|
|
HomeGraffitiAboutSitemapVisualDevWork
Email BrianGPG Key |
GRAFFITI -- December 24, 2007 thru December 30, 2007>> 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. |
 
|
MONDAY
Tues
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
Sun
December 24, 2007
A Fence Less Fallen |
1030 - Good morning. One thing I forgot to mention yesterday. It was raining out, all day. But at some point I managed to look out the back, and observed that the fence along the back of the property seemed a bit further away. Since it was raining dogtoys and dogs, I simply went upstairs and over to Marcia's sewing room to get a better visual angle. Angle was the right word to use, as the fence was leaning out, about 10 degrees or so. Not so much for the whole row. This was probably caused by the strong winds following rain earlier last week. I don't see this stuff because I leave before light and get home after dark, this time of year. Anyway, I organized and roped in the two most at risk posts. In the next few days I'll organize gear and supplies to take down that whole back row, set fresh posts, and re-hang the fencing.
This morning, I walked the yard, cleaning up dog waste. As I was working out there yesterday (an unusual occurance between November and April), I noteds that it was more mines than minefield. That'd be unpleasant while carting materials and such out to work. Usually I let such stuff wash in through the winter months, and take up what's left in the early spring. But today I took out (2) three gallon buckets full. Yow!
Now to shower and get out for a little final shopping for myself. Happy Christmas Eve.
Mon
TUESDAY
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
Sun
December 25, 2007
1614 - Good afternoon. A quiet Christmas day progresses. We mostly got each other books, and a present to ourselves with holiday cash of an bonus payment on the principal of the higher interest rate home equity line. I'd have done more, but until we know how Marcia's employment situation shakes out, it's better to be cautious. We just finished watching Solaris (the Soderberg version) ... I don't know why the whole freaking movie felt like the three minutes of hallucination that Kubrick felt was all he needed in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Oh, well, we've had the movie on the shelf for neigh unto three years now. Far as I'm concerned, it can go into the donate-to-the-library stack, now.
I'm going to go start the bean soup to reheating, crack open a book, and do some reading.
Mon
Tues
WEDNESDAY
Thu
Fri
Sat
Sun
December 26, 2007
1912 - Good evening. This is the year that was, my usual rehashing of old news to fix in my mind what was going on when. It's useful for me, and hopefully not too boring for y'all.
It was a dark and stormy night. Whoops!
January started with a short night's sleep, after a party where I was the designated driver. That day, Marcia and Linda started working on a 1500 piece Teddy Bear jigsaw puzzle. It's still not done, at this writing. In January we mourned the passing of Gerald Ford. My employer was new, though I kept going to the same office, thanks to an acquisition. Other acquisitions included Harmony, the MacBook Pro (I'm going to go with "overrated" at the moment, but she works pretty well, really), and a World of WarCrack account. Sadly, I reported the 81 deaths announced by DoD during that month of posting.
February brought us the troop surge in Iraq. I discovered how to easily transfer Firefox profiles from Linux to OS X. I experimented with a bunch of text editors on Harmony (eventually settling on BBedit. Linda came to live with us for a while, occupying the downstairs suite. With all that going on, I still primed and painted the master suite in preparation for new carpet, in between battles with the pilot light on the main house furnace. We spent a long weekend (and too short a trip) visiting the Thompson's over President's Day weekend. Lucy spent most of her time watching squirrels and chipmunks out the back - you may remember that we call that "Lucy TV". 97 lives were sacrificed by our fine young men and women over the four weeks I reported in February.
March was busy. The carpet was installed on the stairs, in the master suite, and down the hall. I build Marcia an XY frame for her long-arm quilting machine (the machine was her birthday present, even though it arrived in January, her birthday was in February, and I didn't build the frame until March). I ran the taxes, and we were due refunds both Federal and State. Huzzah! In the middle of the month, I was in Israel, at New Hire training for my employer, Check Point. Given how I felt about how things were going from my perspective, I'd asked that they not spend that kind of money on me, not until things stabilized. But this was what they wanted, so my cow-orkers and I all trundled off to Tel Aviv for a week of Power Point presentations, team building exercises, and some wonderful food. I'll give them much credit - they were wonderful hosts. Israel is beautiful, and awesome. 90 casualties reported by DoD, and mourned by me on Sundays in this month.
April was a weird month. Although it was a light winter overall, we got snowed upon in the first week. Guess I didn't have to start up the garden early, eh? I did help a reader out with a SSH authentication problem using keychain. We got Marcia a new ride: a red Toyota Solara ragtop. We leaned towards VW and Audi, but they were too small for her taste. Our region mourned over the deaths at Virginia Tech. And I handed in my notice - changing jobs seemed like the right thing to do. In hindsight, things worked out okay, I guess. There were some reasonably sane policy changes that may have resulted in part from my ... extremely direct communication about the issues that I perceived. And most of the blokes I like are still there, so I guess that's a good thing. They're bloody bright, and deserved to be treated well. As the month wound down and the temperatures started winding up, I edged all of the front planting beds, and redressed all of them. The tulips came up well, too. And 112 casualties drew my sorrow over five Sundays in April.
