The Time Sink

I actually think I may have managed to catch up on my emails last night! Not my postings; there are still several of those in limbo waiting for me to put the pieces together. ...and at least one Smart Media chip in the reader with weekend pictures on it. ...but I think I replied to everyone who happened to write in on or before my computer-free weekend. Yeah, I know it really wasn't "computer free", but I spent less time at the machines the last three days than I spend some evenings during the week. Most interesting...

...and I didn't get all that much accomplished other than some downtime I realized I needed (post fodder for the other site at some point). I watched some football; retuned my muscles for a different setup on my blades; enjoyed a silly time or two; rested whenever the urge struck, and came away with some perspective on Getting Things Done... Now to see how that holds up against the workaday world.

Whoohooo! The power that is cut us loose early yesterday! That was way cool as I wanted to come home and play on the boxen. I ran across this thread on Bob Thompson's Daynotes Journal Messageboard and I wanted to try out the bit Brian Bilbrey posted on January 14th.

I was scheduled to meet Shelley and the boys at my Mom's house after work for a birthday party for her; the 'early out' let me come home and try out the test part of that post. ...and it worked great against my Windows network! ...and I recall someone having something the other day about a tool for fstab that managed the tabs and such for you, so I started looking for that. ...and then we had to leave.

...only to return many hours later full of Chinese food and chocolate cake. ...and realizing any attempt of any sort on configuration files on the production machine would be like cleaning a loaded gun. Off to bed...

What the heck happened to the early morning post for today? ...or the one at noon? Oh, yeah, I must have just forgotten...

...and I'm still tired <g>! So tired I can't remember what I was working on last night before I got side tracked... I mean, like there's no shortage of projects here in front of me: I know I was working on parsing the entries in the fstab file samples so I'd have more than a general clue before I started mucking around. ...and I know I shut down the project I had open on the Win2k side of the test bed so I could take a look at why SuSe's YAST2 was choking on my NIC. ...and that was important 'cause Debian showed up yesterday and I wanted to throw that on. ...and at one point I'd started setting up a Linux install on a webpad since I finally have all the pieces of the hardware puzzle in place (port replicator, FDD, parallel-based CDROM, modem for one serial port, wireless NIC for one PCMCIA slot, wired NIC for the other, spare HDD to test with, 128mb solid state drive for final install, partridge...)

Move along... There's nothing to see here... Yeah, that's pretty much it; after the day job and homework this evening, I'm pretty much done in. I'm not sure when I've looked forward to a weekend to just break the pace of a week. ...and it's not that I haven't managed to get a few things done here and there; it's just that what's been accomplished doesn't bear a whole lot of resemblance to the to-do lists at either location.

So, I think the cure is to hit the sack and get some sleep. If that actually happens, perhaps I can get in to work early and from there get home early enough to beat the rain if it comes in early...

So I get in early enough to know I'll be cool to be home in time to blade before the fog hides the sun. ...and maybe in time to do a bit of yard work! Until my boss walks in and says, "You'll be having auditors around nine o'clock." Flying monkeys must run in my family...

"Auditors" translates to Janeen pulling whatever check/invoice combination they see fit to randomize us with, and me figuring out exactly why something that should be simple isn't. Today's caltrops were entries that were broken out and entered for accounting by department (but were integrated within the full check write) and some basic miscommunication about exactly which entry was meant by that checkmark right there.

The final result pleased my boss very much, but Janeen ended up with files scattered everywhere and I ended up with a lost morning from covering her position and helping Rosetta Stone the problems. Still...

...and I did get home in time to blade; Monday won't be any fun, mainly because I just converted my 'tasks' to Monday's date; but the day ended in a tie as best I see it.

Good morning! Yeah, a Saturday morning post for a change... Well, there are things to be done and I want to get a link posted before more flying monkeys showed up:

Yesterday, garret over at dangerousmeta flagged a link as important; he doesn't do that very often, so I took a look at:

What I found was an excellent overview (from my admittedly limited knowledge base in this area) of exactly why the Guantanamo base is being used, rather than say, some salt flat in Nevada: in the legal arena, the administration is defining the playing field. Have a look, it's an interesting read.

Well, SuSe and I just aren't getting along... Remember that lockup during the setup process when YAST2 tried to probe the network card? Well, last night I let the installation continue without setting up the network card, just the sound card. ...and it completed. Cool, now to try for the network. No go; YAST2 just wouldn't initialize... Several hard reboots later (with the same results) and I was pretty much conviced I was going to have to give up this route and just put Red Hat back on. ...or really jump into that special TimeSink quicksand and start playing with Debian!

Waddayaknow, when I fired YAST2 back up, it initialized just fine. ...and showed an eth0. ...and with a tulip driver. Cool; I know this should work. ...and sure enough it did: network connectivity through the router and out to the net. So I started downloading Ximian RedCarpet. Yeah, JHR, I'll let you know how that whole thing turns out.

One twiddly bit from SuSe 7.3: it gave me desktop mount points for three of the Win2k partitions. I need to take a look at the fstab and see if I can figure out why only three of the four were picked. ...maybe because one is NTFS???