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Last Week Next Week Insights Index Daynotes.com Email: tom@syroidmanor.com
Yesterday was BEAUUTEEFULL. Stunning. Sunny, warm (20C) -- the ideal early summer day. And it twearn't just me. It was almost like someone unlocked the gates to a lost civilization. Three days ago the streets were quiet, almost devoid of traffic. Yesterday almost all of Saskatoon was out and about; doing something, going somewhere. People walking their dogs, people pushing strollers, people roller-blading, people taking their motorcycles out for the first time this year, jeeps driving by sans tops... Amazing. There's at least one universal truism I've learned about living in northern clims: After a long winter, when the warm weather finally arrives, people take full advantage of it.
So what did I do to celebrate the day? Well, I got the front yard raked and most of the flower beds turned. I got the garage swept out. I even got the trees pruned. And of course, we barbequed. Chicken kabobs along with Leah's famous potato salad. Yum.
And while they don't always vocalize it, the kids appreciate the weather as well. Landon and Danielle spent almost all day outside playing. Kids need to run and play and build sand castles (we have a huge sandbox in our backyard). It's their nature. When they can't, they fight and squabble. And argue with their parents. Give them a yard to run around in, and a quiet peace falls upon the kingdom.
Needless to say, I didn't spend a whole lot of time sitting in front of a computer yesterday. Leah's new box continues to run like a top. Leah loves it. I love it too except for one thing -- her monitor. It's a 15" LCD. It's clear and sharp and the color is exceptional. But it only supports a maximum resolution of 1024x768. I run all my systems at 1600x1200. So when I sit down at Leah's machine, I find myself constantly shifting windows around to see/read stuff. Most of the screen seems taken up with toolbars, window borders, and other needless crap (or maybe that should read non-essential crap). Oh well. I suspect that's a blessing in disguise from Leah's perspective ;-)
I'm off to putter in the backyard. Gee, I might even get the car washed today... Imagine that -- being able to wash the car in my own driveway.
The sun has returned; the snow is gone. The forecast calls for the nice weather to continue through the weekend with temperatures around 18C. Nice. And long overdue.
The kids and I have just returned from an Easter egg hunt at the store where Leah works. Leah talked the management into donating some eggs for the project, and she hid them in one section of the store then had the staff's kids come in and "hunt them out". Great idea. Kudos to my wife. A grand time was had by all.
Speaking of my wife, I built Leah a new computer last night. Well, kinda-sorta. I picked up an Asus K7 motherboard and Althon XP 2100+ CPU on sale yesterday, so I dropped them into her existing system, and rounded it out with a new WD 80GB hard drive (as the old MB had a SCSI HD and the SCSI controller was on the MB). After much discussion, we settled on XP for the OS. Leah actually wanted to go with Red Hat 9 <grin/> but I don't have time at the moment to fiddle around with configuring peripherals, and XP is definitely lightyears ahead of Linux in this regard. Plug the device in and it works. Ta and Da. I also need a system around here running Office 2003 -- none of my systems are running Windows at the moment. It sounds like O'Reilly wants a revision of Outlook in a Nutshell sometime in the not-too-distant future. I'm not sure what role I'll play in the book, but I will be involved at some level, and as such, I'll need to be familiar with Outlook 2003.
The new system is really fast -- I'm impressed. This is our second AMD-based system here at Syroid Manor, and so far we've been very pleased with our buying decisions.
Dashing through the snow, in a one horse open sleigh. 'Or the fields we go, laughing all the way... Not. No laughing around here. There's a blizzard blowing outside; I can't even see across the street. Damn. Will this winter ever end? No, don't answer that.
Enough war, weather, and politics... On to some computer-related topics, which is what this journal's supposed to be all about.
