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Last Week Next Week Insights Index Daynotes.com Email: tom@syroidmanor.com
Like my friend Bob Thompson, I too am a packrat. I save bits of "stuff" all over my network, Just In Case. When it comes to sifting through and sync'ing up the data, however, the scope of my effort doubles in size. I use two different file systems for storage: ext3 and NTFS. Yes, I know there are kernel drivers available that will read NTFS partitions, but I personally don't think they're mature enough yet to trust with data transfer. So I've spent the better part of the day sorting data, documentation, and downloads across a mulitude of locations, taking care not to delete anything of importance while throwing out stuff no longer of value. I'm about 85% there. I'm pleased -- I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
It's raining today. That's good for the grass (you can almost see it green up by the hour), and bad for me. The kids have been inside all day and are currently threatening to tear each other's eye balls out. Sigh. I need a holiday. A long holiday.
Leah and I are going out tonight to, as the Rankin Family would say, do the "bump and grind" ;-) We're off to a friend's 61st birthday party. Catch you tomorrow. I'll attempt to do a summary of some of the cool insights I picked up during the course of the week.
Up with the birds this morning... My hope is by getting an early start on the day I can get through my task list by mid-afternoon and get an early start on the weekend. That's my hope. I'm old enough to recognize hope and reality don't always mesh well, but I'll give it my best shot.
Mmmm. This sucks. I've been working upstairs on Leah's machine on and off this week as the Danielle's on spring break -- the kids are a whole lot easier to track when I can maintain at least partial visual contact. Landon in particular. He's at the age he knows exactly where the cookies are hidden, and when Dad's working in the office, the guardian of the gate is distracted... [10:31 - Ooops, sorry. Proofing my post and I just realized I didn't finish my thought] Anywhooo, what sucks you ask? My favorite system suddenly sucks. After working on Leah's machine for a few days, suddenly my P3-1GHz notebook seems sloowwww. Bleh. It's all a matter of perception, of course, but sometimes perception really does suck. I broached the topic of a new notebook with Leah and I got a deadly stare in return. I guess that answered that.
Wireless on RH 9: I've been trying to get wireless working under RH 9 for almost a month now. No joy. So I opted for plan B: Brute Force. Late yesterday I did a clean install. This time around I picked the "Desktop" route, followed by a "Customize Packages" option at the end (I typically do a "Server" install). Probably not significant to the end result, but what the hey -- I felt adventurous. On first boot the PCMCIA service started, but I had no connectivity. So I fired up the Red Hat Network Configuration applet, added a new wireless device, tweaked the configuration, and as Pournelle would say, Bob was indeed my uncle. Heh. I love it when things work as advertised. I also installed both Gnome and KDE this time around. I'm currently pecking this from Gnome. Nice -- I kinda like it (given I've been a staunch KDE 3.1 advocate for over six months now). Or maybe it's just the change of scenery. The spice of life and all that good stuff.
And how this for having "one's head up one's ass"... I was bemoaning the notion yesterday that every time I wanted to edit an XML file on Leah's machine, I had to fire up Dreamweaver MX. Now don't get me wrong; Dreamweaver is a good product. It's just too big and complex for my tastes. I've become a devout jEdit kinda-guy. These days I work predominantly in HTML or XML and I don't like/want/need/desire a bunch of bells and whistles. I have a slew of abbreviations set up in jEdit, and my fingers (er, finger) is programmed for certain keystrokes. And I dislike most vendors idea of tag completion. In Dreamweaver (and most other HTML editors), when you type a tag the program automatically enters the associated closing tag. With jEdit, I type the opening tag, enter what I want within the tag, and when I type </, the program supplies the closing tag. If you're working with multiple embedded tags (which I frequently do), just keep typing </. In a similar scenario with a program like Dreamweaver, you end up either moving the cursor around to position your text entry, or reaching for the mouse. And any time I need to take my fingers (er, finger) off the keyboard, I get grumpy.
