The Time Sink

Okay, life in the interactive lane is slowly returning to normal; give me another day or two to get things lined out. Mainspring is up and running and posting (here and on the blog), so that part is cool. ...but I have a bunch more work to do before things are as they were before. It's more or less like moving into a new place and finding things are still boxed up; I keep reaching for a 'tool', only to find I haven't installed that one yet. ...or set 'that' network link. ...or have that email address (I think I'm caught up; but if you haven't heard from me since last Thursday or so, it means I've lost your email somewhere along the way. Please resend it).

...and since I was on a Linux box for several days (even though it was in WindowMaker), my 'muscle memory' keystrokery is driving me crazy here (yes, of course: as soon as the Win2k box was back up, I redid a thing or two on ol' TuX and threw another install on him <g>): I keep highlighting things and then hitting the center button on the trackball to paste it!. Ah, well, that will be temporary until I get whatever I'm going to use back up on TuX. Debian, this go round?

Okay, weather, this is two days in a row when we've had clouds all day and the rain holds off until after I'm home and all psyched to go blade! Enough! This is California, not Hawai'i!

Right. I should just get on that blasted recumbent bike and work out there. Not. Boring. ...and it makes by tail end hurt. That's why I enjoy blading: fresh air (from 32 to 110F, although I try to avoid both extremes), I get to meet people (and their dogs), ...and it's anything but boring, what with the spiders and snails. ...and cars! Still, I wish this had been an 'early day'; I'd have liked to have gotten in some time. Between busyness, rain and not feeling all that well, I've missed more days than I like.

...and I should chill: we need the rain here for sure; we're still looking at lowered releases for the farmers unless we really get some snow. ...and we're running out of time. Although... I recall an El Niño year not too long ago when I spent a whole bunch of time on the roof of the old building patching leaks during the month of March. So, yeah, I should just consider more yoga at night...

...and I may have the problem with the Linux box figured out. I changed a thing or three about and managed a clean install earlier. ...so now it's time to pull that and throw a kitchen sink install on to see what will happen.

Brought to you by Bluefish, gFTP and KDE! Yep, that install took, and I had to pull myself away before I started playing with all the new goodies <g>...

The problem stemed from my slight rebuild when I benched Tux before bringing him inside as TuX: I'd added a 40gig HDD and hung both it and the 15gig off a controller card. Uh-uh. I'm pretty sure I could make it work, but the main problem was some confusion about Who's on First? with the HDD's running through the BIOS on the card and the OnStream tape drive and the ZIP drive plugged into the the motherboard.

The final clue was when LILO wouldn't LILO and just LIed. That's a geometry problem and one I really didn't want to deal with, especially since there's no FDD on this boxen. So... Putting the smaller boot drive on the motherboard seems to have done it. Now to test out the new toys and get all my mail over to this box!

...little things like finding goodies like GAIM working immediately and with no tweaking needed, Kmail letting me do the setup I like so much, browser features like tabbed browsing. Yeah, I need to try to break things pretty quickly. ... or just stand pat and call this box finished.

...and yes, the Cat5 is long gone from the laundry room; TuX talks to the net through Mainspring's wireless link. Which reminds me that I need to link up one of the webpads in here. ...and test out the tape backup. ...and make sure I can get some sort of media reader hooked up. ...and feed the blasted partridge.

...and the weekend is here! ...or at least within touching distance <g>! ...and I have a list of things to work on. My things! Yeah, how's that for a surprise? No kidlet projects that I know of and not too terribly much household stuff (yes, honey, I'll get that replacement door gasket on the refrigerator for sure), just the entire list left over from the last two weekends while we finished up stuff for last night's Open House at school.

...and that includes some serious computer and and garage time. I think I might as well button up Tux and see where I can go with him for a while. The Win2k box can handle things if I have to take TuX down again and I really need to move on with the router project and the X-10 project and the file server project and the other stuff that's been on hold while things shook out...

I did find one nice trick that works with RedHat's servers and their update software: remember how TuX talks to the net through Mainspring's wireless connection? Well, I needed to upload something from Mainspring last night. ...and the network and dialup connection were totally saturated by a progressing 20meg download. Sure, the upload might have slipped into a crack or two, but I thought about how well the RedHat connection recovers as their server load-cycles the demo users off. So I disabled the local NIC on Mainspring, did the upload, re-enabled the NIC, and waited. Yep, about fifteen seconds later, things were flowing from RedHat through the dialup router onto the wireless segment to Mainspring and over to TuX through the local hub on Cat5.

Ah, the weekend... So far, the scores are: Cabinet doors 1, Dan 3; Refrigerator 10, Dan 1...

FSU: 107, Nevada: 99. ...and a conference championship to boot. ...and in the last game in the arena where they've played for thirty-seven years (the on-campus arena opens this fall). Sweet. Even with the ghosts of the Tarkanian legacy hanging in the rafters for one last round of NCAA penalties... Okay, so only Cecil (and Ken! Thanks for the correction!) will understand that one, but that's okay on a Sunday morning.

...but today is a new day; and if I'm going to have the water line stub ready for the Sears people to hook the water connection for the new refrigerator later in the week, I'd best get some breakfast on board and make a parts run.

Click image for larger version

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Technology and the Future"

    Thanks for visiting!  
All content Copyright 1999->2003 Daniel C. Bowman. All rights reserved.