Tom at 16

Week of February 25th, 2002

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Saturday March 2, 2002

Earlier in the week, Suzie came upstairs and pronounced to us that her mother did not want her doing dishes any more.

Uh, not.

Everyone in our house participates in daily household chores. The only thing we ask of Suzie is to _help_ with the dinner dishes (Danielle helps as well) -- which takes all of 15 minutes a day -- and _help_ (again, with Danielle) clean the downstairs bathroom once a week. Not terribly demanding or taxing IMHO.

I got to thinking about it after our conversation, and began to question whether Suzie was telling us the truth. So I wrote her mom, and basically asked WTF? When she visited last summer, we informed her of the "rules of the house", and at the time she appeared delighted with the way we did things at Syroid Manor. To make a long story short, she finally responded to my query with a long diatribe, in very bad/broken English, detailing how "other Korean students didn't have to do dishes at their homestays" and how she was "embarrassed" by the fact her daughter was doing dishes when she should be studying.

Of course, the fact she "chats" on the phone with her friend for an hour (in Korean, no less -- great way to learn English, no?), or surfs the net for two or three hours, didn't phase her mom one iota. Mmmm. So we informed the program coordinator yesterday Suzie needs to find a new place to live by April 1st. He was very understanding; I guess he too has had several less than acceptable dealings with Suzie.

Too bad really. We'll miss her, but are comfortable with our decision. Suzie is about to learn some hard lessons. She will never find another place to live that serves gourmet meals every day. Or that accepts a complete stranger into their home as a son/daughter. But Suzie is most definately a spoiled brat, and at some point in time, she's going to have to get a grasp on "reality". I only have one nagging question -- I wonder who's going to do her dishes if and when she ever "grows up". Just curious.

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Friday March 1, 2002

Indeed. YACW (Yet Another Crazy Week).

Both Landon and Danielle have been coughing and barking all week, which in combination with the asthma they both suffer from, has made for some long days (and nights). And Leah too. I've managed to stave off any full blown illness (likely to the amount of garlic I consume every day; grin), but the balance could conceivability tip at any moment.

The thermometer has been hovering around the -30 mark all week (with the wind chill factored in), which makes for some added logistics: remember to plug the car in as the kids need to be driven to school. Don't forget to pick the kids up AFTER school as well (Tom!). Etc, etc.

The mailing lists I subscribe to have been remarkably busy -- and informative -- the past 10 days. Lot's of excellent dialogue, suggestions, brain stretching questions, yada-yada. The end result is I've been spending an inordinate number of hours every day reading email (and trust me, I've very selective about what I actually read; the subject line is my friend) and learning new "stuff". I also had some excellent personal back-n-forths with Ken Coar and Jeff Trawick of the Apache team, and Jerry Carter of the Samba team. The end result is that I've decided to "pay forward" to both projects by contributing my forte -- writing, and in some cases, reorganizing documentation. Yep. In my "spare" time. One can never have too many chandeliers in one's house.

Many thanks to Mike Kelly who forwarded me the solution to converting table formatting to CSS. Here it is:

Tom,
Glad you moved to CSS. If you want to have that masthead at the top, you can
make one  that has the logo and nest another  after the logo that
that is set to float right. It would look like this:

imagephoto

the CSS would be something like this:

#mast
{
	width : 100%;

}
#photo
{
	float : right;
	width : 25%;
}

I haven't implemented the above yet, but I plan to this weekend sometime.

One of my regulars wrote to say that opening my current page in IE 5.0 caused an error, which in turn closed IE (or the page; can't remember which). Very weird. I'm using IE 6.0, with all the latest patches, and I haven't experienced any problems whatsoever. I know my traffic is down due to my sporadic posts, but I haven't heard anything similar from anyone else. If you experience any problems viewing my site, please send me an email and provide details: browser, version, etc. Also try this: Can you view my index page OK? Last week's page? TIA.

Time to go pull the latest CVS trees for both Samba and Apache. I'll do my best to make up for the dearth of posts this week by checking in later tonight (um, hopefully? barring any kid problems). In the meantime, here's an excellent paper I stumbled across yesterday by the famed Mr. Raymond himself. It's titled How to Ask Questions the Smart Way. Recommended reading for anyone who participates on mailing lists of any flavour.

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Tuesday February 26, 2002

G'Day, and welcome to my new CSS/XHTML page. I actually had a lot of fun revamping the weekly template I use and paring out all the formatting specific tags. It was a good learning excerise. I still have one small section left to do that describes the table at the top of the page holding my logo graphic and picture. I'm not sure yet how to specify table formatting in CSS, but I'm sure there's a way.

Winter is back. Monday it was 20-below; with the wind chill factored in, the temp hovered around -30 degrees for most of the day. Bleh.

No resolution yet on getting Apache 3.0.32 to build on AIX. Apparently, the problem has to do with AIX not following the rules when it comes to supporting DSOs. Beyond that, I'm lost -- I do not claim to understand one iota about software development. When I look at source code, my eyes glaze over. Some of the best minds in the business are working on the problem, though, and I'm confident I'll have a working solution soon.

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