I recv'd a copy of Longhorn -- beta 1, I assume -- about 10 days ago. We've been running it on Leah's machine for about a week now. By way of appraisal, about the most honest comment I can make at this time is -- interesting. The interface is evolutionary, but revolutionary. The new filesystem slated to ship with Longhorn (based on Yukon) is not yet implemented. Some things are easier to accomplish; others remain convoluted (or at best, unintuitive). It's also very beta -- perhaps even alpha. I can break it at will, on a consistent basis. But it was interesting to see what's coming down the pike. I'll likely scrub the box this weekend and return it to whatever Leah desires.
I've been working with RH 9 for two weeks now on a variety of boxes, in a variety of capacities. My initial views remain unchanged for the most part. It's pretty. It recognizes more hardward than RH 8, and the setup is more seamless than previous renditions. Is it worth the upgrade? That's a toughie. I have both RH 8 and RH 9 on kronk, my dual Athlon "server" (server cuz it's functioning and accessed primarily as a server, although I do use it as a workstation on occasion). I've updated RH 8 to KDE 3.1. Honestly, I don't notice a whole lot of difference between the two distributions. So I guess the bottom line is, if you're shopping for an easily installed, easy to maintain (a subscription to RHN makes the process even easier), Linux distribution, RH 9 is a good choice. If you have an exisiting RH 8 installation, that's current as far as patches and updates go, and you're willing to seek out and install KDE 3.1, you're not going to gain a whole lot by upgrading. IMHO, of course. Cheers.
Onward and upward, I suppose.
I don't believe it. It's April 15th, 10:30pm. I just looked out the front window, and it's snowing. Snowing. I pinched myself and checked the forecast. It's supposed to continue through tomorrow. If it wasn't so cold and wet outside, I'd go out in the back yard and slash my wrists ;-)
Another long day. I finished up a bunch of high level-edits (high-level edits are edits suggested by someone higher up the food chain than me), catalogued all the accompanying screen shots, and shot everything back to my boss for submission. It's over. Until the next round of edits (from IBM) -- if any.
I'm done. Toast. Fini. And no, I'm not going to shovel the driveway before I go to bed. Bleh.
A rather mundane day here in Saskatoon and at Syroid Manor. Grey and overcast. Coolish. Bleak. Which has in turn affected the mood of both Leah and I. We're not depressed or upset or... well... anything. That's it. We're just not anything ;-)
I have to assume the war is over. All of CNN's correspondents have returned to their regular duties. The banner at the top of the screen still reads "The War in Iraq", but reporting has returned to domestic issues and the stock market. Oh yes, and more purported chemical weapon discoveries. Mmm. I'm not going to climb on a political soapbox here, but Rumsfeld's remarks today about Syria possessing chemical weapons stopped me dead in my tracks. Wasn't it Rumsfeld that insisted Iraq possessed chemical weapons? Now correct me if I'm wrong here, but so far the only chemical that the military has recovered to date is a bunch of industrial strength pesticide. Kinda makes my occasional soapbox look kinda small. Enough. I donna-wanna-go-there.
What else is new? Not much. I wrote all day. Finished up another tutorial for IBM. I'll let you know when it's posted. It is -- I don't mind saying -- a good one. It's also the culmunation of 5 months of hard work. Amazing. I bust my ass for five months, and I can put the whole adventure in about 15,000 words. Sigh.
A batch of weekly newsletters just arrived in my Inbox. I think I'll go surf for a spell. It's been a while.
Before I go, a moment of levity compliments of Landon...
Leah and Landon are out shopping. Landon spots a pair of Joe Boxers that are kid size. He looks at Leah. "Mom, are those underwear?" Leah nods and says yes. "Mom, can I have a pair of those?" The pattern was bright blues and yellow with race cars on them, and I suspect this caught his attention. Then, right out of blue Landon looks at Leah and says, "Mom, if I wear those will I be a big man?" Leah was laughing so hard she couldn't say no and bought them on the spot.
Landon's parading around the house tonight in his new Joe Boxers and being a "big man" ;-) Have a pleasant evening.
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