The Time Sink

It's a day off today here; well, from work at least. There's a ton of projects to be worked on, but in reality we'll be happy if we get to one or two of them. Daniel is trying to earn some bucks to buy the latest game for his Playstation and Brad has a book report due in a bit. I have some cleaning to do and a box to build up...

Remember, in goal setting, keep things in perspective and reachable. Yep, that's what we did yesterday and it worked pretty well. Shelley concentrated on cooking up meals for the week and for a church delivery last night, and we pulled an abort on Brad's report. Oh, we were all ready to go on it, but when we read the worksheet we found out we're to to use the 'supplied' paper. Darn <g>. So, we have much of the raw work finished, but we're unable to format it until we know what size the final product is supposed to be...

...and I took it easy and only tried to build up the one box; I'd scrounged enough parts to finally be able to get my 'backup box' rebuilt (I haven't had one for a bit). I like to have an older piece of hardware dual booting some Windows version and some Linux version in case I have one of the main boxes go down. The replacement for the Celeron 500 looks to be ready after yesterday; I'll bring it up some night this week and see how it does.

...and I made it out blading again. This last month or so has been a problem with the rains and wet fog; this weekend has only been a depressing grey and possessed of a biting cold. I took it easy over the weekend, but yesterday the urge got to be too much. ...and hey, the cold wasn't too bad, once my face went numb <g>!

So it's back to work and back to the homework schedule. Daniel and I actually have hopes things will be light there since it's the last week of the semester for him. Yeah, we're dreamers...

Interesting... When I got home this evening I checked email and answered a couple of quick inquiries (Gary, yours is delayed; keep reading). ...but after dinner I noticed I still had messages in my outbox. WT? I forced the send and received a port 25 'system call interrupted' error? WT???

Okay, that was on Evolution under Fedora Core 2; I popped <g> over to the Win2k box and Thunderbird and tried to send from there. No go. (side note: I routinely send mail through my account at pair rather than through my ISP. I have email available though other servers and webmail at pair, AT&T and on the .com and .org servers so it's not like this was a showstopper). A little more testing showed I could receive just fine, but sending just wasn't happening. Okay, so it's webmail tonight and I'll configure a backup. ...but I shot off a notice to pair because they pretty much rock on the oddball stuff.

...and I got the usual gracious note back asking for more details on my error messages, but with a suggestion to try a workaround with port numbers first. Oh, yeah, there's a thought! What if SBCglobal suddenly decided to block port 25? Sure enough, I switched ports to pair's workaround and I was golden (with Thunderbird it's a fill in box; with Evolution you append the port to the URL).

Hmmm.... Up late working on a project...

Some weeks are just there; others you just survive. This one was the second sort. The combination of a short week and a very full week pretty much did me in.

More or less a busy day today. Shelley isn't feeling well, and I've been trying to pick up some of the slack. They guys are helping, but they need reminding <g>...

They both scored well in the late afternoon though: after Brad's drum lesson (yes, yes, I know) I took them shopping; Brad found a game he'd been wanting at the local Target and Daniel found one he had been looking for at a game store. Actually, Daniel made out like a fat rat; he had trade-in games and the place was running a 'bonus' special. Yeah, he kept all his cash, got a new game and even has store credit! Not bad...

...and we'll see if my roll continues. Last night I finally decided get Brad set up with a new card reader for his camera/computer. Yeah, real simple, -right? Not...

...and it's the little things that get to you. Like, he's not on the net. Oh. ...and his USB drivers seemed to be hosed. ...only they weren't; it turned out to be the reader. Okay, there's a backup reader. ...but I had no idea where the disk for it was. So, the net. Not.

When I built that machine last year, I must have needed to connect to the net. ...and since I don't trust the inventiveness of little boys of my bloodline, I must have instituted parental controls in the IE installation after I downloaded whatever I downloaded. ...only I don't recall doing that. ...or what the password might be. Yeah, I reconnected him to the network and the Net, but I couldn't connect to much anything because nothing seemed to have a 'certificate'. ...and I was ready to be 'certified'! ...and his USB seemed hosed, so a 'key' was out. (Pick a word, any word!)

I ended up burning a copy of Firefox to a CD and installing it. Things went fine from there and the other reader worked. ...but man, we still have some things to do to that machine (and Daniel's)!

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

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