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Last Week Next Week Insights Index Daynotes.com Email: tom@syroidmanor.com
ulI do apologize for the lack of posts here over the last few days, but it's been a very long and difficult week.
We still have snow on the ground. Yesterday the wind howled and drove the temperatures down to around -15C. I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but this winter has truly broken my spirit. Too long; too harsh. Our kids are driving us crazy. You simply can't bottle young children up for six months, especially energetic kids like ours. They need to run and play and run some more. They haven't been able to do that this winter, so instead they run around the house, fight, and break things.
This week I had a major application to install on our company server in Indy. I knew the task would be a challenge due to the fact I'd have to do it all remotely, and I spent a great deal of time anticipating everything I could possible think of that could go wrong. I didn't get any real surprises, but what I thought would take 36 hours took four days. Four very long days.
So this afternoon (or what's left of it) I'm going to go lie down and do nothing. I don't want to sleep, or read, or think. I just want to close my eyes and escape for a few hours.
Be well. I'll work at improving my consistency next week.
The snow remains/continues. The temperature is -10C. I'm too depressed to check the forecast. It's April 2. I'm not amused. The prolonged winter this year has really broken the spirit of both Leah and I. We love Saskatoon, and generally speaking, we love the ambiance of Saskatchewan, but we no longer have any desire to live somewhere that demands parkas in April. BTDT. No idea where this all will lead; Leah and I plan to wait for a nice sunny day to talk further.
I'm even less impressed with my Red Hat Network subscription. All their servers are seriously bogged down, slow, and in some cases, completely unresponsive. Red Hat made a point of promoting RHN as a means to download RH 9 early. They evidently did not anticipate the response they'd get. Bad business to promote something they can't deliver on. I'm not in a huge rush to get my hands on RH 9, but one of the selling features of subscribing to RHN was to grant early access, to independent servers, to those that did. I've been trying to get RH 9 for 24 hours now. I have two of three ISOs down. The third is chortling away. It quits every few hours and I have to restart the process. Bad PR.
Two bright spots amid the swirling snow and stalled downloads: Leah's system (currently running XP for a multitude of reasons) had a brain hemorrage last night. It's working again, but the system is clearly not firing on all cylinders. Leah announced to me last night -- no prompting from me whatsoever -- that she thought it might be a good idea to try out RH 9 on her system. Heh ;-).
Two, I'm delighted with what I see in Moneydance. Support for Canadian online banking is missing, but overall the product looks and acts like a mature, well crafted piece of software. The final say on this one, however, will fall to Leah. You'll know when I do.
Three (OK, so I lied ;-), I've been keeping my Gentoo install on Phaedrus "current unstable" (that is, emerge -u[p] world on a daily basis) for almost a week now. Everything I've built/installed during this time has compiled without error or incident. Even the new Nvidia drivers installed without trouble (I should point out, lots of people experienced problems with these new drivers), and they've evidently fixed the 2-D "sluggishness" the previous version displayed. It was also nice to find OpenSSH 3.6-p1 in the Portage tree this morning. I installed it around 7am; it's been running like a top ever since -- and I use SSH for pretty much all inter-system communication around here. Kudos to the Gentoo development team.
Good day and welcome to April. We awoke to blowing snow this morning. Late yesterday afternoon Leah and I sat on the back porch and commented on how nice the warm sun felt. And so it goes. Spring in the prairies.
I enjoyed a very relaxing and pleasurable "extended" weekend. Sunday was my birthday. Fourty-five years young ;-) We had some friends over, Leah make her world famous lasagna, and we enjoyed some of our very own (home made; well, home-made from a kit) white wine. A fine time was had by all.
I worked yesterday -- just not at my normal fevered pitch. I spent the day doing some testing of the application suite I managed to get installed and working last Friday. I also battled the email genie all day. For whatever reason, all the mailing lists I subscribe to were unusually "chatty" yesterday.
FYI: OpenSSH 3.6 was released yesterday To the best of my knowledge, 3.6 contains no major security fixes but it does contain several enhancements to the privlege separation code. Check the release notes for details (www.openssh.org).
I bought a one-year basic subscription to RHN this morning. I have, after all, been downloading free Red Hat ISO's for several years now. Time to give back something to the cause. It's also nice to have priority access to updates and new releases. Guess that means I can download 9.0 ISO's today...
I also intend to purchase a copy of Moneydance today. I downloaded the trial yesterday and had a look. I was suitably impressed with what I saw. It's only $30 US, and versions are available for Linux, Mac, and Windoze. Check it out.
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