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Last Week Next Week Insights Index Daynotes.com Email: tom@syroidmanor.com
Damn. The sun actually had some heat in it today. So in acknowledgement, I bowed (twice) to the weather gods and went out and bought a new snow shovel for the season. Ah-ah-ahhhh... not so fast... Just to show them I still had my warrior spirit, I came home and shoveled the front driveway in my sandels.
A day of household chores and catch-up. Picked up two large Rubbermail tubs to help organize the kids "stuff" in the playroom. Cleaned out the fireplace and lit a new toasty fire for the family. Sorted the garage; brought the hoses in. All the rudimentary things that go into making a household function on a daily basis.
Cheers
Coldest October since 1919. Or so they tell me. Although I wasn't around in 1919, I have no trouble accepting that. We took the kids out trick-or-treating last night. After an hour, Leah trotted home to get the car. By 7:30 we were spending more time in the car getting warm than we were going from door-to-door. At first I thought I was just getting soft. Then I heard the temperature: with the wind chill, it was a bitting -22C. Despite the temp, everyone had fun and the kids accumulated quite a sack of candy (Oh Joy, Oh Rapture). Danielle, being the little bean counter she is, spilled the works out in the middle of the living room floor and proceeded to sort everything into categories (chocolate bars over here... suckers over here... chips in this pile over here...). After careful analysis, she proudly announced to me that they had collected 200 some-odd chocolate bars. Needless to say, about five minutes after they were both in bed Leah had the bulk of it hidden in a safe location.
My hellish week reached a grand a glorious cresendo last night about 8:30. I put aside work yesterday afternoon about 4:30 so I could help Leah with dinner and getting the kids dressed up. With everyone tucked safely into bed, I sat down on the couch to finish up the day's agenda. Flipped open my laptop, pushed the little power-on button, and... #$&@##$!!... ???... Nothing. Nada. Squat. Diddley squat. The LED was glowing brightly on the power brick, and I soon discovered that if I held the power-on button for a few seconds, the Num Lock key would flash, once, about three seconds after release. The external adapter LED would then blip about once every 5 or 6 seconds.
Needless to say, I was not terribly amused. I was even less amused when I realized all the info I needed to finish my day was sitting on my notebook's hard drive (plus a bunch of notes and stuff I need for today). The good news is at the single moment in time I accepted the fact it was going to be a long evening, and that the only option I had was to go downstairs, fire up another box, and re-create all the hard work I had put in earlier in the day, it was all downhill from there. This week goes to Murphy. He won not-so-fair and square. Today, I'm doing what I can with what I've got, and anyone who wants to take issue with that, can... well... take issue with that. In short, "Obviously you have me confused with someone who gives a shit". I'll lick my wounds over the weekend, and emerge Monday morning ready to do battle again.
Here's a good link to tuck away in your bookmark file: scponly. It's a shell replacement based on SSH's scp (secure copy) component. Install it on your system, replace the user's shell with it, and their home directory becomes a secure FTP repository. Good stuff.
Have a happy day. And REALLY folks, TGIF!
Sunny and brisk (-10C) this morning.
I wish I could say my disposition matched the weather, but alas, sunny I am not. While I'm not as "bummed out" about the world around me as I was Monday, I don't see a lot of long-term resolution going into the volitile state of international news at the moment. On the other hand, brisk might aply describe my demeanor to my immediate surroundings. Work is very demanding at the moment, and will only get more so over the coming months. Landon is in an intense exploratory stage (both with his surroundings, and in testing the limits of Leah and I). Danielle continues to struggle with her schoolwork. Unfortunately, up to now I've left most of the homework supervision to Leah. This was an oversight/failing on my part, as Leah lets Danielle manipulate her more than I do, which has resulted an abyssmal lack of focus on Danielle's part. She's in grade three, and stumbling over three and four letter words in her reading. No wonder it takes her hours and hours to complete simple task. As a result of my observations over the past week, I've decided I need to take a much more active role in her schooling. Which means I'll need to shuffle my work schedule according, which means I'll have to work later at night than I prefer. It's a no-brainer decision, though; learning how to study and synthesize/sort concepts is -- to me -- an absolutely vital skill I want both my kids to possess.
