The Time Sink

Well, so far, we've only had that one incident with the Cessna, but that was understandable... Yes, pics at some point...

...and it's time to note some serious props to the teachers at the middle school. This bunch is great; I've mentioned how they post assignments and grades, but they are also quick to respond to a request for information or to clarify how an answer should be presented. ...and that's great deal for parents!

Darn. I kinda' ran out of the day.... Well, that's because I was working over here doing some home automation stuff instead... (archived here for this site).

(retrospective, Part I) I blame this on on Dave. ...and well, his buddy Steve. I caught Dave's piece on Easy and secure remote Linux/Unix file transfers with SCP and sent it to the Win2k box to play with the next time I had anything like play time. ...but along the way, I routed the piece to the Linux box because of Steve's comment about apt being ported to Red Hat. I've had problems with Red Hat's updater with my dialup and had just given up on it. ...and in the process I've hosed a bit or two. Apt looked promising.

Short version: if you're running Red Hat or any of the other versions the port covers, just go download it. Now. Right now. Yes, it works. Better yet, it can fix things!!!! Oh, my, yes! It found a couple of places where my Red Hat install was less than perfect. Yeah, I can't blame all of it on Red Hat; certainly some of the problems have to do with me installing RPMs on my own (and missing an dependency or two). ...but the apt port and the -f switch worked wonders for me. I spent the night updating and fixing and updating and just having a grand old time...

(retrospective, Part II) By the time Thursday evening rolled around (meaning homework was finished and i thought I'd have a life), I'd decided to give the GUI at try. Yep, this little gem called Synaptic provides a very nice interface showing dependencies and download totals for packages you select. ...and that's pretty important on a dialup. Oh, and the apt/Synaptic combo caches things; so if you do have an interrupted download, you can recover it on the next pass (or two or three).

...and that was Thursday night: one download after another and updates and learning how to work the combo (if anyone can tell me how to 'clear' my selections in Synaptic, please pass that along. Thanks). All in all, I can say that the basic apt tool is great to work with; but adding in the GUI takes a lot of the pain away from maintaining this distro.

(retrospective, Part III) ...and in between all the playing on the Linux box, I was gathering up parts from the holding tank in the garage to add in some additional USB capability to the Win2k box. Belkin has a nice little five port USB 2 card (four external/one internal) that is currently being cleared out for a song (a cheap song) at Office Depot (dunno', some marketing glitch I would guess). That would let me operate without a hub for the external HDDs and the card reader and the occasional use of the ZIP drive. ...and that internal port? Well, that would nicely drive the four port front panel that just started the clearance slide at the same place...

Yeah, that is worth a tear down. ...and while I had that system out of the hutch, I started the cleanup of all the stuff that's accumulated over the last few months. Whew. That was a job (hence the 0100 shower in Saturday's post). About all that's left to do on the lower section of the hutch is to change out the power strips and add in one more UPS.

Hmmmm.... I think I'm going to have to just do the last three days as a retrospective <g>. I mean, it's like 0115 and I just showered to get the sweat off from working on the workstation area.... Yeah, it's been a busy couple of nights. ...but sleep seems to be in order, so I'll just call it a night and fill things in tomorrow.

Well, I didn't manage the UPS changeout I was hoping for; but hey, there's still tonight <g>! ...and it will have to wait until tonight: Shelley and I have one of our rare "date nights" scheduled for this afternoon. Yep, lunch and some quality time together. Maybe some window shopping?

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

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