Tom at 16

Week of January 6th, 2003

Latest Update: Saturday January 11, 2003 12:35

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Sunday January 12, 2003

The weather remains "seasonal" -- -30C this morning. Thankfully, there's only a trace of wind.

Yesterday was consumed with household chores. Laundry, sorting the kid's room for another week, toys back to the playroom and in their respective containers, floors, etc, etc.

Danielle went to a friends for a sleep-over last night; Leah went to her company's belated Christmas party. Which left Landon and Dad. So we had our own sleep-over, complete with popcorn and a movie. A nice end to a busy day.

Today I've got to finish up a tutorial for IBM. Hopefully I can knock it off in 3 or 4 hours, then curl up with the kids for the balance of the day.

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Saturday January 11, 2003

Not feeling terribly chatty these day. Can't put my finger on why -- just the way it is right now. Bear with me.

Some pictures need no caption or explanations. Here's two:

I don't have a clue how to create a thumbnail with Dreamweaver MX, which just happens to be the program I'm in at the moment. Oh well. I'll return and patch things up later.

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Thursday January 9, 2002

Brrrr. It's COLD this morning. Minus 10 with a brisk wind. Of course, cold is a relative term. I guess I should say it's cold relative to the spring-like weather we've been enjoying...

Sorry about the graphics smoz. It seems I misplaced my graphics directory somewhere... Bah. I hate it when that happens.

I think I've finally got most of my ducks in a row regarding my new Gentoo installation. I fixed the last major "niggle" this morning -- sound wasn't working under KDE. As it turns out, it was a simple matter of re-compiling the maestro3 driver into the kernel, instead of as a module. Weird Stuff, apparently related to ALSA versions. I had this some problem once before. I found in order to get sound working I had to make sure the maestro3 driver was compiled into the kernel. Then, after an alsa upgrade, sound stopped working. So after scratching my head for several hours, I recompiled the kernel with maestro3 as a module. Sound worked again. Now the driver appears to have reversed course yet again. Oh well. Sound works again.

[tom@hydras]:/export/home/tom # uptime
  09:42AM   up 254 days,  15:45,  1 user,  load average: 0.06, 0.04, 0.02
[tom@hydras]:/export/home/tom #

--> Big Shit-Eating Grin <--

I don't think I've ever had a box that's been up for almost 300 days. Kudos to AIX 5.1 and the remarkable stability of the RS/6000 platform.

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Wednesday January 8, 2003

Gosh... how time flies when you're having fun. I say that tongue-in-cheek of course. The past week has been a blurr, and I can probably count on one hand the number of things I've done that are "fun".

Vancouver was Vancouver. Despite the fact I grew up there, and it is without a doubt one of the most beautiful cities in the world (to visit as a tourist, that is), I find very little about Vancouver compelling or alluring. It's big (relative to when I grew up), it's sprawling, traffic is nuts, and everyone's in a hurry to be somewhere they're not. Oh well. To each their own. Personally, I'd prefer spending two hours a day reading or playing with my kids rather than sitting in traffic. Which is why I live where I live.

The "family matter" I flew to Vancouver over is personal and not for public consumption -- at least not at this time. Suffice to say I'm deeply troubled by what I learned this weekend and sailing in unchartered waters.

I managed to get Gentoo 1.4-RC2 to install last week. Turns out there was a bug in one of the scripts that only manifested itself if one "unmasked" ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86" early in the build process -- which I was doing. The trick, it turned out, was to build the base system using the defaults, compile the kernel, configure, reboot, THEN unmask your desired customization settings and do a emerge sync && emerge -up world. Apparently, the aforementioned bug has be addressed in the latest available stage? builds.

I decided to go ahead and install Gnome 2 on my system while I was waiting for KDE 3.1-RC6 to hit the Portage tree (I didn't want to compile KDE twice as it takes something like twelve hours on my system). Perhaps I'm just used to KDE and it's conventions/mannerisms, but I wasn't terribly impressed with Gnome. I explored the menus and associated apps for about two hours Friday night and haven't been back since. KDE RC6 became available one the weekend, and I started the build process Monday night. By Tuesday morning it had completed without error or incident. I'm a happy camper again.

It's becoming increasingly evident, given my workload this month, I'm not going to get a whole lot done toward my goal of restructured database-backed Web site. I will, however, make an effort to revamp my index page, make it a little more current than it is right now, and move all previous year's entries to individual pages.

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