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Orb Designs Grafitti July 08 thru July 14, 2002 Mon   Tues   Wed   Thu   Fri   Sat   Sun Last Week  <--  *  -->   Next Week --> Link to the most recent week <-- Email Brian Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message..

MONDAY    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
July 08, 2001 -    Updates at 1145

Good morning. You may not have caught this one... (Page down a bit from the link) Bob Thompson's mom took a spill and "powdered" her right femur above the knee. Our thoughts and sympathy are with Lenore, Bob, and the whole family. Bob's going to be on break for a bit, with plenty of things to occupy his copious powers of concentration.

And I know, it's hardly even morning anymore. But I wanted to make the effort, put in an appearance. Whenever I skip a day (or even miss the morning window), I get email in response, and while I don't mind the attention, there's no problems at this end that finalizing a deal to rent a house in Maryland won't cure. We're working on it, although Marcia's a bit nervous and the calendar pages keep flying off, and we have no address to send the moving truck to, once our gear is on it at the end of the month.

I had a nice chat this morning with the people that run a networking and web consulting firm in Silver Spring, Maryland. They might, it turns out, be able to make use of my services once we're feet dry on that side of the continent. Things are moving, but not settled. We'll be glad to get into the latter state. Now I'd best see what other kinds of trouble I can get into. See you later.

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Mon    TUESDAY    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
July 09, 2002 -    Updates at 0740

Good morning. Well, it appears to be harder to rent a house while owning a dog than we had anticipated. A large place that really appealed to us ended up rejecting our application because they're worried about possible interactions between Sally and a nearby child-care center. Silly people. We'll keep hunting about, surveying the ads and making calls. Something will come through.

Beyond that, I've got some weird behaviour emerging on Gryphon. When booting, capslock, numlock and scrolllock are all set. That's new in the last 24 hours. Mebbe it's time to check the BIOS settings and see if they've moved. If so, I'd suspect that the motherboard battery may be getting a bit wonky. More on that when I know more.

This just in, we've heard from the real estate person who's been working on our behalf (out of Bowie, MD) that we have a likely prospect, a house rental and the owner will accept us and Sally. Apparently pictures of the mellow dog helped a bit. Some details yet to be finalized, and it'll cost a bit more than the first one we were interested in, but all-in-all, not too shabby. Of course, this means I have a lot to do now. See y'all later!

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Mon    Tues    WEDNESDAY    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
July 10, 2002 -    Updates at 0545 and 1745

Howdy. Very early start today. We appear to have a Maryland address now. That's a very good thing. Now to start in with the scary stuff... can I get anything better than dialup? I don't know. I haven't heard a lot of positive feedback about any of the vendors in that area, following my searches on Broadband Reports (aka DSL Reports). I need to get phone numbers first, then I can find out if Speakeasy Networks (through their CLEC partner Covad) can continue to provide us service in Maryland. If not, then my options start to go a little bit wacky. So I'm gonna get on the phone and start getting things arranged. Ciao!

~1745 PDT - Good evening. I'm actually writing this at the stated time, at 31,000 feet over Kansas, headed westbound. I'll post it later, when we're home. You can, if you wish, go back and read the last several day's posts in the context of Marcia and I actually being in Maryland, as that was the case. Needless to say, without Malcolm, Duncan and Kerry to hang out and protect our stuff while we travelled, it's better to be a little discreet in our plans and announcements.

We did get a house rented, I probably have a least a little bit of work available to me once we move out East, and we generally had a very nice time. Marcia's manager and her husband, Judy and Jim, lent us their house and their car for the duration - how very nice! I'll have a picture or two of the house we're moving to tomorrow, when I finally get around to pulling them off the camera.

