Week of September 3rd, 2001

Last Updated: September 10, 2001 16:51

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Monday September 3, 2001

Greetings. I did something yesterday I haven't done for a very long time. Nothing. Nothing at all. I sat on the porch all day, and marveled at the beautiful weather. I did move around 5pm or so, but just long enough to BBQ some hamburgers for the clan. Then it was back to my deck chair. Sorry if my life seems a tad dry these days... just the way it goes sometime.

On the topic of my mother. Mmm. Seems she's doing well and expected home today or tomorrow.

When I started digging yesterday I found remnants of discarded soap opera screenplay. She did this because of that. My higher power this; my higher power that. She was in intensive care, but not really -- she was on the same floor as the intensive care ward, but in a special cardiac ward. And the most disconcerting... she had an irregular rhythm in her aorta and they're giving her heparin to correct it.

Uhh. That's called a heart attack folks. Did anyone use the dreaded "H-A" words, though? Nope. I don't profess to diagnose from afar, but I know the health care industry well enough to be relatively certain they wouldn't have kept my mother in a hospital bed for 10 days without very good reason.

Sand creatures. I'm surrounded by idiots and sand creatures.

Such is life. Thank you again to everyone who wrote and expressed care and concern for my mother's health. Apparently you and I are more concerned than some people much closer to situation. So be it. Onward and upward.

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Tuesday September 4, 2001

23:00 hrs... I've been sitting here for almost an hour trying to think of something unique and insight to say today. I'm at a loss.

The weather remains splendiferous. But it's been that way for most of the summer.

Fall is quiet encroaching on our days, but everyone already knows that -- it is September after all.

Danielle and Susie are settling into a new school year. Nothing terribly revealing there.

Landon's being Landon.

Leah's canning beets. Well it is September. Isn't that what everyone does in September? Can beets?

And me... well, I'm back to the grind after a very enjoyable long weekend. A little edit here, a little edit there.

Strange. My life is running along just as it should. The seasons are playing out just as they should. And because I'm not leaping from chandelier to chandelier, or dealing with a medical or emotionally dysfunctional crisis of epic proportions, I don't know what to write about. Go figure <g>. Guess it's time to grab a machine and YANTI or YALI it.

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Wednesday September 5, 2001

10:30 hrs... The winds of change blew into my life sometime while I slept. Figures. Whenever I put up a post like I did last night, it never fails to torment the gods, Murphy, and whoever else happens to be listening. Yes, I know... I should be more careful with my wordsmithing here <g>.

The weather in Saskatoon has shifted rather dramatically. For the first time in weeks it's overcast and threatening rain. Huh? Rain? Ah well. The temperature is still very pleasant (mid-20's C).

And what should appear in my Inbox this morning but a personal message from Mr. Tim O'Reilly himself. He's interested in a proposal to revise Outlook 2000 in a Nutshell. Mmm. Interesting turn of events. I've been using Outlook 2002 for about a month now -- on and off -- and while it is still a buggy program (read, unexplained things seem to happen for no apparent reason), it is less buggy than 2000. And the program does have some useful new features. The best news is I could explain the new installation routine in 1/2 the pages it took to explain in O2KIAN. Click here for this, click here for that, no hidden surprises.

Mmm. I'll have to do some heavy thinking on this. My days are already more than a little full, and I'm not sure I want to ever go back to working 20 hours a day just to claim I've authored a title or two. On the other hand, Outlook in a Nutshell is more than just a title to me -- the book quickly became a vehicle that opened all sorts of interesting doors for me; it also added a slew of challenging but worthy bullets to my resume. Then there's the friends I've made through the book...

Yes, Mmmm indeed.

Gotta run. Phaedrus has returned from the hospital. Goody-goody. I SURE have missed my notebook. Who woulda' thought...

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Thursday September 6, 2001

Another glorious day in Saskatchewan -- the sun has returned, although we are very definitely on the back side of summer. 'Twas cool last night / early this morning. Sweat shirt weather and shorts only on select afternoons. No regrets or reservations from this cowboy, though -- 2001 has been one of the best summers I've experienced since moving to Saskatoon four years ago.

Speaking of winter coming, here's a giggle Dan Bowman sent me yesterday:

http://www.non-sequitur.net/index.php3?inmonth=9&inday=2&inyear=2001&x=33&y=8

And that is indeed how the first snowfall strikes -- WUMP (never heard the 'Le' part before, but there again, I've never visited Quebec in the fall).

-oOo-

Greg Lincoln sent me the following yesterday as well:

Hi Tom,

NVIDIA has released new Linux drivers with significant enhancements to the Geforce 2 Go support. It should fix the one start of X per reboot issue and many other annoyances. It also fixes Xvideo acceleration allowing much faster DVD playback.

http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?PAGE=linux


I'm really looking forward to trying these new drivers. Under SuSE 7.2 the last revision was sharp and fast, but lacked the stability needed for daily work. Here's hoping the above release corrects the issues I experienced. Unfortunately, I've yet to boot into my new Slackware installation since getting my notebook back -- I'm procrastinating as I have a fair amount of configuring to do before I have things such that I can accomplish any meaningful work, and right now I am up to my keester in work that demands my immediate attention.

