EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy, say so, I will respect that. If I don't know that you want your email address published, then I won't. Be aware, though, that I am (usually) human and make mistakes.

I just spent the last half hour writing (and rewriting and rewriting) three short paragraphs. That cut into the time that I have for this, but it was important. I can do stupid things all day (though I often don't), and rectify them as I go. But when you screw up online, as I did, many people in addition to the offended party have seen what you have done, especially when you draw attention to it. This must be like rubbing salt in the wounds. I abjectly abase myself and apologize. No excuses. I have asked for guidance in which mode the repairs need to happen. More here if it seems appropriate. Now I am late for jumping into the commute. See y'all later.

In other news, it has been pointed out that I am no longer maintaining anything which could be properly called a mirror. So now daynotes.orbdesigns.com leads you to Daynotes Alternity. I should track (fairly closely), the official Daynotes website - Tom and I will do our best to keep things in reasonable content coherence. But this will allow me a little more freedom with design - I took a few liberties already, I will probably take more. If you want to use it too, you're welcome.

Other business is afoot, most of which is covered under SEC regulations so if I told you . . . well, you know. I'd have to kill you. Seriously - fun things may be happening here, and if they don't, then other things will. Marcia and I have an extremely low boredom threshold and everything is fair game.

Speaking of fair game, the rats in the rafters should be dying in droves, since the exterminator did some heavy baiting last week. Meantime Earl the Squirrel (no relation to Rocket J. Squirrel, I presume) is having himself a major romp through all of our potted plants. There have been suggestions for ridding ourselves of this troublesome squirrel, but then we can't have a BC in the apartment. I think that a .357 may just be a little over the top. I am now officially trolling for ideas to plant Earl 6 feet (hell, 2 meters if you prefer) deep.

We are looking to attend a performance of the Alchemist (an adaptation of the Ben Jonson play) later this month. It has received glowing reviews - the site is here. Growing up, as a family we went to Berkeley Repertory Theatre frequently. I saw Joe Spano and John Hershefeld (both later to star in Hill Street Blues, Joe as Henry, John as the desk seargent) in many shows there. Others have moved on to Oregon Shakespeare or to the New York stages - it was a great and exciting time in a tiny little hole in the wall theatre that seated perhaps a hundred and thirty if the fire marshall wasn't looking. The new digs (last 15 years or so) are much fancier, and seat perhaps twice as many, but it is still an intimate venue. Many of the productions of recent years have been . . . too avant-garde for my simple tastes. This one sounds quite good though - the SF Chron had 'little man stands and claps' - not uncommon, but generally a reliable indicator.

You want comment? Alright, comment - can we start with
garish? But then you probably know that - being 6'3"
you probably don't give a damn either, whereas we who
are only 5'11�" and not a bit sensitive about it so
there have learnt a little discretion.

Seriously, I have been looking at it - I had kept to
the old, tried and true, but I'm not now - the layout
of your arrangement is more convenient for me -
uncluttered, all people links on one screen (except
the women - sometimes such heroism can be admirable,
Brian), and room for more. But garish. Normally I
don't like a dark background either, as it tends to
visually bleed over other colours and swamp print; but
I recognise you've put a lot of thought into your
garish colours to avoid that problem. Your "lighten up
the background" may have something to do with why I'm
finding it more bearable than the first pass, too. 

So, I'm using it, and I haven't found any problems
that shutting my eyes for a few seconds won't solve. I
don't normally set out to find problems though - just
go puddling around with my big feet and fall over
things from time to time.

Regards, Don

Fresh from it's being linked on linux.davecentral.com, RealPlayer G2 for Linux (Alpha) enters stage left. It works -sorta. Fairly hinky to install, and tricky to make work properly as a NS plugin (I have only had intermittent success), it does work. The distinct advantage here - you get it yourself, just like you get Netscape yourself, and there is NO LITTLE AIM MAN to hunt down and kill. If you take great joy in hunting down and killing the little AO-Hell Instant Messenger dude, then Windows is the OS for you - I haven't found one o' them yet. But I could do an Icon... Nah!! Just kidding. I right click and save the RAM or RM links, then open RealPlayer (either from the menu to which I manually added Real Player, or from the command line in an open shell window) and open the saved link file. Voilà!

