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GRAFFITI -- April 02, 2007 thru April 08, 2007

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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.

Ron Paul in 2008

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Read LinuxGazette, get a clue.

MONDAY    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
April 2, 2007

2046 - Good evening. We managed to get through about two thirds of the long audio tour of the Gettysburg battlefields today. We'll do the rest tomorrow. Lots and lots of pictures. We picked up some knick-knacks last night, and ate very well indeed at a local restaurant. Back home tomorrow night. Happy Monday!

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Mon    TUESDAY    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
April 3, 2007

1630 - Good afternoon. Back home safe and sound, beating the mixed traffic from afternoon commute and Nationals evening game. We had a really good time, and simply couldn't have had better clear, sunny weather for touring the battlefields in and around Gettysburg.

Tonight we're going out for Mexican, Linda Rose will join us. Hopefully later I'll have a column from Jerry to format, and I can prepare for the coming workday. Also tomorrow we've got FiOS taking over the balance of our phone lines as well as booting Comcast entirely out of the house. Yup, FiOS TV, too. We have to dance around the start time, so ... More planning.

Hasta!

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Mon    Tues    WEDNESDAY    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
April 4, 2007

1826 - Good evening. Last night, bills. Tonight, backups and our guests. Life stays busy. Later...

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Mon    Tues    Wed    THURSDAY    Fri    Sat    Sun   
April 5, 2007

No Post....

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    FRIDAY    Sat    Sun   
April 6, 2007

1052 - Good morning. Boy, howdy. I sure am havin' me boatloads of fun. I've ordered a batch of batteries to refurb some old APC units here at the office. But the old batteries heated a bit, apparently, and swelled just a bit. That wouldn't be so bad if there was any clearance to speak of between the batteries and their rivetted sheetmetal housing. I finally used the repeated-drop extraction method — Yeah, gravity still works. So, that plus data extraction and backup is consuming my morning.

A week or so ago, it was low-80's out and we'd turned on the aircon. Yesterday, driving to the office, I found snow hitting the road on the beltway. It was far too warm to stick - high 30's. But tomorrow or tonight we're due for snowshowers. Lovely. Weird.

Happy Friday!

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    SATURDAY    Sun   
April 7, 2007

Snow in Maryland ... in AprilLucy: befuddled and cold without her winter coat0914 - Good morning. Well. The upside is that it's clearly not a day to spend gardening. I know it needs doing, but not just yet, thank you! The downside is ... SNOW in April! Lucy certainly doesn't like it much, given that we put away her winter coat two days ago (that is, puppy cut at the doggy day spa). Molly is unconcerned, as usual.

I have a couple of projects in mind... Perhaps I'll finally refettle the system layout here. I've migrated nearly all of my ops to Harmony, the MacBook Pro. So I am able to finally prune out the remnant home directory on Vimes (the AMD64 X2 4400+ box) and preserve what needs preserving before rebuilding that with an AMD64 distro, just for fun. What I *SHOULD* do is get that setup, and migrate all the data storage to Vimes, too, making it the home server, and shutting down Vroomfondel. Hmmmmm. I can get it done in a day, I just have to get moving.

It's the weekend!

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    SUNDAY  
April 8, 2007

1623 - Good afternoon. First, my apologies to those readers who look for my regular Sunday listing of the members of our Armed Services who made the ultimate sacrifice on our behalf. When I go to the DoD site I use as a primary resource, I get this:

The page cannot be displayed
There is a problem with the page you are looking for, and it cannot be displayed.
. . .
HTTP Error 500 - Internal server error.
Internet Information Services (IIS)

Gee. Thanks, Microsoft.

I'll pick up the ball next week. Know that our men and women in harm's way are never far from my thoughts.


On the much-progress-made front, I've gotten several hanging chad ... err, chores done. I've redone the running rails on Marcia's quilting frame. The first pass was executed with shelving mount channels - they weren't long enough and I used butt joints to the get the length needed. However, alignment was a problem. So I picked up some longer aluminum U channel, angles, and bar. Measured, cut, drilled, countersunk and seated. Now the whole thing runs more smoothly, and the 1/8 x 1" bar that I used to reinforce the sides of the sliding tray mean that there's much less sag when the heavy sewing machine is on the frame.

A while back, I picked up a 400G drive to make more space for the music on the home server. Yesterday I finally got that installed onto Vroomfondel, and moved stuff around from partition to partition. Much saner layout, now. Then I backed up the last of the stuff off of Vimes, and this morning got the AMD64 build of Kubuntu 7.04 Beta installed. I need to understand what 64bit is supposed to be better at ... For purely research purposes, I ripped a commercial DVD from disc to drive. With Kubuntu 32bit, the program ran in 8 minutes and 42 seconds. Once I had the AMD64 version running, the same program ran in 8 minutes and 42 seconds. Okay. More (read: some .... any) research needed.

Okay. Time to figure out what's going to be for dinner. Oh, yeah. Ham. Guess I'm running late, already.

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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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