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Last Week Next Week Insights Index Daynotes.com Email: tom@syroidmanor.com
If you read my last post literally (and how else does one read a writer's writings?), it would appear I'm not very good at keeping promises. Yes and No. I try to avoid writing checks that can't be cashed, but the truth is there are a lot of facets about my life that demand a great deal of careful juggling. And I have a problem; two, actually. I don't like to disappoint, and despite how crazy my days get at times I still cling to the ridiculous notion that I do it all if I just throw a little more effort at the situtation(s).
I have a job that I could spend 18 hours a day at and still never "get ahead". I know, because I've tried. I also know that unless I make a conscious effort to work realistic hours, my job will -- quite literally -- kill me. I'm not 25 anymore and my last medical contained quiet warning signs. Fortunately, nothing serious, but warnings nonetheless. In addition, doing any one thing for 18 hours a day is not healthy -- from a mental perspective. You get focused on one thing and lose perspective on everything else. You start to make bad decisions. You start to work harder instead of smarter. Plus, balance is lost, which in turn affects everyone and everything. So about two weeks ago I promised myself I'd make every effort to walk away from my desk between 5 and 5:30 Monday to Friday, and to make working on the weekends an exception rather than a rule. Friday aside, I've kept my promise. And trust me, getting up and walking away from an unsolved problem is not easy for me.
I have a wife who is actively pursuing a career with London Drugs. She's currently the early morning stocking crew "team leader"; I suspect within a year they'll ask her to be a floor supervisor. She's good at what she does, and more importantly, she enjoys her job. Before she took the team leader position, we talked at length about how it would change things around our household. I gave Leah my word that if she truely wanted to take the position, I'd support her. That support has meant I've needed to take a more active role in the day-to-day running of our household. Generally speaking, I've always been pretty active when it comes to family matters, but there a number of things Leah used to do that are now my responsibility. For example, Leah's at work when the kids get up. So I have to get them fed and watered, and Danielle off to school. Saturday is typically our day to clean house. Leah works until 2pm, and by the time she gets home from "the office", she's ready to sit down and relax -- not wash walls or scrub toilets. So I try to make sure most of the heavy lifting is done before she gets home. Thus far, I've kept my promise to Leah.
I'm blessed with two healthy and [very] active children. Ask any parent -- kids grow up fast. One day you're changing their diaper, the next helping them make a decision about which university to attend. The phrase "time flies" is especially pertinent when it comes to raising children. I made a promise to myself several years ago that I would spend time with my kids while they were kids. Some days I do better than others, but overall I've kept my promise on this one too.
As you can see, I'm a pretty busy guy trying to keep all my promises ;-) My ramblings here are an important part of my daily routine. This fact should be self-evident -- I've been at it for five years now. I really do try to post every day, but there are days I must choose between balance (or personal sanity) and trying to make everyone happy. Lately, I've opted for balance.
I've developed some very profound and deep friendships over the years as a direct result of my writings here. If I miss a day or three now and then, it doesn't mean I don't love "ya'll" any less -- it just means I'm working hard to ensure this soapbox will still be here five years from now.
BTW, I don't routinely check email at night or on the weekends anymore. It's too hard for me to skip over work-related issues. So I've adopted a "what you don't know can't bite you in the ass" mentality. The jury's still out, but so far so good.
Yesterday was a day of great celebration here in Saskatoon. Spring arrived. A week ago it was -45C. Yesterday it was +10C (about 50F for my 'merican' readers). The water was -- quite literally -- running in the streets. Only in the prairies. To mark the event, I shovelled off the back porch, put out the deck chairs, and spent an hour sitting, enjoying the sun's warmth. Then I fired up the barbeque. Whooo-hoooo. Our first BBQ of the year. I have a lot of things to be thankful for in my life, but today I'm focused on one thing -- the temperature is above zero ;-)
Be well and have a great Sunday everyone.
Every now and then I read something I can really relate to. Today I gleen inspiration and humor from Pournelle's post yesterday: "I am being nibbled to death by ducks: a million small things to attend to." Ducks indeed ;-). I should rename my TODO List my Duck List.
I started this over an hour ago, and have yet to make it past the first paragraph above. So I'll promise to return later. Too many ducks around my ankles just at the moment...
I have no idea where my days go... last time I recall looking at a clock it was 7am. Now it's after 7pm, the house is winding down for the evening, and I've hardly dented my TODO list for the day. Bother.