Our flights were generally uneventful. We flew American Airlines, San Jose to Dallas to Baltimore outbound, Baltimore to Saint Louis to San Jose back. In all of that, I was 'specially selected for searching only once. The real almost bummer was a 1.5 hour tarmac delay leaving Baltimore due to weather in Saint Louis. Funny thing, we had just an hour and a half to our connecting flight out to San Jose. We hit the ground there just 10 minutes before that flight was to depart, rolled a ways towards the terminals, then... stopped. Aaaargh. We were sure our flight left without us, and that would have been less fun. However, a quick jog from one gate to another, followed by a breathless question or two revealed that our connecting flight had also been delayed, and was just about to start boarding. Most excellent. And let me tell you something else: For a tall guy like me, the extra leg room that American is offering in Cattle Class makes all the difference in the world. I was comfortable all the way there and back (relatively speaking), and never had to ask for an exit row (my usual ploy to get enough leg room to keep my kneecaps off my eardrums).

We're really looking forward to hitting the ground, and going to get Sally. She stayed with Laddie, Myrna and Roger (thank you, thank you, thank you) while we were on the road, this trip. Marcia is hoping that Sally at least pretends to have missed us during our absence. I'll just be content if she ... recognizes us! Ah, a bag dinner has arrived, so I think I'll partake. See you tomorrow morning, probably early since I'm on East coast body time right now.

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Mon    Tues    Wed    THURSDAY    Fri    Sat    Sun   
July 11, 2002 -    Updates at 0800

Good morning. If you missed yesterday's late post (and I wouldn't be surprised, it didn't go up until nearly 10pm local) then you'll only now be learning that we are now back from a 6 day power run to Maryland to find a place to live. The last week's worth of posts make sense from that context, too! Here's the follow up from there. We were on the ground in San Jose just 50 minutes later than our original scheduled arrival time. Roger was there, our bags were out nearly first on the carousel as anticipated, and we were off. Sally was very, very happy to see us, we drove home, aired the house out for 15 minutes, then closed up, shucked off and crashed. A very long day indeed.

Above, left to right, are some selected snaps from our trip. We found a nice house in Bowie, MD. It's a little over 2000 square feet of living space on a quarter-acre lot. The front and back yards need a bit of work yet, but some of that is promised, and I'll take care of the rest. The house is a standard three bedroom Colonial (on a slab, no basement), with half of the garage converted into a guest bedroom and bath. So all told there's four bedrooms, three and one-half baths, kitchen, family room, living room, dining room, one-car garage, a shed in the backyard... anyway, WAY more space than we have here. Uh-oh. Marcia probably wants more ... stuff!

Bowie is named after Jim, the man with the knife named after him. I was rather hoping that it had been a David sort of thing, but clearly it's not a rock-and-roll town by nature. On our flight home yesterday, we were either in the clouds or over them most of the time, but it cleared to a haze over Colorado, and I was able to get one shot of a fire burning in the wilds there, quite a ways west of Pueblo. There were others, but there the haze was too thick to even think of getting a camera shot. As it is, this one (above, right) is color-distorted by the adjustments I made to clean up the shot so you could see the smoke plumes.

It was quite late last night and I really couldn't see much in the garden, except that it looked like nobody had been over to harvest the beans... Heh. Have a look at this:

We'll be eating like veritable vegetarian kings, the balance of our time here in Sunnyvale, eh?

In other news, I've now got my copy of PC Hardware In A Nutshell, by Bob and Barbara Thompson. Pick a copy up at your favorite booksellers (on- or offline) soon. I've always had hardware review books around, because they aren't driven by advertising dollars like the magazines or websites. This is the second edition, and I'll be buying based on what I learn from this one, just like I did from the first.

Bummer. Although I haven't yet heard from him since we returned from our trip, it would appear that my planned luncheon with Moshe Bar is now off the schedule. I had thought he was travelling in this direction, and we were to have lunch here in Sunnyvale today. But his travel schedule appears to have changed. Ah, well. I'll just keep racking up in-person meetings with the various Daynoters as I can, Moshe and I will hook up one day, never fear!

Now. What to do next. There's packing to be done (more and more, somehow), breakfast to be had, a lawn for the mowing... I guess I'll see you later.

