Here the artist was Andreas Haefliger, the WAV files were from the latest album I've downloaded from MagnaTune. You remember MagnaTune, right? I've written about them before - they're the record label that isn't evil. Although the term "record label" is stretching the term - they don't ship records at all. John sells tracks and album collections, all by download. And fully half the proceeds of each sale go to the artist. That's excellent.

I took this picture of Lucy a week ago, but forgot about it until I pulled pictures off of the camera last night. She's relaxed into her role in this houshold quite a bit, and seems to be getting along fairly well with Sally. And Sally is definitely improved for having the company and the competition. The one thing that we're still having to manually insist upon is that when Sally is getting attention from one or the other of us, that Lucy not push in between and get Sally's lovin'. Lucy is a bit of a needy dog yet, and has still to learn that sharing is a good thing.

I started a couple of projects yesterday. I took a flourescent fixture that we bought last year for the garage at the house on Tulip Grove and put it to new use, holding the grow lamps for our seed germination efforts in the basement greenhouse. It's still too cold to put plants in the ground, but by mid-next month, it'll be time for peas and broccoli. So there's snow peas and Alaska peas, plus a Barbados variant of broccoli. Then I've got two more waves after that, starting on March 10th and April 1st. More on those as the time approches. The tricky bit's going to be getting into the yard and prepping the ground.

Next up, the basement workshop. The former owners had used this space as a play area for kids and their guests, a good thing with four kids. But we don't need the whole downstairs space finished, so I'm going to put my woodshop down there. In order to contain the sawdust, I'm going to put in a wall and a door. I'll rock and finish the outside, and put masonite pegboard up on the inside. The floor's going down to bare concrete, then I'll clean it and lay down some sturdy epoxy-based paint in a fetching shade of gray. So we've got some shopping to do today to support this effort.

As it's President's Day here in the USA, I'm going to try hard not to think about the shambles of our political system and our priorities. Really. And no pink elephants either. I ain't gonna think about them either. No way! Okay, you have a great day, where ever you are.

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February 17, 2004

0701 - Good morning. We did our shopping trip to get the materials I need for the downstairs woodshop. I also made significant progress yesterday.

I parted out the carpet and padding, rolled it up and moved it upstairs to the garage for later transport to the dump. Then I used a prybar to pop all the tack stripping up from the edges of the rooms, swept up and examined the floor. There's a fair amount of crud down there, from previous painting, spackle spatters and so on. It'd be a real pain to clean up well enough to paint or put down linoleum, so I think I won't. I'll use the floor as is. So I put up the battens, then attached the pegboard to the wall. Now I can dismantle and move the bench and tablesaw downstairs. Once those are in, I'll build the wall. Plenty of fun yet to come.

Have you ever been frustrated by Linux? Then relieve your tension and hit the penguin as far as you can (warning: Flash). Hours of fun when the brain is on idle. And it's not as much work as Frozen Bubble, an arcade-style shoot-the-bricks sort of thing that gets as deep in your head as the badger thing (warning: more Flash).

A runnable from the CD MS Windows system? That's what Bart's Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD promises. At one of our client sites, we have a number of ... issues that this might be the solution for, if we can make it work. More when I know more, but it looks bloody interesting. If it helps rescue frighteningly broken Windows systems in as easy a manner as I can use Knoppix for Linux boxen, then this is going to rock.

Gotta roll. Have a great day!

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February 18, 2004

0615 - Good morning. I'm up early this morning to keep my appointment with the dentist. Yeah, I know, but I mistreated my teeth for a number of years, and as a result, some of them went out on strike and never came back. I've not gotten to the point of getting posts set for replacements yet - that's a mite expensive and we really wanted to get the house in order first. Probably next year I'll look into getting that done. But in the meantime I'm keeping up the maintenance, prevention really is best.

I didn't do much with that Windows Live CD thing yesterday - we talked about it and Mike has mucked with it before, to not much avail. I'll do some independent experiments one of these days, because I think it might be a hell of a tool in my kit, under some circumstances.