Lastly for now, on a search for something else last night, I happened across this Robert Heinlein thing that L. Neil Smith wrote a few years ago. I found it wonderful in that it brought back memories of my growing up reading his books (along with Jerry's, Issac's, "Doc" Smith's {thanks, Dan}, Frank Herbert's and so many more). If it wasn't for the fact that the future we are building is so much fun, I could disappear into books and the past, never to return. As it is, I don't read enough (offline). Anyway, here's the link - give it a read if you have half a mind to - I enjoyed it.


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Subject: Thanks
    Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2000 19:00:15 -0800
    From: Dan Bowman
 
Loved the piece on Heinlein. Probably the single most 
formative factor in my teen years (and beyond).
 
Oh, and it's "Dan", 
 
dan

On the phone bunches last night, knocking the rough edges off of a couple of upcoming projects, setting up to see the aforementioned stage play, The Alchemist, later this month. We started to watch Blade Runner (Director's Cut) last evening, but there were too many different things going on, we just got past the point in the beginning where Decker tested Rachel. Hmmm. And oh my, such names. I had forgotten just how many talented and 'big name' people were in this one.

Today I fight the battle of redesigning the sheetmetal I finished last week. The joy of it all is that I don't control all of the components. We are oem'ing someone else's box, then building it's contents, along with our own magic, into a new housing. The initial design was based on the first unit received, used for prototype purposes. The ten units that are to be incorporated into the production boxes are physically different, necessitating a redesign of mount points and front panel openings. Not nearly as challenging as initial design, but still, I thought I was done with that one.

In my box early yesterday, but unregarded until last night - Jakob Nielsen has a new Alertbox out, this one on the topic of Profit Maximization vs. User Loyalty. As usual, Jakob's work is worth taking a look at. Often for me, he rings several warning bells that I need to heed in my design philosophies.

Have a great day, here the streets are dry but the clouds are threatening. Now it is time to go vote. If you live in a state that holds primaries today (or any day) - VOTE. If you don't exercise your franchise, then you default on your citizenship, your freedom. People have been dying for centuries to preserve our right to vote today, so DO IT!!! Later.

Firstly, I have decided not to either keep up with the Jones or with myself. Sorry I have been wiffling and waffling on this issue, but the 'alternative' or 'mirror' for the daynotes site is no more. If you linked to it, you can use daynotes.com. I just built myself a startpage that I will use as my launchpad here and at work, with no guarantees of consanguity or coherence. You are welcome to it - though it is in a state of flux at the moment. Then the mail just rolled in today...

Subject: "Modern Medicine" bane
    Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2000 10:26:45 +1100 (EST)
    From: Don Armstrong

In response to me, you wrote : .... "One isn't always
sure that "Modern Medicine" isn't more bane than boon.
I often think that we are breeding loads of sickly,
mentally unstable people" ....

Of course, I agree, but ....

There's no question that treating people so that those
who would have been weeded out of our gene pool by
natural selection instead go on to have offspring
bearing their defective genes, is a worry. It
certainly decreases the average fitness of the human
race in terms of the criteria which got us where we
are now.

The same applies to welfare payments (which I have
benefited from on occasions), particularly to people
who are of low intelligence. We are creating an
inverse selection criterion here - people who can't
get a job, and have plenty of spare time thereby, get
rewards for having kids. Previously they would tend
not to have been able to afford the conditions, the
time and the energy to get pregnant; but instead would
have had to work long hard hours just to survive. Now
the ones working long hard hours are the ones with
enough ability to get a job - they have to, to pay the
taxes to pay the welfare.

I think it was RAH who said, perhaps quoting, that man
stops evolving when he controls his environment,
rather than being subject to it. A corollary to that
is that lacking meaningful selection pressure, our
gene pool will go to hell in a handbasket quite
rapidly.

On the other hand, following those attitudes just a
little leads us very rapidly to side with the Nazis,
or to start breeding Sauron supermen.