So there I was, working on Leah's box under XP, getting grumpy, when the light bulb started to glow. jEdit is a Java application. And one of Java's key selling points is it's cross-platform-ness. Idiot. Why not simply install jEdit on Leah's machine? And that's precisely what I did. I downloaded Sun's latest Java 2 beta (1.4.2), opened a command window, typed java -jar jedit41install.jar, and once again, Bob became my uncle. Well gawwwd damn. Ain't I just the most brilliant computer newbie that ever graced the face of this planet ;-)
Time to do some real work. Have a happy Friday.
A busy, yet productive, day. I submitted another IBM piece, enriched my knowledge base somewhat (it's been a few weeks since I had a chance to "just surf" for a spell), and got wireless working (under RH 9) on my notebook. I'm also getting better at typing with one finger :=) The good news is I should be able to unwrap my hand by Monday...
I'll detail my wireless adventures tomorrow when my finger's not so tired.
Be well -- take care.
I'm going to cheat today and do some cut'n paste... Brian Cheesman responsed to my comments regarding SARS with this:
It seems there's both more and less about SARS than we're hearing. It sure looks like it's not airborne (good news), as there hasn't been any spread to date in Toronto beyond hospital exposures, but WHO now says the virus can live 24 hours outside the body, which may explain the 17 health care professionals infected in the Sunnybrook Trauma Centre after doing a 4 hour intubation on a SARS patient, despite masks, gloves and gowns. And here in Ottawa on the weekend, they closed the airport customs and immigration for half-an-hour, when a child with SARS-like symptoms arrived from China (turned out the kid had a cold). It seems to be having a major economic impact in Toronto though. Hotel occupancy is way down (my mother-in-law was in Toronto over the weekend, and talked to a chambermaid on Saturday in a downtown Holiday Inn - normally there are 30 on duty, Saturday there were 6, and she'd been told not to come in on Sunday), and a 12,000 person cancer conference was cancelled a couple of weeks ago. Then, since they've told people to stay home if they have cough, sore throat or a temperature, there's a lot of absenteeism. There's an impact in the rest of Ontario as well: All hospitals cut off visitors and even volunteers, so hospital cafeterias, gift shops, etc. have all been hit. (And hospitals these days rely on them to augment funding, so on it goes.)
Public reaction here in Canada continues to escalate. For the first time since the SARS outbreak began, I saw someone driving around Saskatoon with a mask on their face. Mmmm.
Our summer weather continues. The grass is greening and the weeds are growing. I'm not quite in gardening mode yet, though -- maybe this weekend.
I've just returned from the doctor. In her typical wry humor she said, "I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is it's not broken. The bad news is if you want it to heal any time soon, we're going to have to wrap your hand."
"It" is the index finger on my right hand. I took a tumble on Leah's bike on Saturday (I hadn't ridden a bike in 10 years and my coordination was a tad rusty) and jammed my finger trying to thwart gravity. When it was still sore three days later, I decided to get it checked out. Turns out it's just a bad sprain. But as the doc informed me, if I want it to get better I have to keep it wrapped for a day or three. Bah. So here I sit, right hand wrapped up, pecking away with my left hand one letter at a time. This sucks. Twenty minutes to type two paragraphs. Oh well, such is life, and onward we go. Expect shorter posts this week ;-)
Happy belated Easter. Needless to say, I took yesterday off. I felt it my duty, as a Saskatoonian having suffered through a long a bitter winter, to get a sunburn before the end of April. I'm pleased to announce, I was successful ;-)
Yesterday was an outdoorsie kinda day. Leah and I mucked about in the yard and washed the car. Landon washed his car too.
I was happy to see the POWs made it home for the holiday. The US is treating this conflict very different than past conflicts as far as looking after their troops, and I think that's a Good Thing.
SARS headlines our local news. Ontario is in a state of panic. BC is battening down the hatches (Leah's sister-in-law is a nurse at a local hospital). Personally, I don't know if paranoia is appropriate, or unnecessary. I do sense there's more to SARS than we yet know or understand.
More tomorrow. Be well.
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