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Orb Designs Grafitti -- January 06 thru January 12, 2003
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..
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January 06, 2003 - Updates at 0745 and 0850 EST
Good morning. It's snowing. Again. Our predicted one inch of dusting for this area yesterday evening turned into a 4 inch dump throughout the day. We got Marcia out just in time. Otherwise she might have been here for an extra two days, which would have been lovely for Sally and I, but not so good for the purposes of her business trip. We did get her off yesterday morning, and all is well, safely landed in California last night.
I'm not sure what the prognosis for the day is just yet. As I said, it is snowing again, but the weather liars this morning are at least acknowledging that yesterday they missed the mark, so who know's how much for today. One station says 1 to 3 inches more here, another says 1 or less. Somehow I don't think it'll be wise to drive north for work.
I'm going to clean up a bit, shovel the driveway off and then re-evaluate. Wish me luck!
0850 - OK, back by popular request (and you both know who you are!), it's snow picture time.
While they're keeping the roads in fairly decent shape, it's continuing to snow and stick. The shambling weather beasts don't have any real idea yet how much snow is likely to dump today, either. So I think the prudent course of action may be to remain safely home out of the traffic accidents. I'll call in to check and see if anyone else has come in. Ahah! They have. Apparently the roads are in semi-decent shape, and we're pretty much past the commute time, so maybe I'll go in and do a bit of research and writeup for a proposal to be presented on Wednesday. Then I'll come home and run the vacuum around the house and get a few more bits cleaned up, just for fun.
Oh, I forgot to mention. I slept quite restlessly last night, and not just because my lovely Marcia is on the other side of the continent. Reminder to self: Do NOT read the last half of a collection of Stephen King short stories right before bedtime. I finished up the 14 story book Everything's Eventual. There's some right good tales between those covers, but not for late, before sleeping. Really.
Now, on with my day. Stay safe, alright?
Top / Email Brian
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January 07, 2003 - Updates at 0724 EST
There was this movie, see? It's called Things Change, and it stars Don Ameche and Joe Mantegna. It's one of my favorite movies, hands down. It's funny, but it's got a story and a heart. And things do indeed change. I'll never understand why, when there are two ways to express a thing - one nice and one not - someone would explicitly choose to be rude (or seem to be, it comes to the same end). Of course, even I do so, but I try *really* hard not to make a habit of it.
I'm not here to change anyone else. I've had enough trouble in this one life to settle me. As I mentioned to someone just the other day, I've given up all my vices. They mumbled something in return that vaguely sounded like "straightest arrow I've ever..." My parry? "Of course, I was lucky enough to survive my vices." Sheesh, you'd think I'd figure out how NOT to stop a conversation dead in it's tracks by now.
But when I am moved strongly by something that someone else writes, I usually find a way to turn the worm. In my case, it was last Tuesday's post about the merits of the word "blog". My one sentence summary: You can call me anything you like, just call me! That's my preferred method of dealing with apparent criticism - make lemonade. Deflection is good, too. So is ignoring the source, sometimes. But often there's a kernel of truth or justice in everything, so I try to pay attention.
Most to the point, I don't have to go there. I also don't have to react. All I have to do is be the ball... I'm outta here for the rest of the day. Later!
Top / Email Brian
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January 08, 2003 - Updates at 0700
Good morning. We had a good day yesterday. Lots of naps, a few belly rubs, a medium-length walk. And what I did was ... a whole lot of nothing. I mucked about with the latest release candidate for Gentoo 1.4. I played Half-Life for a while under Transgaming's Winex. Watched a little HGTV last night. Had leftover pizza for dinner. All in all, a lovely relaxing wasted day.
Now today's going to be a bit busier, with some write-up time in the office first thing, a telephone consultation with a client site in the late morning, and a meeting to really get the ball rolling on a large project for another customer all of this afternoon. Should be fun. Now I'd best be getting ready. See ya!
Top / Email Brian
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January 09, 2003 - Updates at 0716
Good morning. I was hopeful of getting more accomplished, and having something even mildly interesting to report here. But yesterday was eaten with meetings and research. We're going to be assembling some image management systems - from slide scanners to storage systems and database systems - for one of our customers. It is going to be a fun spot of work. After yesterday's meeting, today we're going to final quote and order all the hardware. Although I worked extensively with the office copy of PC Hardware in a Nutshell, there were a few questions that I was having trouble answering. The good news is that I know those authors - it's Bob and Barbara Thompson. So I called and we talked a couple of days ago about large IDE RAID systems, and last night about DVD recordable technology. Things change so fast ...
The balance of my time is taken up by Mopey Sally and all the other little chores around here that I normally share with my better half. While I have had time in the evening, I've had little to no energy to use in that time. Instead I've been watching some TV, reading Kary Mullis' Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, the autobiographical story of a more off-beat than usual Nobel Prize winner. Downstairs I've been plowing through a couple months worth of Scientific American and Smithsonian, ;Login and IEEE publications. I guess you can count it as refill time, but here it is, bright and early, and I am tired. Probably a combination of sleeping restlessly without my best buddy, and the coffee not having kicked in yet.