There's an argument that WE (humanity) don't only
evolve as individuals, but as clans, societies and as
the entire race as well. In that case, saving
EVERYONE, or at least as many as we reasonably can,
may be a wise move - diversity is good - we retain
possible advantages that would have been lost along
with those disadvantageous genes "weeded out". Simple
example of one aspect - a single dose of a
semi-recessive gene gives some resistance to malaria,
double dose gives sickle-cell anaemia - good for most
people, bad for the individual. We also retain the
actual contributions made by people - sometimes
markedly gifted people - carrying disadvantageous
genes - anything from haemophilia or "hole in the
heart" to diabetes or cystic fibrosis to deafness in
one ear or a tendency to sciatica or pick-your-own.
However, the human gene pool is still deteriorating
quite rapidly in terms of survival capability of the
average individual, and if society breaks down then
we, currently lords and masters of all we survey (more
or less), could be facing an "extinction event".

Personally, I don't like either of these approaches. I
don't want to leave people to die; and I certainly
don't want to establish conditions where a bureaucrat
can expand on precedents to sterilise or euthanise
people because of a tendency to ingrown toenails. PMS,
though .... On the other hand, I don't want humanity
as a whole to waste and sicken.

OK, it's good news/bad news time: 

The good news is, we don't need it to be an either/or
situation. We CAN have the best of both.

The bad news is, we aren't doing it, and it looks like
we're going to be forever prevented from doing so by
short-sighted politicians and bureaucrats who couldn't
find their own fundaments with both hands and a map.

What we need - time-proven answer - is an open
frontier. We have an established society providing a
safe and secure home, and support, and base, for those
who need or want them. We need our pioneers to be able
to go out, face challenges and dangers, and best or be
bested by them. The winners reap the rewards of
success; the losers - lose. If they were too stupid or
too unfit for the challenge, humanity's average goes
up. If they were neither, but they still lost, then
they were too rash - questionable judgement - proven
100% - and humanity's average goes up. If they're
successful, they can afford to have more children, and
humanity's average goes up. The average in terms of
individual survivability for successful pioneers is
way higher than that for the stick-at-homes. The
stay-at-homes are also survivors in terms of their own
environment - better, in fact, in those terms than the
pioneers. Diversity increases - micro-niches colonised
increases - all good.

The open frontier is also necessary in terms of the
health of our society. Without it, we get
self-destructive behaviour. At best this may be civil
servants building bureaucracies to ensure security for
all (and that's good?). At worst it can be breakdown
of social norms, alienation, loss of contact with
reality by our public officials, frustration and
destructiveness by our youth, a search for recognition
in gangs, graffiti, crime, violence. Individuals need
to feel there is a safety valve, a way out, hope of
change - even if they don't then elect to use it.

Jerry Pournelle's Space Mail covered some
of this some time ago, and in particular there
was a reference to the Martian Frontier.
Recommended reading, even if you've seen it before.
Space is where we need to find our future challenges,
our hopes, our open frontier. I used to think the USA
would lead the way there. Now I fear that even Japan
or the ECC may not do so - and when I find myself
losing hope that even China will do so then things are
desperate indeed for the human race.

Best wishes,
Don Armstrong

Another potential offset is the power of communication granted us by the Internet. The kicker is that thoughts and ideas must always be accompanied by plans, goals and action. Great things await us, if we don't falter, and lend a hand to those around us who cannot see.

Of course, I am often guilty of muddy thinking, and virtually everything you see here is hand-flung mud against the wall - no varnish or anything else to pretty it up. Here, I am a one-draft writer, and rarely go back to see what I have read. That is why Marcia will send me email saying, "Why didn't you capitalize my name in the second paragraph?" Then I go in and fix it. This is for fun, and for me, not for money.

Segue: Speaking of money, I did my civic duty this morning, 10 minutes after the poles opened. In an attempt to sanely exercise my franchise, I voted no on bond measures right left and sideways, voted to let Native Americans have 'gaming' on their lands (I think - they keep weasel-wording these things - I do my very best to understand them though). And on elective petty bureaucrats, I vote for the lesser evil where I can, vote for the ones I know wear white hats (GO, Elaine !!!) and generally try to vote for less bread and circuses, in order to offset someone whose opinions differ with mine.