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    FRIDAY    Sat    Sun   
July 12, 2002 -    Updates at 0800

Good morning. While I generally don't do one-on-one assistance gratis for major problems (via email... newsgroups and mailing lists are different, of course), every once in a while something crops up that fuddles people, and since I can post my reply here, then other people can benefit, so my efforts are worthwhile on a larger scale. Steve was having a problem with his modem, and had been emailing my buddy Tom Syroid about the topic. Tom passed the buck to me, and Steve and I have gone back and forth a couple of times already. Here's the latest installment:

OK, I'm going to ask more explicit questions. Please don't think me rude in tone, I'm going to try to let you understand the level of detail required to get remote help via email... On Friday 12 July 2002 00:01, you wrote: > Hi Brian > > What I meant by > > > I am really unsure with RH 7.2 even the help pages are not the same as > > what comes up on my GUI. > > was that the available help is different from the setup screens that come > up on my screen. What available help? Do you mean from books, websites, me, online docs for your system? And explicitly, which setup screen? What menu items, in order, beginning with the KDE menu, do you select to get to this setup screen that's confusing you. In order to provide help, I need lots and lots and lots of details. Since I can't be over your shoulder and say "Oh, just click that and type this, you'll be fine!", you need to be my eyes. LOTS of details. > Okay so I got the modem to work by going into internet->internet dialer and > setting it up in there it is on the "1" I think it was ttsy1. I would imagine it was actually ttys1. It's really important to get the info transcribed properly. > However when I try to use Kmail and set it up I get the following error [snip] > > I am also not able to use Konqueror as well as Mozilla. The modem just > doesn't hook up like it does in internet dialer. Above, this reads like kmail doesn't work, konqueror doesn't work, Mozilla does. However, I think you mean that all three don't work. So let's go back to basics. You set up internet dialer with your ISP telephone number, account name, password, and start that. It does the dialing, appears to connect OK, and you see *what* that tells you this might be true? Did you try wvdialconf as I suggested? As I said before, wvdial is the only tool that's ever worked consistently for me in dialup. It should be installed. Just open a terminal window, then execute these commands (assuming wvdial is installed, if not see below for some direction on installation): [steve@machine steve]$ su - Password: [type your root password here] [root@machine root]# wvdialconf ... and follow the prompts, reading everything, and taking exact notes on questions that confuse you, if you have problems. Once that's done, wvdial should be mostly setup properly. You need to edit the file /etc/wvdial.conf, making sure the following lines are correct - change the stuff to the right of the equals sign to be your information, in that file. You can use any command line text editor you like: vim, emacs, whatever. Phone = 5551212 Username = steve Password = password then: [root@machine root]# wvdial And it should connect without problems. Leave that window open, do your browsing and email, then back in that terminal window, type Control + C to terminate the dialup connection. If there's a hitch, then I'd check this: Have you got this machine on a home network? Is there an ethernet card in it? If so, then as root, you may need to disable the ethernet card before starting the modem. It's possible that the two setups are conflicting. Do that by typing something like: [root@machine root]# /etc/init.d/network stop (the file name may not be network, it may be net or networking, you'll have to figure that out on your own) Then you can try starting wvdial again. [root@machine root]# wvdial If you don't have wvdial installed, then, still as root, load up CDROM that you installed RedHat from, find the RPMS directory (should be under a RedHat directory on the CDROM), and locate wvdialx.x.x.rpm, where the x's stand in for whatever version numbers there are. To install the program from the cdrom, type this (adjusting the path to the file according to where it really is on the cdrom). If it's not in the first CDROM, it'll probably be in the second or third. I *do* know that it's part of the RedHat program collection. [root@machine root]# rpm -Uvh /mnt/cdrom/redhat/RPMS/wvdialx.x.x.rpm ****Please bear in mind that I've done all of this from memory, I don't currently have RedHat installed on any machines, and I can't even get to the discs at the moment, they're packed as we're moving house at the end of the month. You may need to experiment a bit, try variations on a theme. Also, is there any sort of Linux user's group in your area? If so, do they have events where people can bring in their machines and get setup help? If you have a local Linux group, get in touch with them. Really! **** Hope this helps, .brian

I have a bunch of phone calls to make, setting up utilities, checking into connectivity and so on. I'd best get to work. See ya!