The fact that I can once again move about the house with Phaedrus and stay connected via wireless LAN really does make a huge difference to the whole concept of work, though -- well, at least for me. Sitting on the back porch culling mail late at night is pleasurable and certainly preferable to sitting in my office surrounded by four walls. Have I mentioned lately that I'm VERY pleased to have my notebook back?

-oOo-

I got one of those innocuous little cards in the mail yesterday informing me I had a parcel waiting at the post office, and the charge to pick up said parcel was $51.00. I get goodies in the mail all the time, but this notice surprised me as I usually know when something is enroute. Plus, most companies I deal with use FedEx or UPS to ship things to me -- it's rare, but not unheard of, to get something via regular post, unannounced. So I truck off to the postal outlet to see what's up.

Turns out it's a box of books. I work for a literary agency (Studio B Productions). One of the perks of the job is free reading material. Studio B gets -- literally -- several dozen "agency copies" every month of books that have been written and published by represented authors. When I was at the office in July I was told to help myself to whatever titles I was interested in (they have several hundred in bookcases throughout the office), and they'd ship them home to me. Cool. So I picked out a dozen or so titles, packed them in a box, and promptly forgot all about them.

Well, they finally arrived yesterday. By regular mail. Turns out Customs opened the box (clearly marked on the shipping label: Complimentary Books), and decided to charge me duty on the contents. So they took the cover price marked on the book jackets, added it all up (the total was $664), and charged me GST on the total.

Sigh.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm more than a little grateful for the opportunity to buy $600 worth of books for a mere $50. But it's the principle. No one had to pay anything for those books. The publishers shipped them to the agency as promotional material. I didn't have to pay the agency anything for them because, again, they were considered promotional material. Last time I looked, complementary meant complementary -- ie, no charge. But along comes the Canadian government; they need to get their slice of "nothing".

Bah. Again, I'm grateful for the reading material, and it is indeed worth $50 to me, but it's the principle. I plan to contest the bill, but I've never had much success in getting money back the government has already collected and stuffed in their sock.

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Friday September 7, 2001

 

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Saturday September 8, 2001

 

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Sunday September 9, 2001

20:00 hrs... Greetings, from the back porch of Syroid Manor! A lovely evening here in 'Toon-town. The sun's just gone down, and the heat of the afternoon is just starting to dissipate. In a few hours it will be time for a jacket, but at the moment the temperature is perfect -- coolish, with just a hint of autumn on the breeze.

I wish I could tell you I've been basking on the porch since Friday. Alas, this is one of the first quiet moments I've enjoyed since last weekend. Friday I worked until after midnight; Saturday I immersed myself in Linux kernels and modules from early morning until almost 11pm; today I took all the information gleaned from Saturday, honed and refined it, and put it to use. I have Slackware 8.0 running on Phaedrus. The filesystems are all ReiserFS, the kernel is 2.4.10 pre6. I have wireless networking configured and working exactly as it should. The kernel is compiled for hot-swap, so I can unplug the Linksys card and the card manager gracefully closes the connection. Plug the card back in, it beeps, and starts to work again. It's been an insightful and productive weekend.

My objective yesterday was to compile a custom kernel (knock out all the stuff I didn't need; add in APM and a few other goodies), and do whatever I needed to do to get wireless working under Linux. I certainly didn't think such a minimal list would take two days, but in retrospect I don't regret the time spent -- I learned a lot about diagnosing compiler errors, picked up several handy command-line tricks, and in the end, managed to make sense out of all confusion I felt on more than one occasion during weekend.

I simply don't have time or space to detail the complete process; suffice to say that at one point last night I had tried 4 different kernels (2.2.19, 2.4.5, 2.4.9, 2.4.10-pre5), three versions of the PCMCIA-CS package (3.1.26, 3.1.28, and 3.1.29), and about six different builds of the linux-wlan-ng wireless driver -- all No Joy. The kernel would compile, but make modules would choke on a bad chunk of code. I'd take something out of the kernel another module or process needed so the compile process would give me rude errors and quit. I almost got everything working under 2.4.9, but I abandoned that thrust when I found out 2.4.9 has a memory management problem. So I went to 2.4.10-pre5 only to find this build seg-faulted (think "blue screen of death" without the blue) on a routine basis doing everyday stuff (like copying a file from one filesystem to another). I was about to throw my hands in the air and shout "surrender" when I noticed this morning that "pre6" had just been posted hours earlier. So I did a clean install of Slack to ensure I was working with a clean slate, and:

Now all I have left is to get X running (I saved my config file from SuSE 7.2, so it shouldn't take much tweaking), grab the latest build of OpenOffice, and install Mulberry for Linux. I'll then have a dual-boot, powerhouse notebook. I'll be able to pick and choose which OS I want to work in without worrying about which one supports what devices or programs.

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Last modified: September 10, 2001