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GRAFFITI -- February 27, 2006 thru March 05, 2006>> Link to the Current Week <<Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week 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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February 27, 2006
0617 - Good morning. Two more days and a sixth of the year's gone by. How time flies. So, the weekend was full of assorted web/prose/datasheet stuff for ETS, some shopping, a bit of Solaris 10 x86 running on VMware Workstation 5.5 ... ah, yeah, rinsing and filling water bottles against untoward need. So it was a full weekend, unremarkable though.
New rawhide treats for the dogs came by parcel post the other day. They are 5mm X 6" compressed granulated rawhide, "peanut butter" flavoured. We'd been generally buying that sort of thing from Petsmart (Petco?) for about $9 per 100 count when they were in stock, or much worse, about $5.50 for a 40 count when that's all there was on the shelf. Yeah, there are cheaper treats, and more expensive, but these are the once-a-day in the evening treat, different from the cardboard-ish cookies. I got fed up with it last time we had to pay through the nose for a 40-pak, and went looking online. After a bit of "window" shopping, I found my way to Rawhide Direct. Now, they're advertising Greenies on their front page, and I can't recommend those at all - my boss almost lost his family dog to a intestinal blockage from undigested Greenie. There are plenty of similar stories online, so read and decide for yourselves on that topic. In the list of products, I found munchy sticks identical to the ones we like for our dogs, plain as well as basted in a variety of flavours, in significant quantities. Yeah, the minimum order from that site is $20, so I bought a 1000 of these treats. At two per day, that should last us well over a year, even counting guest dogs and special dispensations. Please note that these folks (at Rawhide Direct) can't do product size math (although their pricing and service are excellent!) -- the description for our product reads: "Sticks 5"x9" 10 mm Peanut Butter Basted", where it should be 5" x 9-10mm ... And I'm not really sure what the 9-10mm refers to. I know what a centimeter looks like, and these sticks really are about 5-6mm in diameter. But that's okay, they're popular with the dogs, and about 1/3 the price of retail store purchase, after factoring in shipping.
The Olympics came and went: I didn't see any of it. The athletes all seemed to be about "me, me, me", and I got results from the major events while I sat in traffic each evening on the drive home. I didn't feel like watching much after that (even though I already have to have a class-full of fourth graders to make up for the miniscule amount of television I watch (on the order of perhaps two hours a week!)).
I'm going to build a new T1 terminator machine using a little 1U box, Debian GNU/Linux, and a Sangoma A101 T1/E1 EFT card. That, along with Sangoma's WANPIPE software makes for a pretty economical alternative to a Cisco Router and a T1 WIC. As last week wound down, I'd finished building a fresh kernel for the box, in order to have a clean kernel tree for the Sangoma modules and tools to build against. I should be able to finish that project up today. Not if I don't get out of here, however, even in this 15 degree cold... Have a great day!
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February 28, 2006
0744 - Good morning. The work went well, yesterday. Evals prepared for shipment, and the T1 terminator machine rebuilt under OpenBSD 3.8 and working like a champ. The evening was the usual Monday routine of bills, shredding, refreshing offsite backups, and trash/recycling prep for this morning. All done, all boring, all the time. Oh, well.
I thought I could trust NEC drives because they weren't Sony. Ooops. Well, they're gonna be now. According to an article posted on El Reg yesterday, Sony and NEC are merging their Optical Drive divisions, with Sony in the lead position. Lovely ... NOT! The question is, what's going to be built into that firmware? What's in the software drivers that come with the Optical drives? More rootkits, only better concealed this time? Gosh, I hope not.
Time for me to get to work. Have a great day!
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March 1, 2006
0630 - Good morning. I forgot to mention, I went shopping at Magnatune the other day, and picked up some Serenissima, Vivaldi at Arcadia was the album, a total of 21 tracks. Excellent baroque strings, some nice operatic bits. And I do so like how Magnatune conducts itself. Yeah, there's been a bit of a flap over their recent update to the FREE online MP3 tracks, adding a Magnatune blurb to each one. Let's be clear here, folks. Whining about the free stuff that a web business gives you to entice you to buy the real thing ... that's just mean-spirited. I use the MP3 tracks to decide whether to purchase a specific album or not. That's what they're there for. And that works for me. For instance, Magnatune has some nice groups that are primarily cello ... and that just doesn't appeal to me. I lean towards piano, solo violin, string quartets, chamber music and symphony orchestras. I'm often found listening to Bach, Mozart, Couperin, Vivaldi, Beethoven. I don't much care for lute except in ensemble. Same goes for recorder. Then I'll turn around and listen to Back In Black, or Animals, or ... on and on it goes.