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    SATURDAY    Sun   
July 13, 2002 -    Updates at

Good morning. It's been a picture filled week, I thought a few more wouldn't hurt. The other morning, after pulling out one batch of tomatoes right around dawn (along with all the other vegetables pictured on Wednesday, I went back for more in full daylight. Twice again as many, as you can see above left. Also, another of our pot cactus has started flowering. Dangerously pretty!

Yesterday afternoon, Sally was in the mood to play. We tussled on the lawn for a while, she roamed around a bit, then found one of her balls. She's really not a throw and fetch sort of mutt. She's more a "I'm gonna hold on to this tightly while growling, you try and take it from me, okay?" We had a nice walk and a fun play session yesterday. For our upcoming road trips, we got Sally some motion sickness meds from the vet. When we tried it out on a trip to Orinda it seemed effective. However, we're not sure we have enough, because we'll have some very long driving days in front of us. So Marcia ordered what appeared to be an equivalent from PetMeds (good prices, high convenience). After they checked with the vet, we didn't get that. But Marcia talked with the vet, who gave us the names of over-the-counter people medications that should meet Sally's needs as well. How ... progressive!

I got most of our utilities arranged for the house in Bowie setup for August 1, after spending an immense amount of time on the phone yesterday. A couple of hitches: Comcast isn't accepting orders for turn-on in August yet - that is, their system software won't accept dates that far out. So much for the scheduling program, eh? The good news for DSL is that Speakeasy/Covad does serve the area, and we'll be much closer to the Bowie CO than we are to the Sunnyvale one here. I'll have no problems gettings top-speed RADSL, and if I wanted to lay out the bucks, we would qualify for 1500 Mbit SDSL at that location. But I'm not up for that, certainly as long as we're renting rather than owning. That we can't schedule until the dialtone goes live, on August 1. However, the helpful Sarah at Speakeasy took down all the information, and will enter the order for me on that day. How cool is that? That's why I recommend Speakeasy Networks whole-heartedly - they go the extra mile in service. (If you decide to switch to them, let me know, so I can get a referral bonus, neh?)

Today, I'm taking the remaindered paints and flamable stuff down for recycling. We can't transport it on the moving truck, and I don't want it in our cars. So it goes. Then I'm going to start packing the living room. One little bit at a time, we'll get ready to move. I guess I'd best get to work. Later!

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July 14, 2002 -    Updates at 0800

Good morning. Greg and I spent some time last night going back and forth about a potential problem with the mailserver on Rocket. An email to Jerry had been blocked, and the sender got back this:

   ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----


   ----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to rocket.mazin.net.:
>>> DATA
<<< 550 Error: Message content rejected
554 ... Service unavailable

For some weird reason, that message was read as Jerry's email address not existing, rather than as the real (and stated right there) reason: Message content rejected. The query and and response cycle that followed was confusing to some parties, and it needn't have been. The upside is that I went back to take a look at what the filters have been doing for us in just the last week: We blocked 700 spam headed Jerry's way. Bob came up 342 spam short of his quota. Greg had 232 fewer messages to delete outright, and I had a paltry 107 silly messages not to deal with. Thus, for the four main domains on Rocket, we blocked 1,381 spams, advertisements and scams. Now that's what I call a proper treatment for RSI problems caused by excessive deleting.

We've got a Costco and grocery run today, Sally gets her nails clipped and a bath, and I've got some cleaning to do following the mess I made packing the bookcases and china cabinet yesterday. I suppose I'd better hop to it. Oh, oh, I almost forgot. When we went back to the house in Maryland for a final peek before coming home on Wednesday, there was a bunny in the back yard. A real bunny. Won't that make Sally happy. If her external dream manifestations are any indicator, then she knows exactly what to do when she sees on of these little fellers. Should be fun. See you later!

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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.

All Content Copyright © 1999-2002 Brian P. Bilbrey.