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GRAFFITI -- November 28, 2005 thru December 04, 2005 >> Link to the Current Week << Last Week << Mon   Tues   Wed   Thu   Fri   Sat   Sun >> Next Week Search this site : Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable.     About 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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November 28, 2005

0623 - Good morning. Early start today - I'm sitting in the dentist's chair this morning for 90 minutes to get the molds taken for the two upper crowns. That's the penultimate step for all the implant work I've been having done all year. The crowns themselves will be installed in about 3 week's time. Following that first early sitting this morning, I'm headed over to the dental surgeon to let him look at the upper implant that he exposed two weeks ago using a laser. He'll want post-surgical reporting from me about how that healed, as he used me as a guinea pig for trying out the laser in his practice.

First on my list today is replacing aging hardware with a much newer (though not "new") box that'll hopefully be more reliable for us as a private DMZ host. The old machine started pitched disk errors, and locked up while I was gone on holiday. Time to go, as Pink said. And it's time for me to go, too, so that I'm not late. Ciao!

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November 29, 2005

1932 - Good evening. I had hoped to get into work early, and push up a post before getting into the day. However, the traffic gods conspired against me. I was out of the house at 0630, and didn't walk in the door at work until a couple of minutes before 0800.

Thereafter my day was eaten with applying patches, updates, AV and assorted configuration to a set of laptops for placement with assorted executives over the next couple of days. Then I emplaced a replacement server and finished un-mucking the configurations I'd munged to build the box inside our network ... to make it work in it's actual DMZ home. That plus a meeting finished the day off nicely.

The drive home was nicely short by comparison with the morning, and since then I've fed the mutts and setup DNS secondaries for Linuxgazette.net. Now I can have some supper and perhaps do a bit more work on some of the ETS pages. I did some the other night, and more data's landed in my inbox to fill out the new distribution channel page. I guess I'm staying busy... See you tomorrow!

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November 30, 2005

No Post...

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December 1, 2005

1848 - Good evening. My, I have been remiss. I have a one-word explanation: Exchange. That's all I'm going to say about that topic because I'm sick to death of it. In other news, the commute is starting to lighten up as people start heading into the holiday-season vacation cycles. But all it takes is one accident to turn 50 minutes into nearly two hours, one way.

"Patent pending." Ooooh, was I ever annoyed to hear those two words following the latest promotional radio commercial from Bank of America. Those bastards have a deal going where they sweep the "small change" from any purchase into a savings account (think automated piggy bank), and they'll even do some matching funds thing, too. But those two words hanging off the end mean that they're treating this marketing promotion as an invention. Talk about a turn-off. If for no other reason than that, I'll avoid doing business with BofA, just to ensure that I do my part to discourage this sort of frivolous crap process patent.

Anyway, thanks for dropping by, I'll do better. Catch you tomorrow!

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December 2, 2005

2141 - Good evening. One recent change came about shortly before we went down to Thompson's for the Thanksgiving holiday ... I shaved. I started this beard just before I met Marcia, so she'd never seen me without. Well, in trimming the beard one day, I noted that I'd gone considerably asymmetrical, and rather than fixing it up by going with an Amish look, I'd just shave the bugger off entirely. Time for a change. So there I am, sporting a 9 o'clock shadow from this very evening. It's not permanent, as one day - next week or next year - I'll get tired of shaving, and the beard will return. In the meantime, boy howdy am I glad this week's at an end. There are more issues to deal with migrating a few more folks into the Exchange fold, then I have to come up to speed on how they need to do just what they're sure they wanted to accomplish when they started down this path. I know it isn't anything I told them, because I distinctly remember wanting it in writing that I didn't know and couldn't properly support an Exchange environment. But shit changes and life happens, so here I am. I still might go postal on that server, though.

Pictures from around here, and from Thanksgiving week are coming here tomorrow. Ciao!

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December 3, 2005

1641 - Good afternoon. Finally a moment of peace and relative quiet. Marcia headed out early for a hair appointment. I slept in a bit, then after some breakfast cleaned some spotting on the rug in the Library, where we're setting up the Tree. Then, after some other chores and a quick run out to the store to get a baking tin for the 20# turkey we're going to carve tonight, I finally got to finish working in my office.

It needs some work, but instead of doing that last night (when I took that picture at right), I hauled all the Christmas decorations and tree bits down from the garage attic. Then I set up and arranged the tree. I put out some of the decorations before I ran out of steam. Pictures from there after we're done... Meantime, the good dogs managed to actually stay out of my way. When they don't, doing decoration is a big hassle. But Lucy just slept under Marcia's desk most of the time, waking up only for that picture. Molly came up and down a couple of times, but quickly bailed back upstairs.

I started up in my office this afternoon, pulling out some equipment, arranging other bits to make more of the desk available, etc. The tower system visible on the side desk went down to NC with us over the Thanksgiving holiday, for Bob and I to do some experimenting on, as he was running a Sempron 2800 system, and this one is a Sempron 3100+, but with a bit less RAM, I think.

So I put that system back in place, and moved the 19" NEC tube over to that desk, making way for my early present from Marcia, a Samsung 204T flatscreen. Schweet! It's 20.1" diagonal of 1600x1200 resolution goodness, with a 16ms response time. Not as fast as the 4-8ms 19" models, but those only do 1280x1024, and I'm addicted to screen real estate. Without a simple way to do dual-head at this time, this seems like a nice compromise.

