Saturday
- a nicer day, but rain is predicted for the next couple of days.
In other news, I apparently named the linux system "Gondor". I have no
recollection of doing this, but perhaps it was at some point during the
OS install, weeks ago.
Gondor is working well - I burned a DVD+R of the DooDah
parade footage for my friends using K3b. It worked well, except that
the DVD failed to eject properly.
I tried to use the PDA camera today to take a picture of the Ron Paul
weirdo's demonstrating on a corner, but it claimed that there wasn't
enough memory to run the application. I check when I got home - indeed,
only 8MB of program RAM left, out of 48MB. I think there is a
memory leak of some kind. I did a soft reset and (after killing the
useless ActiveSync which was restarted) had a nice 25MB of program RAM,
and the camera worked fine.
I've noticed some odd behavior since the first time I tried to use
ActiveSync on the PDA - this camera problem and the fact that the battery now
runs down much quicker than before - a day or so in standby, rather
than three or four. Perhaps the reset will fix things.
Friday
- feeling a bit under the weather. Figures - get a couple days off, get
sick. Not awful, just slept most of the day :-(
It rained like heck last night. Warm rain, which melted the snow on
the foothills. Well, some of the foothills. It was still pretty snowy
on the hills near the pass. Some sort of microclimate perhaps. Light
sprinkles in the morning, which during their morning ramble, Riley
hated and Phoebe ignored.
Has Microsoft
peaked?
I don't know. Their stuff is overly complicated, about a B grade in
functionality, and overpriced. On the other hand I'm not a big believer
in the current dot-com favorites like Google - I mean, what do they do to make money?
Why do people invest in them? Microsoft at least has some product.
I meant to mention the reverse 911 call I received the other day. No,
it wasn't about a fire storm, which is the call my friend Tim got last
fall down in San Diego. And it wasn't about the flash floods or
blizzards as might be expected with the storms rolling into California.
No, it was about a
help meeting for the local morons who took on too big a home loan. Why
the
hell is Lancaster using an emergency service to deal with
this? I
wonder who paid for the emergency service, and if this
is a violation of regulations?
I am using my USB switch, so now I can print from the Linux or Windows
without having to swap cables. Pretty cool. But it does affect printing
with the Linux box just a bit: after a printer switch away
from the
linux box and back it doesn't see the printer until I press the power
button on the printer front, it just queues up the print jobs. Press
the power
button and it all prints out. I can live with that.
Thursday
- working away on various things. Raining.
I did get the laser printer to work with Kubuntu, it was painless. Plug
it into the USB slot, run the K system manager, go into admin mode, go
through the Add Printer Wizard and select the Brother HL-1440 and voila! it is done.
Maybe five minutes elapsed time.
I don't think that I mentioned going to the 2007 DooDah
Parade
last weekend. Yes, 2007, held in 2008. The DooDah isn't big on
following rules. It was fun - lots of strange low budget floats and
what not. We had gay people, drunks, anti-abortionists, war protesters,
drummers, bicyclists, motorcyclists, pro-marijuana groups and who knows
what else. These were (generally) not
Rose Parade kind of entries. People brought soft tacos to throw at the
parade entries (it used to be marshmallows but the City of Pasadena is
tired of cleaning that up.) It had a pretty good turnout of entries and
watchers and the weather was nice.
I took pictures and nearly constant video, but discovered that I didn't
have room left on my hard drive for the 1.5GB of quicktime. At least
there wasn't room on the windows machine. The Linux box (I still
haven't a name) had 150GB free so I attached the camera to the USB port
to see what would happen. And it recognized the camera as an external
device and allowed me to download everything. And, even cooler, the
video played perfectly on it, with sound. I'll post some pics soon.
Which shows what a piece of insulting user-unfriendly crap Windows
Media Player is, when free software can run quicktime and Microsoft's
flagship player won't.
Book #4 was
John Scalzi's The
Last Colony. Pretty good. It is the successor to Old
Man's War and The
Ghost Brigades (#37,
2007). I see that there is another book in the series that
I haven't read,The
Sagan Diary. I'll have to check the library for it.
Scalzi has a blog,
and I see that he is writing another book in the series, Zoe's Tale.
Cool.
Wednesday 23
January 2008
Wednesday
- working on various things around the house. It's raining, still, in
Ventura. No work down there for a while. I spent the day doing various
office chores and tasks that I've needed to do for a while. Wrote some
memo's. All very exciting...