There's the first third of the year. More to come in the days ahead.
Mon
Tues
Wed
THURSDAY
Fri
Sat
Sun
December 27, 2007
1940 - Good evening. Another day of decent progress on assorted tasks at work, so that's a good thing. While I'm thinking that I'm going to re-fettle magickthyse with the 64-bit version of Ubuntu, tonight isn't the night. Instead, I'll continue with my walk through of the year past, while I worry about the fate of Pakistan in the coming months. Seriously... our candidate was murdered: Let's burn some hospitals and schools! Um, what?
May started off with a bang, or at least the implosive clap as I left Check Point (nee NFR) in the afternoon of the third. So began a week of "free" time between gigs. So I got the gardens planted, the watering system setup, and loads of general maintenance. I caught lunch with my friend Amanda before she moved out of state. Marcia went to Malice Domestic and to the AQS Quilt Show in Paducah. In the middle of the month, I started my new gig. Half the commute, one-third of the commuting time, and a good bunch of folks. I reorganized my home office. As the month was winding down, I found another robin's nest in the front hanging baskets. There was both good and bad news as the month wound down: My friend Trang had her husband back home after an 18 month National Guard deployment. The bad news was the loss of Laura Ellen Hopper, a great force in mid-California radio. And the meat grinder in the Middle East chewed up another 110 of our young men and women.
 Berry extravaganza. |
June started well, with Pat and Nathan visiting from California, and bucket loads of strawberries coming out of the garden. We have assorted excitements, from late night police monitoring the kids wandering about very late in the common areas outside our fence line, to road repairs staged to badly that I called the county to report a launch ramp on the road across from our house. Faye and Karen came in for a short visit from Michigan. We all joined Linda and some of her family for a lovely evening of dinner and entertainment at a piano bar called the Flaming Pit. Yeah, don't look at me like that. I got started on some front porch refurbishments, and rearranged my computing environment again, cutting my Linux boxes down to one. Sigh. 115 deaths of US Forces put at the door of the Administration's policies in the Middle East.
 Hungry little birdlings |
July got rolling, hot and dry. Who knew that we were in for our driest summer since we moved here? The watering system did it's job, though, and we started eating tomatoes from the garden. The world lost a great voice and heart when Beverly Sills died. I finished up the front porch project, taking out all the railings and repairing all the posts. Marcia was accidentally run off the road by troopers, costing us a wheel and tire. And it became time to get the roof done, a year earlier than I'd hoped. And a small fire decimated the shredded ceder around our mailbox. I thought it might have been a pitched cigarette, and hoped it wasn't purposeful. I fixed that up, the next weekend. The nest in front became full of raucus little hungry birdlings. We enjoyed the last installment of the Potter books. Over the five Sundays in July, I noted another 115 troops lost to war.
In August I was popular at work, because I was bringing bag after bag of garden-fresh produce in a couple of times a week. We celebrated 5 years of living in Maryland, and battled with Comcast over their crew cutting our FiOS line, "accidentally". Marcia travelled to Michigan for a shower of babies prior to Susan's first grandchild. SCO started really getting slaughtered in the courts (hooray!), and we enjoyed the Potter film in the theater. We don't do that too often. I built a new, larger mulching box, and demolished the old sandbox that George and Kathy left behind. We also finally got a little rain, three days in a row, which was barely enough for our parched back yard to keep a toehold on life. I'd fallen back on watering in the front, just because I like the curb appeal of our yard. 97 lives were given in our names on the sands of the Middle East, this month.
That's a wrap for tonight. Tomorrow, I'll wrap up the year, so that I have time to start staging the changes I need to have in place for the new year that rings in next Monday night. Ciao!
Mon
Tues
Wed
Thu
FRIDAY
Sat
Sun
December 28, 2007
No Post.....
Mon
Tues
Wed
Thu
Fri
SATURDAY
Sun
December 29, 2007
1939 - Good evening.The day got away from me yesterday - instead of putting up a post in the evening, I tried installing the latest RC of KDE4. I'm using it here on Magickthyse now. While it's certainly much prettier and "modern" than the KDE of yore ... it's not precisely stable or actually done, as such, yet. I'm not entirely sure why they're calling this a release candidate when it doesn't seem at all ready, to me. I read now that Ubuntu isn't going to have an 8.04 release of Kubuntu, because this next one is supposed to be the next long-term support version, and KDE4 just won't be stable enough, but all the development is in the KDE4 tree, leaving the 3.5 tree to gather dust. Hmmmm.
There's a new member of the computational family here at The Hovel: an iPod Touch 8G. I really haven't had much luck these last couple of years, at Best Buy. But I had a gift card and some coupons that got me about halfway there, so there you go. I now have my first MP3 player. Oh, it plays video nicely, too. Oh, with WiFi, so browsing, etc. mostly just works - and Apple's interface is indeed really well thought out. I've dumped about 5G of music on the thing. Eventually I'll do audio books, too.