For a while today I thought I might have to spend the weekend rebuilding the Gentoo installation on my laptop. My newly minted wireless connectivity would cease-and-desist for no apparent reason. I still hadn't resolved the "modprobe" errors. cdrecord -scanbus no longer responded as it used to. And overall, things just kinda felt flakey. Grand Bother. You see, I've grown kinda attached to this Gentoo installation. Over the months I've tweaked and tuned just about everything to my satisfaction, and I don't know about you, but despite heroic efforts I never get an installation exactly like I had it when I rebuild. Open Source software is a very dynamic playground.
Now don't get me wrong... I like to muck about on the bleeding edge, and I accept the consequences of doing so. I'm actually surprised I've managed to keep this installation intact and stable for as long as I have -- given what I ask of it. Anyway, the short side of a long story is I've cured all my current ills. Well, all the current ills I'm currently aware of ;-) The culprit of the errors I struggled with last night was devfsd-1.3.25-r2. The reason cdrecord -scanbus spit out a bunch of errors when queried was devfsd-1.3.25-r1. I'm back at revision 1.3.25 and cdrecord works as advertised, and I can login and out without error. How did I stumble on the solution? Good guessing :=) I keep up with the Gentoo user and dev mailing lists every day, religiously, and there was a message posted a few days back I flagged for further attention out of curiousity (I don't always have time to read every word of every message, so if something tweaks my interest and I'm in a hurry, I flag it for later). The message referred to some device weirdness the writer was experiencing that he had solved by backing off his devfsd build to 1.3.25. So there ya' go. Escaped the executioner's axe yet again...
The weather prognosticators are calling for a mixed bag over the next few days. A warming trend, snow, and temperatures above zero by the weekend. Goodie.
Mmmm. I have wireless working on my laptop again. I'd love to tell you it was my gift for technical problem solving that made the bits and bytes flow across the ether again, but alas, it was fluke and a new card manager revision.
About a week ago I emerged PCMCIA-CS-3.2.3, the latest linux-wlan-ng drivers, and a few misc wireless utilities. My wireless card hasn't worked for so long that it never even dawned on me to try it at the time. Tonight I plugged my Linksys card in and it sorta came to life (one beep and some flickering on the LCD). Well, well. Haven't seen that much activity in months. What really surprised me was the card manager detected the chipset as an orinoco_cs. In the two years I've used a Linksys WPC11 in my laptop, PCMCIA has yet to see the card as orinoco-based. Yes, I know it's supposed to come up that way -- just never has. Weird. So I twiddled and tweaked the config files a bit, and connected to my WAP. Cool. Look Ma' -- no cords.
'Course every accomplishment I've experienced over the course of the last three months tends to come with a little rug-rat bitting at my ankles...
Tonight when I log in or out of Phaedrus as a 'normal' user, I get a screen full of modprobe errors. Huh? Doesn't happen as root. Happens as me, or as another 'normal' user, when I login from the console. Doesn't happen when I remotely log into the box via SSH from another machine. Doesn't happen when I 'su -' to myself from a terminal window.
I re-emerged pam
I re-emerged devfsd
I dunno. It's late, and it's been a long day. The problem is not a show-stopper -- everything works; I can login and out, etc. Just an annoyance. And weird. Never seen anything like it before...
On a rather upbeat note, the refridgerator front is finally lifting. While we can't quite grow oranges here yet, the thermometer did climb all the way to -10C this afternoon. Whoo-Hooo.
Every now and then I have a day that seems especially conducive to learning "new stuff". Yesterday was one of those days. I read almost non-stop from the time I awoke until late into the evening -- much to the chagrin of my family ;-) I discovered pax, a very efficient file archive utility (Portable Archive eXchange) that can also be used to mirror/copy a complete directory structure somewhere else. In all my years of hacking at the *NIX command line, I'd never heard of pax. I love it when that happens. If you have enough free space on your hard drive, and your distribution ships with pax (whereis pax), try this:
cd mkdir /tmp/test pax -rw . /tmp/test
Two words of caution: the destination directory MUST exist; don't make the mistake of creating an endless recursive loop (cd ;; mkdir test ;; pax -rw . test). Type man pax for details.
I also discovered a ton of new and cool things I can do with rsync, I learned how to create a CD on-the-fly (that is, without creating an intermediary ISO) from the command line using cdrecord, I stumbled across a bunch of new keyboard shortcuts to use with JEdit, and I found a whole hockey-sock full of new online resources on everything from USB to digital cameras to LDAP. I need to clean up and revamp my bookmark file (it was on my list for yesterday, but I was too busy adding items...); when I do I'll post it here -- yes, it's been a long time since I updated my bookmark link.
In addition to my knowledge base updates, I also found time to:
mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /mnt/camera), and lo-and-behold, I could access my camera from Linux. Heh.Yup. Busy guy I was. Now to take all the insight I gained yesterday and use it for something constructive... Have a great Monday!
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