Another grandparent story leaps to the front of my brain. They didn't often talk politics, because they rarely agreed, and the discussions could get pretty heated, I guess. But the running joke was that we really didn't understand why they bothered to vote, since they always cancelled each other out. But vote they did. I hope you vote, too. In the voting booth, with your purchasing dollars, in the choices you make with your life - all of these are modes of expressing your will - think about it.


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Briefly, briefly. In the mornings, I can answer email or I can write here. Today, it was email.

Subject: Jakob Nielsen Link, etc.
    Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2000 00:30:00 -0800
    From: "J.H. Ricketson"
    
Gentlemen:

Brian - I linked to & bookmarked your link to Jakob Nielsen's 
dissertation. I am again impressed. He is a very profound
and perspicacious thinker. I appreciate him sharing his thoughts. 
They should be Graven in Jade and read daily by
anyone even thinking about engaging in commerce of any 
kind. As Ben Franklin said - "Honesty is the best Policy."
Simply that. No question of morality involved.

One more thing - I regret the passing of your mirror, Brian. 
I really liked it, by comparison.

<pedantic mode>
Nielsen's dissertation, to me, boils down to basics, as 
expressed in the Bible. Alfhough I am a long-time Agnostic (NOT
atheist! I hope I never have the gall to challenge another's 
honestly held Faith. Besides - at my age I may be in for the
ultimate confrontation with some God who wishes to prove a 
point. I dare not offend any of the Gods by flat denying
His/Her/Its existence! ).That said, I am unshakably convinced 
that the Commandments are the best Rules For
Living anyone can follow, particularly the "Thou shalt not covet..." 
The summation, as "This is the First and Great
Commandment; thou shalt love thy Neighbor as Thyself; and the 
Second is like unto it: Do unto others as you would
have them do unto you."  should be tattooed on the back of 
every child's hand at birth. Might make a difference! The only
small quibble I have is a matter of semantics in acton: I prefer 
the Zen/Shinto/Buddhist version of the Second;"Do not
unto others that which you would not have them do unto you." 
The subtle difference is exemplified by Social/Socialist
do-gooders that cannot resist doing unto others to, and perhaps 
beyond, the point of actual harm to those done unto.
Subtle difference, but very meaningful for me.
</pedantic mode>



Regards,

JHR
--
[J.H. Ricketson in San Pablo]

Subject: Re: Also,
    Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2000 09:43:59 +0000 (GMT)
    From: Phil Hough 
      To: Brian Bilbrey 

On Tue, 7 Mar 2000, Brian Bilbrey wrote:

> how about a quick link to most recent day?  I am into severe lazyness.
> 

The link should've been fixed for daynotes.com now... as for the most
recent day:

I'm thinking of some rearragenment, such that there is no intro page, but
the content frame loads with the current month, with at present the most
recent day at the top.  This means 1 click and you're in... is this too
many  ?

ATB.

Phil

Subject: exactly
    Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2000 10:44:00 +0100
    From: Bo Leuf

Exercising conscious choice on all levels, standing up for your 
position, and expressing your will. RAH would be proud of you. 
'Course was the frontier open, I suspect a lot of us would already 
have headed out to express in other contexts.

/ Bo

***
But vote they did. I hope you vote, too. In the voting booth, with your 
purchasing dollars, in the choices you make with your life - all of 
these are modes of expressing your will - think about it.
***
-- 
"Bo Leuf" 
Leuf fc3 Consultancy
http://www.leuf.com/

Now running later than expected. I must run. See y'all later.


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Good Morning! TGIF! What? No, that's alright. While I may appear confused, Marcia and I are taking a hooky day tomorrow. We were going fishing, but as the rains continue, and we hear "Noah?" calling from the clouds, I guess we won't head into the mudbowl to throw a line or two in murky waters. Still taking the day though - go on a little adventure, drive in an odd direction, etc.

