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GRAFFITI -- May 29, 2006 thru June 04, 2006 >> 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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May 29, 2006

1009 - Good morning. Another lazy day. Marcia's gone shopping!!! Me, I'm relaxing. I may muck around a bit with Xandros Server shortly. Or not... Happy Memorial Day. Remember the veterans who fought and died to maintain our freedom. Your responsibility is to vote this November, vote the bastards out who would take that freedom away from us.

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May 30, 2006

1543 - Happy Anniversary, Marcia! Eight years and still talking to each other. It's a decent start...

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May 31, 2006

1113 - Good morning. We sent Bob, Barbara, Duncan, and Malcolm on their way home a couple of hours ago. Then I took the picture at left, a final vision of the living room cave, in preparation for the painting project... Yes, we had a good time celebrating our Memorial Day weekend and anniversary with Bob and Barbara. The dogs were all well behaved. For once, on Memorial Day, we didn't have our barbeque rained out. We had a few more guests than expected, but everything worked out just great! Oh, and we've been having strawberries from the patch, already (see our breakfast berries, at right).

So after noshing on berries, I migrated all the stuff off the tables, then the tables out of the room. The art came down off of the walls, gently placed in the library. I vacuumed the rug, then rolled it up and carried it out. I centered all the remaining furniture in the room, and draped some of it. I pulled all the nails and hangers and screws from the walls. I've caulk-filled all the pinholes I could find this round. And I've used the brad nailer to secure a few loose sections of floor moulding. In a moment, I'll cruise back downstairs and touch up the areas I'm going to spackle with coarse sandpaper, first. Then I'll patch. The beat goes on...

Have a great day!

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June 1, 2006

0829 - Good morning. I made a fair amount of progress yesterday. By mid-afternoon, all the spackling, drying, sanding, cleaning, and taping was done. I was ready to prime. That was on my schedule for today - two coats of primer. Instead I put up the first coat of primer right then and there. I finished up at about 7 PM. Now I can have a slower, easier day today and tomorrow. We picked out the shade that Marcia wants: Toasted Oats. That's a color name from the American Tradition line. In a few minutes I'll head down to Lowes and have them tint me a gallon of primer for the second coat, and a gallon of paint for the top coat.

Have a lovely day, wish me luck.

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June 2, 2006

0837 - Good morning. Zoinks! It's the second of June already? Well, I'm making progress. Yesterday I picked up the tinted primer, and the paint. I put down one coat of the former. While it may have been good enough to underlay the topcoat, I could still see vestiges of the dark cave in spots. Since I had plenty of tinted primer left, I recoated. After it dried a bit, you can see the even, buttery look of the walls in the picture at left. The tint method for primer is to use the same colors as for the top coat, but portioned for a quart instead, so the tint is lighter (making it easier to see where I've painted when top coating).

*ubuntu released version 6.06 yesterday, in its various incarnations. I pulled down a copy of Kubuntu and installed it on the Presario 2100 that Marcia used to use. Runs fine ... just hot. Hot? 70°C! Seriously. I need to blow out the fans and channels, see if that's the problem. If not, then there's something deeply wrong with that laptop.

Okay, time to put the final color on the walls. Have a great day!

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June 3, 2006

0945 - Good morning...

The living room is nearly as done as it's going to be. We still have to dress the walls, but the tape is off, the furniture in and ... it's yellow. It's much yellower than the paint chip implied. At that, when you hold the paint chip up to the wall, it's not all that much different. I'm not averse to the new look, but I'm hopeful that the art on the walls will help tone things down a bit. Brighter room, yes. Stabbing me in the eyes repeatedly, no.

So, a bit of clean up and finishing touches handles that. I have bills to go through and pay. We'll see if there's anything exciting beyond that, later. Happy Saturday!

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June 4, 2006

1054 - Good morning. I received a nice email this morning:

And so, another week gone by, more of our soldiers, marines, sailors, and aviators valiantly gave their lives in service to the Nation. I salute you!

• Cpl. J. Adan Garcia, 20, of Irving, Texas, died on May 27 in the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., of injuries sustained May 22 in Baghdad, Iraq, when his convoy encountered small arms fire received while returning from an explosive ordnance mission.
• Cpl. Jeremy M. Loveless, 25, of Estacada, Ore., died in Mosul, Iraq on May 29, when his Stryker came under enemy small arms fire during combat operations.
• Cpl. Richard A. Bennett, 25, of Girard, Kan., died May 30, following a non-hostile helicopter accident near Al Taqaddum, Iraq, on May 27.
• Capt. Nathanael J. Doring, 31, of Apple Valley, Minn., died May 30, following a non-hostile helicopter accident near Al Taqaddum, Iraq, on May 27.
• Capt. James A. Funkhouser, 35, of Katy, Texas, died in Baghdad, Iraq, on May 29, of injuries sustained when a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV during reconnaissance patrol operations.
• Cpl. Bobby R. West, 23, of Beebe, Ark., died in Baghdad, Iraq, on May 30, of injuries sustained when an improvised explosive device detonated during dismounted patrol operations.
• Cpl. Alexander J. Kolasa, 22, of White Lake, Mich., died in Baghdad, Iraq, on May 31, of non-combat related causes.
• Sgt. Benjamin E. Mejia, 25, of Salem, Mass., died in Marez, Iraq, on May 31, of non-combat related causes.
• Spc. Brock L. Bucklin, 28, of Grand Rapids, Mich., died May 31, in Balad, Iraq, of a non-combat related cause.

I pulled up stakes on Debian Sid yesterday. It wasn't long ago that I remember myself saying that the Debian Testing branch was actually less stable than the Unstable branch, because of the way that packages stage in and out of Unstable and into testing. While that generally holds true, big changes can still bork stuff deeply. That happened yesterday when the update to the xserver-xorg package broke compatibility with the nvidia-* packages that I used. While I probably could have sussed out the fixes, it was time for a change.

Now I'm running Kubuntu,the new Dapper Drake (6.06) release. Best of all, I'm on an AMD64 tree, and making much better use of the computational resources at my command. I also followed up on RBT's lead on Automatix. A couple of links later, I had the .deb package for AutomatixPure64. After installing Kubuntu from the Alternate install disk (to take advantage of my software RAID setup), I ran Automatix, and got all the rest of the stuff that I generally want for the occasional entertainment bits that I use the computer for. Admittedly, that's rare, as I'm usually hard at work on something.

The Kubuntu advantage, for me, is going to be that I can put the OS back into the background where it belongs. Updates that come will work, tested already. Then I can work on the stuff that I want to work on, without the OS breaking underneath me. Oh, yeah. I still have to get VMware running (so that I can safely play in the unstable arena when the mood strikes). Soon, soon.

Time to get to the shopping. Have a great day!

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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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