Time for me to go. Have a great day.
Top / Email Brian
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January 10, 2003 - Updates at 0948
Hello. No post today, maybe tonight. I rushed right out into the commute, and now I'm deeply into my working day. Catch you later!
Top / Email Brian
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January 11, 2003 - Updates at 0815
Good morning. I'll admit to not being fully awake yet. Sally woke me up and told me she had to go outside NOW! We've had a busy, busy set of days. While Marcia really would have liked me to fly out and join her using our one of our mileage-based airline tickets, there's just too much going on right now. We've acquired some significant new large business, and I'm going to be very busy. Right now at the beginning of the cycle is when I am the most help. So I'll continue to spelunk on a few ideas and products today. I might as well. Sally's gone back to sleep, snoring under my desk.
Marcia tells me that the next large meeting is going to probably be in the UK, and that I have no choice on that one - If she's going, I'm going. Okay, I guess. We'd better sock some cash away, eh? It would be a nice place to visit. I haven't been to England since our family trips when I was young. We spent a total of four months in England and on the Continent in a two year span back in the early to mid-seventies. Lovely places to visit!
I also have a couple of side projects to work on. First off I want to do a test-install of the Gentoo 1.4-rc2 distribution. If I can come up with any hitches that I can report to make the final product better, I'd love to do that. Additionally, I want to address MikeM's question recently on LInuxMuse about menus on Linux. Since I don't control how KDE writes their menu structure, I'll write an article about the KDE Menu editor, and how to effectively utilize that tool to make KDE work better for you. Shouldn't take too long to accomplish that, depending upon the other chores and work I take on this weekend.
I know I didn't make it back here yesterday. I was whupped by the time I got home. Depending on how things go, I might return here later today. If not, see y'all tomorrow!
Top / Email Brian
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January 12, 2003 - Updates at 1030
Good morning. I slept in far too late this morning. I awoke (more or less) about an hour ago, out of weird dreams and into a pounding headache. The latter has abated while fhe former have faded into the mists. I think I'm still catching up from the last week's worth of spotty sleep. Yesterday afternoon, while the Gentoo install was running, I got down on the floor and curled up with Sally to give her some attention for a few minutes. I think I fell asleep there, too. I think I was down there for an hour and a half or so, but when I tried to rise, my joints were crackling with pain. I don't do floors well anymore, it seems.
Speaking of Gentoo, the 1.4rc2 install went swimmingly. I installed in a VMware jail, since I have no need to reinstall on real hardware for any reason at all. But the bits that I found broken in the rc1 release were cleaned up. rc2 also introduces on-cd binary installs of KDE, Gnome, X, OpenOffice.org and Mozilla, built with specific architecture optimizations. This means separate 500M ISO images for Athlon-XP, Athlon-MP, Athlon, i586, i686, Pentium3, and a standard baseline x86 Stage1 only ISO (only 40M there, build everything yourself). I'll observe that following the directions required me to rebuild 30 or 40 packages after initial installation, but before binaries installation. This was to bring certain key systems packages up to date. You know, it would be nice if along with System and World rebuild options, there were a Security option, so that only those packages (and their dependencies) that required rebuilding for security reasons would be called down and built. Mmmmmm.
Speaking of which, (no, not a segue at all, just a head feint in that direction) I read in an email somewhere over the last few days that there are webmasters all over the place who by their site design and tag use express CONTEMPT towards blind users of the web. I think that's a bit strong. I would definitely agree that putting text into images, without alt text attached to the images, on a site that's been designed explicitly as a resource for the blind, might be contemptful. I was thinking of the Bonaparte quote which begins "Never ascribe to malice...", but then it isn't even incompetence that reigns. Perhaps merely ignorance at the worst, I think.
Ignorance in that I certainly don't know much if anything about the tools that the blind use to access this fundamentally visual medium - the World Wide Web! I do use context tags in my HTML (that is, <em> and <strong>), which I am given to understand are more friendly to such tools. However, I know I do so badly. For instance, the strong text that I start each paragraph with. I do that merely because I like how it looks. In a tool that uses text to speech conversion, I'd imagine that the few words at the beginning of each paragraph are shouted? I don't know. I write for my pleasure and try to be accessible without too much effort on my part. Is this contempt? I think not.
Now, if you're blind, and you come to this site, and find that there are some simple things that I can do (emphasis on simple, like me) to make this site more useful and accessible, please do tell me. At least then I'll know and can choose whether or not to go to that effort. Most likely I will. But if I don't, I still don't think it's contempt. I'm willing to entertain conversation on the topic, however.
Okay, there's chores and laundry to be done, walkies (pronounced in the Woodhouse way, shouted and shrill) to be announced and taken, and perhaps another go at the KDE menu editor. Have a lovely day.
Top / Email Brian
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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 © 1999-2003 Brian P. Bilbrey.