Magnatune... Highly Recommended! You pick the album price, generally between 5 bucks and 18. They encourage generosity, since the artist gets fully half of the purchase price. For that you can get any format you want, from fast-to-download MP3, to lossless FLAC, to OGG, to full-data WAV files. I always get the latter, as I can down-convert to today's format today, and redo again another day, as long as I have the "original media" which WAV is. Visit Magnatune. Shop around. Buy something if you want. They really aren't evil, which is saying something for a "record label". And no, they don't pay me a thin dime for speaking well of them. I am just a happy customer: I've purchased four or five albums from them, and have that many more on my personal get-it-soon list. That's more music than I've bought on CD in the last 5 years (not counting gift cards).
I try to always have some music on. That doesn't happen so much during the working day, though. I could - headphones are allowed (though just music through speakers isn't). But I end up feeling disconnected from all the folks I'm supporting, when I can't hear what's going on around me. So I don't. Last night, though, I was listening to Christian Altenburger playing Mozart, when I got a hankering for Beethoven's Pastoral. So that carried me through the balance of the evening.
Of course there's a new Mac Mini announced yesterday. Mine's now old, slow and pathetic, and it's only a couple of months out of the Cupertino womb. That's okay, I really tried to live in the Mac interface for a short while and couldn't make it. It's a fine little low-power secondary system here, something to screw around with. But Gentoo lets me get my Linux on, on this AMD64 platform. I've still got Xandros on a couple of boxen (including my main workstation at the office), and Debian Stable on several servers. I also continue to grow more comfortable in OpenBSD. That's a nice thing. Oh, yeah. Yesterday's efforts at finalizing that T1 router with OpenBSD came out well - I'll be testing the box early one morning in the next few days, just to make sure that it can stand up and do its job, should the primary interface fall over sideways or let out the magic blue smoke.
Today's going to be an early-out, since we're meeting with our tax adviser this afternoon. So I'd best be on my way. Have a great day!
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March 2, 2006
0845 - Good morning. I got a good start on the day, but traffic conspired against me, for a 1.5 hour one-way commute. Just lovely! Oh, and I'm a bit out of sorts from all the bending and stretching I did late yesterday afternoon during my first post-winter backyard dog-gift cleanup. You'll pardon my calling it a crapload of work. Grin. Anyway, the tax meeting went fine, we'll see how the numbers flow in another week or two. Now back to work with me. Ciao!
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March 3, 2006
1842 - Good evening. A busy, productive, positive day, methinks. More I'll not say. But this is fun: http://www.cowabduction.com/. Tired. See you tomorrow.
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March 4, 2006
1740 - Good afternoon. A computationally light day, I spent the morning eating a leisurely breakfast and watching cooking shows. Thereafter, I went on a shopping run, ostensibly to pick up some new hardware for a piece of furniture, and to look for some redwood to do fence repairs. That part of the trip didn't work out very well, but I did stop by BestBuy and pick up a CyberHome DVR 1600. It was under 90 bucks, for a recorder that also plays lots of formats full of things. This will let us do some on-air recording that we've been avoiding because the old VHS was ... well, old. This unit records to DVD+R/RW, and seems pretty nice.
I set it up to be inline between the cable box and the wall, so that we can record one thing while watching another. This allowed me to rationalize our cabling. I took the old VCR out of play, and the old DVD player. The setup is configured enough differently that I'm likely to type up a cheat-sheet to make life easy for Marcia and guests (and me, if I find myself forgetful).
On the furniture front, I worked on re-building the display cabinet that Linda Rose bequeathed to us when she moved. It's a nice, 5' tall by 3' wide, single pane glass front piece, pine construction, dark stained. However, the bottom construction was coming unconstructed. So with judicious use of carpenter's glue, finish nails, and about 6 clamps, I've got the thing back into reasonable shape, I think. There's enough stress that I'm going to let it cure for a couple of days before unclamping. Then I'll address a loose bit near the top, do some finish touch-ups, and we can find a home for it someplace.
The next furniture project is going to be a TV stand with closed storage and stereo gear cabinet underneath. It's taken shape in my head, I just need to do some sketches and materials lists. Following that, Linda Rose needs a fabric cutting table. Then ... then it's dining room time.
Okay. I've a couple more projects in mind before the day winds completely down. I'd best be about them. Have a great evening.
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March 5, 2006
1416 - Good afternoon. A moderately lazy day in progress. I'm reading David Weber's Bolo!, the shopping is done, and I really ought to get downstairs and do a bit more maintenance on that display cabinet. I think I will. But first, a moment of quiet to honor the fallen in service:
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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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