The Time Sink

Summer is officially here: the boys are out of school. ...and sporting "spiked" hair.

...and if you don't think they have the attitudes to go along with the new hair, you haven't been reading our sites enough! Man, it is going to be a long summer...

It's already been a long weekend without Wolf! I'll probably end up kvetching about it for another few days (or maybe even into the weekend), but I wasn't planning on taking that box down until July. First up was Athena, the Win95 box; that one was scheduled for a new motherboard and some other parts I'd found during the cleanup. ...and Tux^2 wasn't quite where I wanted him to be to take the full load of the daily work.

The game plan was for Wolf to take the workload since he had all the software I use for the day to day webwork; Tux^2 would take the overflow and transition into a full time workstation; and Athena would come back up as a Win98 machine with USB connectivity and a gaming machine. ...followed by a rebuild of Wolf as an NT box that would be my fallback machine.

Yeah, I've been busy. ...and not working on machines at home. Well, other than trading out Shelley's trackball... Surprise, honey! Now you get to relearn some muscle macros as you move from that old castoff Logitech simple unit to your new castoff Logitech Trackman+. Wow, lots of new features and stuff to learn...

Oh, yeah; back to me and the busy thing; those new rigs we're going to start using are finally in the pipeline; that means all the other stuff needs to come up to speed RSN. ...like yesterday in the case of the things with the longest lead times. Which means I am one busy puppy down at the office trying to get my ducks in a row. ...and lately it seems as thought those ducks are lined up as in a shooting gallery! ...and I'm that duck in front that changes direction every time a shot hits.

Last night I came home so BTS that I just read the paper, paid the bills and went to bed. No posts, no email, no garden staring, no nada. Bed. Didn't help; today still did the deceased hare/soda straw thing. Until late, late this afternoon when I came up with a spreadsheet to help the tech chief give me answers I need on some of the equipment orders that need to happen this week.

He keeps getting different plans handed to him about how many old rigs will be downed as the new ones come on line. ...and he's having to refigure his radio and GPS requirements relative to the final configuration of the fleet. ...and it's driving him buggy. So I made him a tool that he can just plug his figures into. ...and out come my figures. If things change for him, I can react immediately. ...and keep reacting as events unfold.

Hmmm... How many times have I mentioned I'm a planner, not a reactor? Maybe I've managed to get the cooling rods pushed back in a little... We'll see in the next day or two. So, if I owe you an email or a phone call, it may take another day or two to get things back in some sort or equilibrium...

Oh man, Hump day. ...and so aptly named! It's all downhill from here. ...figuratively and literally.

...at least the weather's been good, or so they tell me. I think I'll get out of the office tomorrow and find out. We've been hitting the mid-eighties here lately and that's made for some real decent evenings. Now if I can just get caught up on a few projects, I can take an outside break after everyone is asleep. ...and at least I'm not having to take work home <g>.

I still haven't even had a shot at starting on Wolf's rebuild; that's frustrating me to no end. ...but Tux^2 is holding up his end of the deal and Athena's still hanging in there for the Windows-based stuff, so life's okay.

I think I'll bounce off of Dave's post this morning...

...and I'm hoping I didn't pitch those motherboards the other day, he may want one<g>. Nah, I just checked the Asus website; it doesn't look like I have the P55T2P4 series at all. The ones I have/had were the series with the processors on a daughterboard (probably the P65UP5 series). I had one here with a single P-200 and another with two P-200s. ...and I know where there's another single-processor unit: under my desk at work, still running smoothly after all this time.

...and on that ATI Xpert 98 video card he mentions? If you need a card Right Now sometime, you might check your local Office Depot; they have them in stock most days. I'll let you know when they start clearing them out. Ummm... I also know where one of those is sitting: in Tux^2 doing just fine under Red Hat 7.1...

Addendum to yesterday's post following Dave's post about Win95 machines and such: Best Buy this week has an $20 instant rebate on the $49 Creative 16PCI Sound Cards... Of course, I just dropped in at my local Office Depot and requested a price match: No problem... While I was there, I checked out those ATI Xpert cards; locally they are the 8meg versions.

Hours, simply a few hours until the weekend. I can hardly wait. It's been an un-fun week and I am so ready to kick back and relax at something that doesn't resemble work. ...or I was until Shelley paged me out yesterday with that code that says "No one's dead, but it's not outside the realm of possibility..." It seems one of the pressure reducers for the low volume sprinkler system blew out and proceeded to flood the side non-yard. Sheesh; plumbing repair duties on Father's Day weekend...

Some tough decisions to be made here in the next hour or so... I'm going to have to figure out if I'm going to go into 'inside mode' or 'outside mode'.

On the inside front, there's a computer to rebuild and one of two spaces that needs to be cleaned first. On the outside front, there's a barbecue with some breakfast sausage cooking, a pool to cool off in, and a drip system that needs to come back on line ASAP.

I guess I should factor in that it was 101F when I came home from work yesterday and nearly eighty when I got up a few hours back. ...balanced off with the seven ounce Miller Drafts I found at the store last night when I was picking up the steaks for tonight's dinner.

Oh, yeah, that's right: Shelley's father is coming over tonight for a combination Hippo Birdy/Father's Day dinner. Sitting on the other end of the cook chamber from that sausage are two tri-tips, one with rub, one without (I'll let you know how the plain one turns out, JHR). This will be one of those days I appreciate the arduous duty off manning the barbecue: keep the firebox full of mesquite and enjoy the occasional cool beverage while cooling off.

Yep, it ended up being an outside type of day. Once I got cooled off in the pool, I just stayed outside and dinked around in the yard. No major accomplishments to speak of, but the drip system and low volume sprinklers are back up. ...and I did play around with the misting system that I'd picked up last year in an attempt to extend Shelley's available time outside. It didn't really do much for her over on the north side, but over by the Japanese garden there's a chance it may do some good in the evenings.

...and dinner turned out well. We had a near crisis when the meat came up to temp about two hours too early, but I cooled the firebox down with some water-soaked chunks of hickory and turned the beast into a true smoker for a time. When Shelley gave me a target time for her pilaf to come out, I brought the temperature back up again. Both the roasts (with and without rub) came out cooked and moist, the perfect combination. In retrospect, I probably could have used the casserole dish with the pilaf on the hot end of the cooking chamber and saved the use of the stove inside.