad's best friend, Johnny Fry, joined the Army rather than the Navy
because (he told Dad) he didn't like getting wet, and died at Okinawa.
My sister V, and brother B both served, during the Cold War.
Feeling a bit better this morning, a bit more ambulatory. I had to
take a hot bath late last night, in order to relax the back muscles enough
to get to sleep. It seemed to work.
I woke up a light sprinkle of rain - not much, but we may get a
more in the next couple of days. Perhaps it will revive some of the
tomato plants.
Storm front, early Friday evening.
Read recently:
Book #130 was The Fires of the Gods, by I.J. Parker. This was another in the excellent Akitada Sugawara series, #6 I think.
Book #131 was The Complete McAuslan,
by George MacDonald Fraser. This is a semi-autobiographical description
of a newly promoted lieutenant in a highlander regiment, just post World War II, told with some humor. The
book is entitled not after the narrator, but the world's dirtiest
and most foul mouthed soldier, the lieutenant's personal bane, one Private McAuslan, described as "Short, be-pimpled, permanently unwashed, and slow witted to a degree..."
TCM is a collection of stories, which was originally spread across at least two books, The General Danced at Dawn and McAuslan in the Rough.
I read them some time ago (probably back in the late 1970's). It's a
study of soldiering in the British Army as the British Empire wound
down in the 1940's. It covers the distance (and closeness) between the
ranks, and the histories and clashes between different parts of the
army, and generally sheds some light on the make up of what
was probably the most professional military culture of all time.
Fraser is, of course, (in)famous for his Flashman series, and there look to be several other fiction and semi-autobiographical books of his, now out on the kindle.
Riley, lurking in the the tomato bed.
Thursday 10 November
2011
Thursday
- Got up early, emptied cat boxes and vacuumed, in anticipation of a
visit from the Time Warner tech. It's probably been three weeks since I
vacuumed, for various reasons and I wanted it to be a little less
odorous indoors. I can't actually smell anything myself, being too
acclimated, but I assume that others can.
And so...I wrenched a lower back muscle.
Which, after the tech had gone, left me mostly incapacitated for the
rest of the day.
The TW tech, Fred, showed up on time and did a good job. The cable was
working when he showed, but I explained the intermittent outage issue.
I was streaming some movie from Netflix to keep an eye on it, but the
signal strength meter inside the house said that it was "barely
marginal". He then checked the vault for the lines servicing my
neighbor and myself...and the cable and connectors' were so bad that
they literally fell apart when he touched them. So they had to be
replaced. He also checked the bigger box across the street - and
discovered an illegal tap on my line from one of the neighbors. So he cut that off, and, I think, put new splitters in at each of these places, as well as at the house.
So, after about an hour I had excellent service, and have to complement Time Warner on their techs.
The frost got to the tomato's the other night. I have been covering
them fairly regularly, but didn't expect the cold that we got. Usually
we have a couple of degrees margin here in town, with the beds near
the house, but this time it wasn't enough.
Wednesday 9 November 2011
Wednesday - Well, the modem was out
again this morning. I called TW, and they'll send a tech
out...tomorrow. As I said before, I don't think it's the modem or the
(TW supplied) splitter, but rather a groundwater problem interfering
with the feed to the house. Some sort of signal strength check at the
house should tell them.
I rather suspect they'll be resistant to the idea, since fixing it
(excavation!) will probably be fairly expensive. What I suspect they
might do is install an amplifier for the line in the box at the house,
or inside the house. Which is fine, I suppose.
Update: Later in the day the signal came back, lending support to the idea that it isn't the modem per se. I left the service call up - I want to know if it is indeed the service to the house that is the problem.
In other news, as well as the modem being out, the laptop
had issues this morning. For some reason the screen was dark, and
wouldn't light. The keyboard and mouse, and power switch had no effect.
I could see the HDD drive activity light flicker as I did things but:
no display. Eventually I just took the battery out for a few minutes,
and that seemed to be enough to reset it. Odd, and a little scary. It's
been a very reliable machine, and, with the external monitor and
keyboard, has become my primary system.
I put the power meter on the old 2.4Ghz Linux box with the CRT monitor
this morning - it burns 144W with both on, at idle, and 70W when the
CRT is in power-saving mode. Yikes. I tend to leave it on for days at a
time...probably I'll be changing that. It boots rapidly after all, less
than a minute to ready-to-go, unlike the four or five that the Vista
laptop takes.
Tuesday
8 November 2011
Tuesday
- The border between San Diego (upper) and Tijuana (lower) is often
shown as an example of what different administrations can do in the
development of land.
But a similar difference in land use can be see inside the United
States, indeed, inside California itself. Here is the border between
Los Angeles County (left side) and San Bernardino County out in Pinon Hills
(263rd Street, green vertical line near center). The higher taxes and
stricter building codes make the Los Angeles County side of the border
a lot less desirable to the kind of person that wants to live cheaply in a rural unincorporated area.
Monday 7
November 2011
Monday
- on the road, late morning, back to Lancaster. I drove, Roger was
co-pilot. Traffic was rather light, and it was a nice drive through the
east Antelope Valley. It reminded us of the days when Roger and I
commuted between Harvey Mudd College and NASA Dryden, back in the day.
Internet access went out on Thursday afternoon,
and was still out when I got home.
The "cable" light was out, which
actually means that there was no handshake with the Time Warner servers, despite
still having Netflix and regular TV working.
I called the help desk, got an Indian-ish fellow, had to disconnect and
go find an old bill with the account number when they couldn't find me in their database, went
through the phone tree again, and when the tech couldn't access the
modem remotely I was told that yes, there was a problem, and that I could wait for a service technician or go
get a new modem from the local office. In the afternoon I went over to
the Time Warner offices and exchanged my cable
modem for a new one.
The new modem worked, and I was back online.
Apart from this problem it's been pretty reliable service. The problems
usually seem to crop up when it's cold and/or wet out. I suspect a
problem with the underground part of the line, possible a pinhole leak
in the wire, or perhaps water in a vault somewhere. In other words, a
loss of signal strength combined with an old modem is enough to make
the digital service unusable.
Sunday 6
November 2011
Sunday
- At the game. This was the San Diego Chargers versus Green Bay.
I was staying at my friends' place, and he drove us to Qualcomm Stadium
on Sunday morning, us being he and his wife, myself, and two other
friends. It was nice having someone else to drive - though it wasn't as
bad a crush as I'd feared. The stadium was a bit stingy with entrances,
they could have made things easier, but so it goes.
Tim's parents had arrived earlier in a motor home, setting up for the
"tailgate party" scene. It was pretty nice, having a barbecue and a
couple of beers before heading into the stadium. It takes a bit of the
edge off of being around tens of thousands of strangers, traffic
congestion and the rest.
The Chargers' lost, but only by a bit. Despite being up against the
undefeated Green Bay juggernaut they were almost able to erase a 20
point deficit in the fourth quarter, failing only in the last minute of
play when Phil River's threw a third interception. You can't give a
team
like GB three interceptions and hope to win. Two of the interceptions
were returned for scores. It says something about the front line that
River's, an experienced QB, was feeling rushed and harried enough to
perform that badly.
In all it was a fun game, particularly the final dramatic fourth
quarter!
The rain came, as predicted, but was mainly sprinkles and mild rain,
with plenty of dry periods, no problem.
After exiting the stadium we had plenty of time for more bratwurst and
beer, then eventually headed home...
Picture of
the Week Photo Notes: After the rain,
Rosamond Dry Lake, Feb 2001.