Playing with lots of ideas and new toys. The LinuxCare bootable business card actually also provides a method for installing a base Debian 2.1 distro. But I only have one partition to play with on my current HD, which is WAY past the 1023 cylinder limit for standard bootable partitions (a BIOS limitation). However, in conjunction with recent BIOS revisions, LILO rev 2.1-3 (formerly, but not on these pages, referred to as 2.2) will *potentially* allow you to boot from partitions past 1024. Untried here, as yet. However, I have need, so will be checking this out for sure, you betcha. Text of announcement follows...

Source code for revision 3 of Werner Almesberger's 
LILO version 21 is available from:

      ftp://sd.dynhost.com/pub/linux/lilo

This revision adds a global option, 'lba32', to enable 
bootind disks beyond the 1024 cylinder limit.  The 
command line switch '-L' accomplishes the same 
result.  To be effective, the BIOS must support the 
EDD packet call interface (post 1998).

The package, available as 'lilo-21-3.tar.gz' includes 
source code, man pages, and updates to all pertinent 
documentation.  This code has been in beta release 
since 11/99 under the name "LILO version 22".  
Werner asked me to change the designation to indicate 
that it is derived from his version 21, as his version 22 
will be a major update.

- --John Coffman

I believe that, lacking another box, I am going to have to add another 128M of RAM and another spindle, perhaps 10G, to Grendel to accomplish an upcoming project. Time to visit the Crucial website - aside from the strong recommendations for both Crucial and/or Kingston from Jerry, Bob and others, Crucial undercuts Fry's prices on brokered RAM by about 45% (as of a month ago, on 64M and 128M DIMM). Heh. OTGH, Fry's is very nearly at the bleeding margin edge for IDE disks.

Now off to work (very early, with a long day in store). TTYL.


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Good Morning! Happy Friday to you all. I have been playing with some interesting toys and programs this week and hope to share some of that with you over the weekend. Marcia and I are playing hooky today, someone turned up the really bright halogen lamp in the blue ceiling'd room on the other side of that window and we are off for adventure shortly (or shopping, one can never tell which).

The fishing concept may yet come to pass, but I doubt this weekend - it's time to let the runoff stop and the water settle and clear. Then fishing. Came across a new .sig of the moment yesterday... (Unfortunately it's gone, so I am going to have to paraphrase a paraphrase. Sigh).

There were only two things to come out of 
Berkeley in the 60's, LSD and Unix.  
I doubt that is a coincidence.

For those of you that like such things, the weekly "newsletter" from Dana Blankenhorn is out - you can explore his take on the latest eBiz and eBuzz trends for yourself at A-Clue.com. If you haven't heard of this before, give it a four week shot, then unsubscribe if you don't like it. I haven't unsubscribed myself, so I can't promise that works, but given that not unsubscribing people would be clueless, you wouldn't have a problem, I imagine.

Hot news fresh off the presses at approximately 04:00 hours this morning. XFree 4.0 is released. There has been a lot of pent up demand for this - there should be LOTS of support for the accelerated features in many recent video cards in this release. You can check the support for your card at this link. Give a couple of days for the download fest to die down, then head over to www.xfree.org, follow the directions and have fun. Found initally on both Kuro5hin (thanks for the link, Matt) and Slashdot.

Also on the burner for this weekend (culled from linux.davecentral.com), the Linux Electronic Mail Administrator HOWTO 3.2. Please note that the 3.2 revision I give here is correct, rather than the 2.2 rev on DaveCentral (sorry, Dave). The release date for this version of the document is January, 2000. Recent documentation is always welcome in the Linux world, if occasionally hard to find.

INFORMATION UPDATE for those who would have Linux and Win2K coexist as on a dual (or multi-) boot system. The information I posted earlier is still valid, but it turns out that, unlike WinNT, Win2K can coexist with a LILO booting from the MBR Linux installation, just like Win9x. I received email to that effect a couple of weeks ago, and finally got around to testing the concept here on Grinch. Validated. It just works. No problems. And I STILL really like the installation process for Win2K. Seems everyone is on the same page - Linux, Windows - ease of installation is very important and you want Aunt Minerva to be able to install after she upgrades her HD and RAM.