KDE 3.1-pre1 was released yesterday. It appeared in the Portage tree this morning, and I'm currently compiling it. I won't see any results for 7 or 8 hours, but I'm post my first impressions as soon as possible. KDE's RC cycle will be a short one. RC2 is due out Monday, with a final release shortly after that. As you know, I've very excited about 3.1. It brings a new level of functionality to the Linux desktop, and other than a few minor glitches, my experiences with KDE-CVS have been very good. I'm really looking forward to KDE 3.1 final.
And this this morning from David Thorarinsson. Interesting times indeed...
We had our first winter storm yesterday, which in turn resulted in me suffering through several hours of dead-bunnies-through-straws-type connectivity [sorry, missed the connectivity stuff in my original post]. Rather than fight it, I gave up and went to bed early. Which is why I didn't get around to posting anything yesterday. Sorry about that...
ARGHHH. I haven't been at it three minutes, and Danielle's at me to help her with a math problem. I'll have to drop back later and finish this up.
OK, it's later. Gaawwd. What a nightmare week this is turning into. My eyes are already starting to glaze over for extended intervals and it's only Wednesday. Nothing major. I just seem to be spending an inordinate amount of time stomping out little brushfires. And of course every one has the potential to get out of hand and be a major problem. That and every 5 minute task I approach seems to turn into a 3 hour ordeal.
A couple bright spots from my day: Some enterprising Gentoo developer created an ebuild for Phoenix, so I downloaded and built it this afternoon. I like Phoenix -- a lot. I really, really don't need all the overhead of Mozilla, and Konq is just not stable enough for prolonged everyday use (at least for me; I understand some people have had no trouble with Konq and use it every day all day). Phoenix fits my needs like a glove. It's small, fast, and does just what I need a browser to do. Browse and manage my bookmarks. And Phoenix has been stable (at least for me) right out of the gate at version 0.1. I'm currently using 0.3; 0.4 is the latest, but there's no ebuild available for it yet and the binaries from the Mozilla site won't work under Gentoo.
Second, Cyrus released Mulberry 3.0a5 today. It incorporates a slew of minor bugfixes and polishes a few more of the rough edges. I've been using the 3.0 alpha releases since a2, and apart from a few niggly things, development is coming along nicely. The fact I'm using an alpha release for my primary email client says something for the respect I have for Cyrus' work on Mulberry.
Time to get Danielle to bed. Later.
It would appear my body is not ready for this to be Monday. I awoke stiff and feeling generally un-rested, and try as I might, I have yet to find the energy to get very excited about anything this morning. And to add insult to injury, the java beans do not seem to be doing much of anything. In short, BLEH.
I think part of my BLEH-ness today is due to to the current state of the world. I'm very much in agreement with my friend Brian. I'm tired of the bloodshed, the never-ending strife in the Mideast, the ongoing talk/threats/warnings of terrorist activities, and everything to do with politics in general (WTF kinda gas did the Russian militia release into that theater, and WTF are they not cooperating with hospitals to help doctors heal the injured? [good article by the BBC here]). I sit here, watching my kids innocently play, and hope with all my heart we can provide them with a world much different than the one I see around me today. And that, as Forest Gump would say, is all I have to say about that.
I downloaded, compiled, and installed the new "liquid" engine Mosfet released this weekend (0.9.6-pre1). It's built around the upcoming KDE 3.1 code base and QT-COPY's new widget library, so you'll have to have both of these installed before it will build. Overall, nice piece of work. Mosfet has done a lot of fiddly cleanup work -- especially with "stippling" -- and generally cleaned up icon placement/rendering. Details and changelog here.
I also saw mention of an application called "Krusader" when I was browsing the Gentoo mailing list this morning, so I emerged it. If you need a lightweight, functional file manager with a Norton Commander-style interface, check it out. I've only toyed with it briefly, but so far I like what I see and intend to give it a more thorough workout throughout the coming week.
Guess I'd better get after it. Lunch to make for Danielle, more coffee for me, and I must take some time and search for my happiness plug that evidently fell out the back of my head last night... Be well, and please be safe.
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