The Time Sink

It's a day off for all of us here today. Both the school district Shelley teaches in and the one the boys attend have the day off. ...and so do I! Yeah! One more day of rest can't hurt.

Yep, I ended up going in to see my doc Friday afternoon. I'd pretty much dealt with all of the cold symptoms but I still was working on what seemed to be a sinus problem. So... Several days of an antibiotic and things seem to be improving, albeit slowly.

Today also is going to be a bit of a cleanup day for me. I've been horribly lax in the last few weeks, but that's been because I was concentrating on things like breathing <g>!

...but there's an accumulation on my non-desk and on the window seat that I need to get to just to find out what is there. ...and to have an idea of where the heck some of the project supplies are so I can finish the things I started and get on with some new ones.

The subject of popups and such came up at dinner the other night and led to a rather roundabout conversation that ended up with me talking with Shelley once again about taking her off Windows completely... My first comment was that I should stick Firebird/Firefox on there for her; the automatic popup blocking would help immensely. ....and then I thought about Thunderbird. ...and then my whole train of thought went into that long unlit programmer's tunnel and came out the the other side running on diesel instead of steam.

I mean, it's not like she needs the OS after we scrub the soccer registration program off the machine. She uses WordPerfect when she helps the kids on school projects (and Quattro Pro for a spreadsheet). ...and since Daniel has been assimilated through the school's laptop program, he's out of her loop. ...and her email isn't much of a thing to her. ...and I'm thinking I want to upgrade her system anyway since she's running the cast offs from the cast offs, so maybe I should just switch her out completely.

...but she wants no money spent on the machine. Okay, she's got an adequate AT case. ...and I still have at least one more of those Celeron 500 motherboards Dave and I bought way back when; that's what TuX is currently running. ...and she already has a Voodoo3 card in that box. Lessee'... 5400rpm HDDs would be a step up for her, and I bet I have a gig or two hanging around. A NIC's a NIC's a NIC...

...and we have a pic posted somewhere of her using the P-120 laptop under Linux wireless to post to her site one evening a year or two back; that proves she can be somewhat OS agnostic. So the question is whether RedHat 9 is too much for that hardware. Redhat 8 is certainly not; that's what's running on TuX right now. ...and stripped down to a minimal load rather than the kitchen sink install I have on that test bed, I'm betting she'd do okay. ...and then we could get seriously less paranoid about email and web sites. Heck, I don't even think Evolution is something we need; Kmail and maybe OpenOffice along with Firefox and we're pretty much done...

Speaking of migration from Windows to Linux, and moving a step up from Aunt Minnie, IBM developerWorks has a rather nice little series up on the Windows-to-Linux roadmap. It's geared heavily to the use of Webmin, but I just don't think that's all bad...

Well, yesteday morning started out as a real circus... Shelley's routine when she is subbing is to get to the job site by 0730. ...and since Daniel has to be at school at that same time, that means I take him (Brad's along for the ride). ...and since I'm still getting over my cold/sinus thing/whatever, I need a little extra time to get jumpstarted in the morning.

...and last night I ended up coughing again and snoring, so Shelley headed out to the big pillow in the living room (we actually argue over who get to sleep there <g>) rather than wake me up. ...and we discovered a new 'single point of failure': Daniel and his alarm clock. She shut ours off since I don't have to be up as early as her, and she knew Daniel would be up in plenty of time to wake her up.

Ummmm...

Yeah, the first person awake was Shelley at ten 'til seven. There's an easy math problem or two there... Umm hmm. People having to get up and get moving "right the heck now". Oh, my...

Everything turned out okay, but Daniel may not have awakened until his second class. Shelley made it in, but I suspect there's another grey hair or two in place now. Brad and I did okay, but we took a few minutes when we got back home just to stare and try to figure out all the morning routine stuff that had just evolved onto us...

Yep, we made it through things okay Thursday <g>... Now it's time to put one more day into the books and head into what looks to be another 'homework weekend'....

It's a homework day here. Brad's California Mission project is taking up most of the CPU cycles for both Shelley and me, and Daniel's Castle project will suck up any extra time that might happen to float loose <g>...

Well, Daniel stepped up and has almost all of his homework and extra credit stuff done (amidst much wailing and gnashing of teeth). ...and we did manage dinner out in spite of the impossible load the local school district places on the elementary school kids and their parents (remember the total overload from the "State Report" a few years back?). Short version: there's no way a fourth grader can crank out one of these assignment. Heck, it's a full load for most two parent households...

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

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