I've got to make myself some supper. Then, if I still have energy, I'll do the final wrap post for the year that I'd intended yesterday. The energy lacks only because we were up at 4 AM to get Marcia to the airport so that she could host a bridal shower for Faye this afternoon. Tomorrow morning, she flies home, having been on the ground in Michigan for all of 18 hours or so. Ciao!
A full KDE4 desktop |
2200 - Back again. I had a bowl of barley/vegetable soup for supper, to balance out my lunchtime BBB sandwich. ("BBB" == A BLT where the lettuce, tomato, and in fact bread are all replaced with yet more bacon. Yum.) At right you can see the KDE4 desktop I'm using at this very moment (clicking on the thumbnail leads to a reduced size version - I work at 1600x1200). I have the new menu tool open from the panel bar or whatever it's called now. There's no right-click configuration of the bar, and removing the widgets (clock and such) at the right tends to inadvertently resize it in exciting yet tiresome ways. When all is said and done, this is supposed to be a blazingly fast OpenGL- or XRender-based desktop, but that's eventually, I fear. I'll either revert to normal KDE, or to Gnome, or, or ... who knows?
 The last veg harvest, mostly peppers. |
September started with an out-of-cycle visit to Bob and Barbara's place in North Carolina for the Labor Day weekend. The following weekend, while the SFWA vs. scribd bout played out in the blogosphere, I harvested out the rest of the garden, a bit early. A hot dry summer took it's toll on the plants, even with a watering system in place. I spent a fair bit of time tweaking performance and security features on Harmony, the MacBook Pro. I was trying to get something more than slothful performance out of it - the encrypted home was a performance killer. Perhaps my best laugh of the year came from Seth Green's take on 'Britney Boy'. As the month wound down, we lost Marcia's sister-in-law Jewl to Cancer. And we also lost 88 souls to the wars, as reported on five September Sundays.
October continued warm. I probably could have left some of the gardens in the ground until November, but who knew? Besides, there were other chores, like the pressure washing of the decks, and so on. We made a trip to the Sugarloaf Craft Festival in the middle of the month. Then the other shoe dropped - Bo Leuf let us know that he had cancer, and the prognosis was variable. He continues to battle through treatment and publicly keep up his spirits, which is great. I reorganized my office for the second time this year. I'm happier with the layout, but more changes are due in the new year, I think, or the year after, depending. I upgraded the Macs to OS X 10.5 (aka Leopard), and overall am not unhappy with the results. Near the end of the month, we got the first significant rainfall in half a year, much needed. Meanwhile, the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts were responsible for the deaths of another 46 US service members.
 A table full of holiday fare |
November saw the return of Mat Lemmings. I finally got through reading Smolin's The Trouble With Physics, and find that of all the untestable speculation going on in the field, the Anthropic Principle is the most troubling and unscientific. Ron Paul continued to do things that even MSM could not ignore - garnering more than $4.2 million in 24 hours on Guy Fawkes Day. I made two apple cream pies for the work pot luck Thankgiving luncheon. And finally we had some freezing nights and the trees started turning colors. Of course, it was so late that the trees that held their leaves through the hot dry, turned, then dropped in under a week. Fast fall color, yow! Marcia got word that her current position had a life expectancy of three to six months. Two days later they told her she was done in two months. Sigh. Then we had the Thompson's up for Thanksgiving weekend, and even though I was sickly, I simple used a lot of Purelle and put together a nice spread (shown at left). We gave thanks for the many blessings in our lives, and for the sacrifices of our men and women in uniform. 52 lives given in service that I reported on in November.
December's almost over, and it's been eventful. I cleaned up the garage and attic. Then the machine that serves this site and several others you might know started pitching errors. Yikes! From initial notification to standing up on the new box at a new dedicated hosting provider (Softlayer Tech), it was less than three days. I feel pretty good about that, and I think Greg does, too. The next few days were full of the sorts of small detail sorting out that accompanies changing platforms (from RHEL to Ubuntu). We got about 5" of snow in early December, not really enough to shovel. Terry Pratchett revealed that he'd been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimers. Then the news got better - Meat-based gifts started arriving. I managed to temporarily reinforce the back fence before it fell over, just before Christmas. And that brings us up to today. There have been 31 service member deaths laid at the door of our entanglements in the cradle of civilization this month, as of tonight's reporting.
Okay, I've got to get some rest. I want to get up and get the shopping done before picking up Marcia shortly after noon tomorrow.
Mon
Tues
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
SUNDAY
December 30, 2007
1624 - Good afternoon. The shopping's done, Marcia's home, and I've cleaned up about half of my office - all good things. The rains returned just as I was bringing herself back from BWI.
For the last time this year, I'd like to take a moment to consider the sacrifices our our fine young men and women in uniform, the profound honor they do us in their service, and the pride I feel in them. My condolences to the families and units fo the fallen troops.
For those that would have the math done for them, that's 1,034 US lives given in service as reported over the 52 Sundays this year. I am humbled. Are our leaders?
Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week
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.
All Content Copyright © 1999-2011 Brian P. Bilbrey.
Except where otherwise noted, this site is licensed under the
Creative
Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States
License.