The adventure was to go a ways without hopping on a freeway, difficult to do in the state of ski and surf, asphalt, concrete and 16 hours of commute time per 28 hour day. We went to Gilroy, down the Monterey Highway (which roughly parallels Highway 101, to the west). The pace is slower, the buildings are ramshackle (or brand, spanking new, on a piece of ground 3.5 inches larger than the house on the property, probably for US$350K and up. Sigh.) We ended up at some Outlet stores, a tricky concept whereby the proprietors attempt to convince you that paying the same price that appears on the department store ads is just ONE HELL OF A DEAL! Yah, riiiiight.

In local tech news, Grendel has acquired a new 15G IDE drive (Maxtor), and has 128M of additional PC100 RAM winging its way here from Crucial, for delivery tomorrow. My schedule next week isn't clear enough to let me know where I will be to have the package shipped to - and the brokered RAM available at Fry's is approximately twice the price (including Saturday FedEx delivery !!!) of Crucial's product. Jerry speaks well of Kingston, as well. But the price for the cheapest 128M PC100 DIMM is $US343 and ranges up to $390. This is for an Abit BH6 Mobo, an option available from the Crucial menus, but not Kingston's. I think that Crucial is the clear winner here. What's the draw?

In keeping with developments elsewhere, here is my pgp public key (aka the confound Janet Reno key). If you need it, you know what to do. I will have this linked off of the Site Index and at the top of every week's entry from this point forward, FYI. I have some partitioning, formatting and distro installing to do, should have some fun things to report shortly.

Lastly for now, the weather gods have smiled on us for a little over 24 hours now - it was a gorgeous sunny shorts and 'T' day - so now, of course, the clouds are rolling in by the double fistful. They (the mysterious national weather they) claim no rain until Sunday. Looking at the darkening skies, I say middle of tonight, unless I am sorely mistaken.


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Happy Saturday to everyone. Brief start this morning - there are chores around here that I want to get done. It's better that I do them first, then play here later. A little update on the events of yesterday evening and the installing of a new disk. First piece of advice - don't assume that the jumpers on my first hard drive are correct. When there's only one HD in a system, apparently the system is fairly tolerant of fubar'd jumpers on the back of an IDE drive. But add a second into the chain and poof. All of a sudden the work I do to partition and format my second drive disappears, twice! So I read, muck, figure out that the jumpers are now set properly (on the second drive). Poof. The partition table on the first drive disappears, corrupted beyond the wildest imaginings of the small side table at the bedside (a rather slothful piece of furniture with very little imagination at all).

Well, it turns out that the first Maxtor (20G) shipped with not the master configuration set, as noted in the documentation. Instead the jumper was set for automatic cylinder correction. So putting a (finally) correctly configured second Maxtor (15G) in the chain was enough to confuse things. I popped the power connectors on the two drives, did some very careful pin counting and jumper setting on both. Then I powered up the machine, scratched my head for a couple of minutes ... powered down the machine, re-applied the power connectors to the two IDE drives and shazam!

To the upper left and (slightly lower) right you see one of the iterations of DiskDrake that I ran. Disk partitioning tools have come a long way from the days of fdisk. Well, not that far - the text-based expert installation routines that almost every Linux distribution offers still uses cfdisk, which is virtually identical to the fdisk of yore. The semi-graphical partitioning tool of Lizard, the OpenLinux installer, was first, then there was DiskDrake, which is colorful and very useful. Then RedHat (for their beta 6.2 release) have done something reasonably identical and useful, but much less colorful. (More business-like, one presumes).

Using DiskDrake, you simply select the empty areas on your new drive (or the empty spaces on your existing drive) and create partitions. Give them a filesystem type, a mount point and a location - voilà - Bob's your male paternal or maternal sibling (maybe both, in straight-line family tree country). As you can see from the second image, I have managed to break the new 15G of storage into 5 native Linux partitions plus an additional swap file. This gives me swap partitions on both drives.

I would imagine that very little of that will be needed, since the system RAM is going to bump up to 256M today sometime - wait, let me check that ... OK, the website doesn't indicate any change in status, and (aha, wonder and joy) although the 800 number currently says no one is there to answer questions, they do have Saturday hours, and start at about 10 (Mountain Time). How enlightened. If you are going to make your people come to work on Saturday, at least let them sleep in a bit. Very nice. I will call back and check status in about half an hour.