On the Python side of things, the only thing that annoys me right now is slices. I would need to go back and check on the syntax for a couple of other languages first, but this is a conceptual problem for me. Slices are specified thusly: L[n,m] where L is the list or string, n is the lower bound (inclusive) and m is the upper bound (exclusive). Now I really do understand WHY it is the way it is. After all, at n=0, the pointer is at the beginning of the list, with every object ahead of it. So the numbers really reflect the cut points between objects. However, I'm used to thinking of such things in terms of containers. I don't really care whether the first bucket is referenced by 0 or 1, but I do like the semblance of consistency. For me that would be a slice that was inclusive at both lower and upper bounds. Once I wrap my intuition around it properly it'll be fine for me, I'm sure.

Quote of the Day (found here):

God invented SCO to give people a company to hate more than Microsoft

Time to drive. That shouldn't be too much of a problem, since the storm missed us here, landing south and east instead. Have a great day.

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February 19, 2004

2101 - Good evening. Long day, no post. Catch you tomorrow.

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February 20, 2004

0724 - Good morning. By gum, and it is morning already. Sigh. At least it's Friday. I had a long bloody day yesterday. I beat everyone else into the client site yesterday, as I left the house at around 0615 to get a head start on the day. By the time all was said and done (and yes, the systems that needed to be communicating by today were, finally), it was about 1930 last night. The facility has a number of video walls, connected into related but semi-untrusted networks. In order to share sources among the video walls, we used the gigabit wire-speed routing and ACL (host and port) capabilities of a Cisco 3550 Catalyst Switch. The funny thing was that there at the end, some stuff just didn't work right until we changed a gateway setting that we shouldn't have had to muck with. But it was the only thing *I* could think of that might have been affecting communications to that one last system. It worked! Huzzah! We also got the job done by calling in a a CCNE who does occasional gigs for NERDS, and he was a joy to work with - taught me a lot!

I got home at around 2020... Wow, were the dogs happy to see me! Marcia was out at an evening business meeting, but had stopped by to put the dogs out at around 1630. So theoretically all was well, there. But they were pretty frantic, and hungry, also. I fed them, then fed myself, and that was about all she wrote for my evening. It wasn't until this morning that I spotted the gifts one of the girls left on the carpet in Marcia's Sewing Room. So that took a bit of cleanup first thing.All is well, though. I'm starting to soak up the cup of coffee, then I'll have a bite to eat, take a shower and wander in to work just a little late. Not too bad after a 12 hours billable day, yesterday.

Regarding the XFree86 licensing fiasco, I've been doing a bunch of reading on that in the last half hour, and I think I understand a little bit, now. You may be aware that RMS is often found strongly urging people to call Linux, "GNU/Linux" instead. Well, the change to the XFree86 license appears to be a requirement that would be equivalent to putting a "You must put 'GNU/' in front of every product that includes GNU tools, and this must be both in the running software *and* on the printed documentation" clause inside a new version of the GPL. Ick. It seems that the current pack of XFree developers seem to think that they're irreplaceable, and that their code can never be forked. Heh. The initial fallout? Most major distributions have dropped the idea of including the new 4.4 version (including the new license) in their product, going forward. Oh, well...

Okay, I need to get rolling. Happy Friday and have a great day!

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February 21, 2004

0859 - Good morning. I slept straight through until just a few minutes ago. That feels good, although more than 8 hours of sleep also seems to leave me somewhat foggy all day. I guess I can live with foggy.

Today is a cleaning day. We've got guests coming for supper tonight, and that's always a good excuse to clean more deeply than usual. I actually started last night, with my office. That wasn't nearly as challenging as a Thompson office clean up. But then, I don't work at home, as Bob does. There's lots to do all over the house, though. so I'd best go have my coffee, and get started. Have a great day!

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February 22, 2004

0807 - Good morning. We had Mike and Patty over to supper last night. Chicken and pasta, salad, bread and cake for dessert. Lots of good conversation, including, of course, much about doglets. We did get the house sparkling clean, too. Of course, now I need muscle relaxants to recover from that.

Today is up in the air, yet. There's the shopping, of course. And I may do some work in the basement, and possibly some initial yardwork prepping for the garden... If there's anything interesting to report, I'll be back 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.

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