Barbara Thompson posted some pictures of the mutts from our holiday trip down to NC, now here are a couple more, but with people in them...

Now I think I'll find something non-challenging to do for a bit. Have a nice evening.

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December 4, 2005

2045 - Good evening. It's been a bit of a dull day, to be honest. I've been jousting with some mild headcold or another for the last couple of days. Not enough to stop me, but enough to slow me and mess with my attention and focus. So we got the important things done today: Shopping. Yeah, that's it. I've also been playing Half-Life 2 under Cedega which generally works quite well. It's about as stable and fast on this setup as is was on Windows ... that is, alternately fascinating and wonderful, then clunky and crash-prone. But that's a common complaint about this game. An alternative is Quake 4 (a native Linux client), which I can't seem to get very far in, even in "Private" (formerly "Easy", now in the hierarchy of "Private/Corporal/Captain/General" or something like that. I think they left out the rank of Seargent, as it's known where things actually get done in any army, and supplying a default "God" mode just wouldn't do. Grin.). Doom 3 is another native Linux client game, and I've been having fun in that one, but there's so much more stuff there that's reaction-time specific. If I don't get the first shot in with some of those demon-spawn, I'm toast.

Over on the left side, I've been installing and re-building OpenBSD 3.8 from CVS-updated sources on the big Sony Vaio laptop. No goals there yet, but a solid, updated install is always a good thing to have around.

The husband of a friend has had his Guard unit called up, and is going to refresher training followed by a 12 month deployment in Iraq. They got married just a few months back. So his unit goes to shore up the troops already in country, fighting (and sometimes dying) on our behalf...

• Staff Sgt. Aram J. Bass, 25, of Niagara Falls, N.Y. died in Baghdad, Iraq on Nov. 23, when his unit came under direct fire during combat operations.
• Sgt. William B. Meeuwsen, 24, of Kingwood, Texas, died in Baghdad, Iraq on Nov. 23, when his unit came under direct fire during combat operations.
• Sgt. 1st Class Eric P. Pearrow, 40, of Peoria, Ill., died in Baghdad, Iraq, on Nov. 24, when his M1A2 Abrams tank accidentally rolled over into a canal.
• Master Sgt. Brett E. Angus, 40, of St. Paul, Minn., died Nov. 26 from an improvised explosive device while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in the vicinity of Camp Taqaddum, Iraq.
• Pfc. Ryan D. Christensen, 22, of Spring Lake Heights, N.J., died at the Medical University of Charleston in Charleston, S.C., on Nov. 24, of a non-combat related illness identified in Balad, Iraq, on Nov. 10.
• Cpl. Joshua D. Snyder, 20, of Hampstead, Md., died Nov. 30 of wounds sustained from small-arms fire while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Fallujah, Iraq.
• Sgt. Donald J. Hasse, 28, of Wichita Falls, Texas, died in Taji, Iraq on Nov. 29, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV during combat operations.
• Sgt. Jerry W. Mills Jr., 23, of Arkansas City, Kan. died in Taji, Iraq on Nov. 29, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV during combat operations.
• Staff Sgt. William D. Richardson, 30, of Houston, Texas, died Nov. 30 of wounds sustained from a non-hostile vehicle accident near Al Taqaddum, Iraq.
• Sgt. 1st Class Brent A. Adams, 40, of West View, Pa., died in Ramadi, Iraq on Dec. 1, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his military five-ton truck during combat operations.
• Staff Sgt. Daniel J. Clay, 27, of Pensacola, Fla. died Dec. 1 from an improvised explosive device while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Fallujah, Iraq.
• Lance Cpl. John M. Holmason, 20, of Suprise, Ariz. died Dec. 1 from an improvised explosive device while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Fallujah, Iraq.
• Lance Cpl. David A. Huhn, 24, of Portland, Mich. died Dec. 1 from an improvised explosive device while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Fallujah, Iraq.
• Lance Cpl. Adam W. Kaiser, 19, of Naperville, Ill. died Dec. 1 from an improvised explosive device while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Fallujah, Iraq.
• Lance Cpl. Robert A. Martinez, 20, of Splendora, Texas died Dec. 1 from an improvised explosive device while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Fallujah, Iraq.
• Cpl. Anthony T. McElveen, 20, of Little Falls, Minn. died Dec. 1 from an improvised explosive device while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Fallujah, Iraq.
• Lance Cpl. Scott T. Modeen, 24, of Hennepin, Minn. died Dec. 1 from an improvised explosive device while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Fallujah, Iraq.
• Lance Cpl. Andrew G. Patten, 19, of Byron, Ill. died Dec. 1 from an improvised explosive device while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Fallujah, Iraq.
• Sgt. Andy A. Stevens, 29, of Tomah, Wis. died Dec. 1 from an improvised explosive device while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Fallujah, Iraq.
• Lance Cpl. Craig N. Watson, 21, of Union City, Mich. died Dec. 1 from an improvised explosive device while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Fallujah, Iraq.

Now to prep for the week ahead. Keep our service men and women in your thoughts as we head into the holidays, and make an effort to reach out to the soldiers, or to the families of those deployed, that their holidays be a bit merrier than they might otherwise be.

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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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