Have a great day - I will see you (virtually) later.


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Sunday. Relaxation. Yesterday was greyish much of the day, but never managed to rain. Today the light from the bright halogen bulb in the big blue and green room is streaming in through the chinks in the blinds, washing out my monitor. Bah Humbug!

I took the last half hour, and caught up on all the Daynotes gang. Tom . . . thank you, I am honored. Everyone is doing reasonably interesting things, and often I can't keep up with all of it, though it takes me just half an hour (weekdays). The problem isn't just the reading, I want to try things, explore the links given, think about the ideas expounded upon, and all of a sudden, hours have passed. My one addition to the DSD (Daynoters Standard Distribution) is Frank McPherson. I happened across him through the good offices of Dave Farquhar. I can't promise I can keep up with everyone everyday, but all the places on my start page get some of my attention.

I didn't go there at all yesterday. Too busy. Working on a project, cutting my eyeteeth on a new field of endeavor. Sure hope it works out. Now to slog through the 175 messages that went into dedicated mailboxes (mailing lists, etc). I could pitch them whole, but the gem to junk ratio on these lists is unusually high. Good thing I speed read.

Catch you later.

We got a few things done today, following Saturday's TCM exercise ("Thorough Cleaning Mode"). The errands to Costco, Orchard and Safeway passed without incident except for an unfortunate encounter with a bunch of thugs ... I mean, Girl Scouts <G>. We came away only three dollars shy, and a whole box of calories in our hands for the trouble.

Then we started the spring planting in earnest. Marcia had previously put in some herbs and specialty lettuces. This week, tomatos (Miracle - above left, Best Boy above Right). We should start seeing production off of these plants in June. Progress reports will follow - this is year three of patio gardening.

Then, in the planter boxes with bench that we built last year, broccoli, jalapeño and bush beans. It is early enough in the season that a failure or two leave lots of time for replanting.

On the X-Server front, it would appear that the binaries aren't out for Linux yet, in their XFree86-4.0 incarnation. I can get and compile the sources, but haven't yet taken the time, and may not, as the XFree site itself recommends hanging loose with 3.3.6 for the time being if you crave stability. We'll see. Currently I have 4 booting OS's here on Grinch. Mandrake 7.02, Windows, Debian 2.2 (Potato - frozen), OpenLinux 2.3 and RedHat 6.2 Beta. Makes for a lot of fun playing compare and differentiate games. Oops, I guess that's five now, isn't it? Hmmm.

VMware 2.0, in both the Linux and Windows versions, is a very capable package. (Disclaimer - I bought the hobbyist model of VMware 2.0 Linux, then was gifted by VMware with a copy of the Windows model. I shan't complain. Thanks!) I cannot speak to the prior Windows version, since I didn't have it. The 1.2 Linux version worked great, but there were some kinks, and shutting down a VM, freeing the resources back to the host OS took a LONG time. Now that may well have been my fault. I have been known to get something running without reading the instructions on more than one occasion. Now it is fast and clean. Another feature available in the new revision is the VMWare Tools diskette information is now installed in the VM, so that I can change the mode of the VM, and access a virtual floppy drive and load the VMware tools into my system. Problems. I haven't ever gotten printing to work. Trick question, though, because Grinch doesn't have a local printer. I am considering moving the Epson over to Grinch - right now it hangs off of Grendel, which behaves as the overall server box in the AWN ("Apartment Wide Network"), serving, firewalling, routing, masquerading, printing, backing up. I really have that box doing too many things, but then again, it only operates at about 2% CPU load, most of the time. More as more happens.

Have a lovely evening - I hope you enjoyed your weekend as much as we liked ours. See you next week. What? Oh, the new 128M of system RAM? Didn't even ship until Saturday. They say they credited the card. No, I am not very happy with Crucial right at this moment - the whole drill was to get it delivered here, while I was here. I ordered early enough on Friday that it should have shipped same day. Sigh. Good Night.


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