Saturday - did a lot of small chores -
raking leaves (lots and lots of leaves), cleaning & refilling the hummingbird feeder, laundry,
shopping, library. Even had lunch (and dinner) with friends.
I also tried to install some software on the linux box. First was the
Android developer kit. This requires Java, which is in downloadable
packages. Except that one, the documentation, doesn't download properly
- it apparently wants hand installation with root privileges...for documentation.
So far I haven't been able to get it out of the package manager, and
every time I download something else it tries - and fails - to
reinstall the documentation, requiring user input to reset the package
manager.
Then I tried to install a file synchronization program, FreeFileSync.
Turns out that it had no debian package, no README.txt, no installer
script, no documentation of any kind. Even the forum was useless (and
by the way, what happened to Sourceforge - it's got this glitzy horrible user interface now. Yuck).
Eventually I gave up, and looking further found Unison, which is a
package in a default repository and downloads and installs just fine. It's a bit primitive, and
no longer in development, but seems to work OK for syncing files
between the HDD and a USB drive.
Friday
18 December
2009
Friday
- back in Lancaster. I picked up a big external drive, 1 Terabyte,
because I want to get all my files in one place - right now they are
stored all over about four or five main computers, and it's irritating
not being able to put my hands on a particular photo or document. Also
I want to put all the pictures together in a folder - the old laptop
was too small to hold more than the last year or two worth of images.
The new laptop has enough space, I think, but I need to collect and
collate the images from the old laptop, the linux desktop, the Win2k
desktop, and the old backup drive.
I also downloaded and intalled KompoZer, for the web page generation -
I am, in fact, writing with it at the moment. It went pretty well, but
there seems to be no spell check, which is odd, because I believe there
is on the Windows version. So if there is a mis-spelled word or two you
can blame the free software community...
Sad news: my brother had to have his dog Duke put to sleep. Duke has
had tumors and pain for some time, and had gotten to the point where he
could no longer walk: it was time. A sad day, though Mike did all he
could for him. Indeed, of his litter only Duke survived - the rest got
Parvo and died only a week or two after Mike picked Duke up. He was
good natured, but so big that his friendliness could injure you ;-)
Duke, in the earliest picture I can find, August 2000. RIP.
Thursday 17 December
2009
Thursday
- not a lot to say today.
I did finish Book #82, Key out of Time,
by Andre Norton. This is the fourth in the Time Traders series, and (again) has
no trading in it. Our intrepid heroes cross space and go back in time
to see what happened to the aliens that used to live there. Short
answer: the "Baldies", the evil aliens of the first three stories have apparently killed them off.
Longer answer...well, they battle the bad guys with the aid of some,
well, witches - and kind of win, but are left stranded back in time on an alien world at the end of the story.
The very short story.
How
do they get back to earth? Dunno. We know they do because I've read the
eighth book in the series, Atlantis Endgame. Norton seems to have
picked up a distressing habit of stranding her hero's, first poor
Travis Fox on Topaz (albeit with the beautiful and exotic Tartar girl) and now Ross Murdoch and Gordon Ashe on Hawaika.
I suppose I'll have to read the series #5 to find out what happens, Firehand, though by some reviews it really stinks. Oh well, these are mercifully short books.
Wednesday 16 December
2009
Wednesday
- another day of grinding away. Even Tim, who usually just tears
through this sort of task, sounded a bit grim by the day's end. But,
slowly, we are making progress. A lot of the problems are from the
early days of inspection, before the process was optimized and while
people (me, mostly) were still learning the tricks of the marathon GIS
inspection trade and of dealing with the active sabotage of Magellan
mapper unit.
Well, it is what it is, and it is certainly an enormous improvement over what they have: nothing.
I was thinking about the Shute book, Ordeal,
of last week. It might be interesting to plot up the path of the boat,
see where it traveled from England to France. A lot of it would be
vague, because the protagonist is only a fair weather navigator - no
sextant ability, and with blackouts of the light houses and radio
beacons his path is a bit unknowable to him, and thus to us.
I
was wondering whether Shute would have them sail across the North
Atlantic, but I suppose that was too far fetched for that date and
time. Even in the 1960's and 1970's it was considered a feat; in
wartime 1939 it would have been considered impossible for a small
family yacht
Wikipedia's entry for Shute lists his War books as follows - red highlights are books I've read by him and mentioned here.
Pied Piper (1942). An old man rescues seven children (one of them the niece of a Gestapo officer) from France during the Nazi invasion.
Pastoral(1944): Crew relations and love at an airbase in rural surroundings in wartime England.
Most Secret (1945): Unconventional attacks on German forces using a French fishing boat.
The Chequer Board
(1947): A dying man looks up three wartime comrades.
Tuesday 15 December 2009
Tuesday
- the grind continues at work. Lots of small fixes that need to be
entered, and changes to the database - one table might use Boolean for
a flag where another it is to be merged with uses an ANSI, or one uses
Int*16 instead of Int*32. And trying to sort and rename thousands of
videos and stills in the appropriate format.
I see that I screwed up on the
blog ordering last week, but have now fixed it so that Week 49 and Week 50
now follow Week 48. There were issues - this happens every year or so
around this time, it seems. About the time I add the Christmas cats up
above.
Monday 14 December 2009
Monday
- back to work. Not much to say there - just grinding through the masses of data.
It's dried up a bit, and the
roads are clean and dry. But the drivers are as stupid as ever, which
is why I spent 45 minutes sitting - another accident on the 118.
Between the people going 90mph in the slow lane and those going 55 in
the fast lane it's a wonder anybody survives more than a week or two on
these Southern California roads.
I saw the 49ers' win their game on Monday Night Football. Excellent game - but only the second Niners' game I've seen all year.
I understand my package finally arrived - the housekeeper went by and picked it up from the doorstep and put it inside for me.
Sunday 13 December_2009
Sunday
- I watched some of the NFL games on teevee - some pretty good games
are on, this late in the season. I was feeling a bit tired so not much
else got done.
I was expecting a package but it turns out that UPS does not deliver on
weekends. Weird, you'd think that they'd have
to during the
Christmas season, but apparently not. Well, maybe Monday or Tuesday.
It's been sitting in California since Thursday, so we're talking 5 days
to deliver less than a 100 miles. It took two days to get to California
from Secaucus, New York (New Jersey?).
I
installed a new version of Linux on the old Intel D845 system - this in
Mint 8.0: "Helena". I had installed 7.0, Gloria a couple of weeks ago -
and 8.0 was released the next day. Sigh. So, since I didn't have much
of anything installed - just 'grip' to save some Christmas music to the
PDA - it wasn't a big deal to replace it. One bad CD turned into a
coaster, and a few other problems which may be caused by a bad CMOS
battery. The system doesn't seem to remember the date or boot order
correctly, and it is a pretty old system, so I'll have to try replacing
that.
Other than that it seems to work pretty well. I have
avoided the proprietary Nvidia drivers, and don't seem to have the old
system hangups that once bedeviled me.
WEEK 51 2009