It started raining here, in the late afternoon. No snow, which is too
bad. I would have enjoyed that. The radio says they had snow just up
the road in Gorman, but I'm not going to drive forty miles on a country
road just to see a dusting of snow. Particularly if the
interstate is closed and they are diverting it's traffic down that same
country road.
Fred Thompson has dropped out of the presidential race. He started too
late, with too little money I suppose. That leaves McCain, Giulaini and
Romney. I'm not crazy about any of them. I'll probably hold my nose and
vote for whoever wins the nomination. McCain's indifference to the 1st
amendment is astonishing. Giuliani is a RINO. Romney I really don't
know
much about, other than he is a (whisper it) Mormon.
I found a stick of unmarked RAM and put it in the printer.
I now
have 18MB of RAM, up from 2MB, so I deduce it was a 16MB stick. There
is only one slot so that's all I can put in, even though I've another
identical stick. Now I need to set it up with the Linux box, which I
also need to name. It has to be in the Lord of the Rings world, to be
consistent. Hmmm.
Tuesday 22 January 2008
Tuesday
- yep, rain, no work. Grim and gray out.
I watched the Terminator:
The Sarah Connor Chronicles
pilot and first 'real' episode. Not too bad. Much better than I
expected. Interesting that they decided to focus on the mom, rather
than the son, John Connor. John is played by some forgettable pretty
boy. On the other hand we have Summer Glau
as the good, but weird, Terminator in some excellent casting. But I'd
worry, if I were her, about getting type cast after the similar role in
Joss Whedon's Firefly.
Monday 21 January 2007
Monday
- MLK day. It's a holiday for the county workers and thus a holiday for
me. And it looks like rain for the next few days - no working in the
flood control channels for a few days.
My knees like the rest period - there is always a silver lining.
I did get out to Walmart, and had no trouble getting a duplicate
receipt. I thought there'd be a hassle and brought my credit card
statement. They took a look and just printed out a copy for me right
there.
I took the cats into the vet. They weren't happy about it. I left the
pet carrier in the front room for days, so that they'd get used to it.
I put a couple of old t-shirts, unwashed, in it so that it'd smell like
me. Even so it was a bit of a struggle to get Phoebe in it. He has
memories of last time, and they were probably reinforced this time.
Anal Probes will do that for you.
Seriously, I was concerned about his diet and weight. He is now 18.5
pounds, with Riley at 12 pounds. That's a hefty cat. The vet once had
one that weighed 35 pounds, so I guess he's not trophy status, but still.
The recommendation was a little less food, some pumpkin pie filling
with
the food on occasion (keeps 'em regular) and some Glucosamine Chrondite
for their joints. I actually use that myself, along with fish oil and
multivitamins in the morning, so that's cool. Cat supplement not a pill
but rather a fine
powder to be sprinkled over the food. Cats are worse than dogs when it
comes to trying to dose them, pills are nearly impossible I have heard.
From
the ease and regularity with which my cats upchuck I can't say I
disagree.
Sunday 20 January 2007
Sunday
- ah, those Green Bay Packers, how could they do that to me? What a
bunch of bums. Well, I always liked the Giants - guess I'll be rooting
for them in a couple of weeks. They were, honestly, the better of the
teams and having completely shut down Bret Favre deserved the win. Can
they beat the Patriots? Maybe.
I didn't get out in the morning to Walmart, so I'll try again tomorrow.
I want to get into Customer Service early, before the rush...
As well as setting up the Windows PC again I set up my Linux box.
Honestly, on the 19" LCD it is quite gorgeous to look at. I use the KVM
switch to switch between the two, so the (physical) desktop isn't
cluttered. The goal is to eventually wean myself from the Windows
addiction.
Once installed you can upgrade and customize Kubuntu with a program
called Adept. Adept
is, really, pretty cool. It's a 'package
manager' with links to repositories of tested open source software. I
just think of something I need and
in a matter of seconds I can have it installed and working. There are
thousands
of free programs
available out there. Nvu, which I've been using on Win2k for a while
has been superseded by KompoZer,
but it looks much the same. Rather
than WsFtp-LE I can use the KompoZer
built in posting tool, or use one of the
many FTP clients available, gFTP
for now. For an image editor there is
GIMP.
Supposedly I can even set up my old Brother HL-1440 laser printer, even
though it isn't an old school PostScript
printer. But the web pages say
that I need to upgrade the printer RAM before doing it. I probably have
some old 72 pin DIMMs around.
Picture of
the Week
Photo
Notes:
Ventura beach with Anacapa in
the distance.
