The Time Sink

Happy Monday, gang! Man, I'm going to be hurting today! I ended up 'cleaning' yesterday afternoon. Yeah, 'cleaning' for me means 'throwing away'. Why? Because that's the only way to make room for the stuff I'm cleaning up...

Yeah, it's a vicious cycle, but to make room for a project usually involves infringing on the kitchen/dining area. ...and that can only go on for so long <g>. So, I cleared from the attic into the dumpster (to be continued), and cleared from the garage to the attic, and cleared (some) from the bench seat in the dining area to the garage. ...and about the only bits left in the house are the parts to the partially assembled machine for the office.

Well, there was a longish post started about network storage and sneakernet in the new millennium, but that segued into a continuation of a post on email and spam. ...and that ended up with me on ssh into a server in one window while working on Cpanel in another. ...and I learned some stuff and found out some more, but I also ran out of time.

Oh, my; oh, my; oh, my... We're maybe reaching the turnaround point in our weather pattern! Yeah, I know we have another few months to go, but Sunday was sunny in the morning before the fog and clouds moved in (yep, you can tell from the photos on the blog) and yesterday? Well, yeah...

Tuesday started out nicely sunny at the house, but by the time I'd reached the halfway point on my commute the fog had rise from the ground and was masking everything once again. ...and just a few minutes later as I reached the downtown things were socked in solid with not even a disk of the sun to be seen. ...and that was the morning. Yeah, even just before noon it was The World As Grey when I popped over to the local Office Depot on a run...

...but when I needed to run out in early afternoon I was stopped dead in my tracks by the smell and feel of the air! I didn't even realize it was sunny outside at first; what had caught my attention was that feel to the air that says it's the first good day to fire up a motorcycle and make a run toward the hills! Yeah...

Sure, those days are long gone, but that memory remains. ...and that sure made the afternoon run a nice time. ...and got me the heck out of the office and home in time to blade before the sun faded behind the fog once again.

The question came up the other evening about file transfers between machines, specifically machines you don't want on the network for one reason or another. ...like say a kid's machine or maybe that new Windows box you're bringing up (yeah, people still do that <g>). You need to get some basic programs over there (Zone Alarm, AVG anti-virus, Firefox, Thunderbird would be a good starter set), but you sure don't want the machine on the Net... So what to do?

We'd passed around suggestions about things like USB Zip drives and USB memory keys, but they rely on drivers that may or may not be present on the machine you're working on. Sure, Win2k and XP have an installed setup, but what about Win98?

...and ditto on external HDDs, one of my personal choices (I'll use the backup drive off the NAS since it's the easiest to get to and non-critical for day to day stuff); they need drivers for the older OSs also.

...but try as we might, it still came down to 'sneakernet', but with a twist for the new millennium: with the presence of a CD burner on most modern machines, it just makes sense to burn your base software package to a CD and walk it on over to the new box.

Those of you who follow the Thursday Threesome meme from the Back Porch over on the blog and followed the link to the Porch may have noticed the theme this week was drawn from one of our hostess' ventures, a Zine titled All Things Girl. What isn't apparent is that one of the articles in this issue was edited cross platform...

I've collaborated with Deb Smouse in the past for a feature of ATG called The Other Side of the Fence where one of the editors and a male acquaintance discuss a topic in "give and take" fashion. This month she asked me to review the work we did on the topic of Can Men and Women be Just Friends?, and I decided to see if there would be any problems editing it in Linux and returning it to her.

She sent over her transcript as a Word document, and I opened it in Open Office. I started out working with the 'inline editing changes', but the type of checkover I was doing really didn't lend itself to that (first pass edits, spell check and such). I ended up just running through the document and sending it back to her saved in Word format. She finished her work and dumped it into the publishing platform they use at the Zine. ...and when I asked her if she had any problems, I got back a "Nope!". Hmmm... Word to OpenOffice to Word to Moveable Type.

Things we learn from our kids: Baskin Robbins now has a Tiramisu ice cream. ...and it goes okay with Winter White Chocolate if you handle it one layer at a time.

Spring is trying to get its clutches on us here in Central Cal; it's been hitting 60F here, or at least trying to! ...and that means I've been able to blade without wearing sweats. Yeah! Well, I maybe should still wear a sweat shirt, but both Thurday's evening run and yesterday's noonish run went okay in swim trunks and a t-shirt.

Yeah, I know it won't last, but it sure is nice as a teaser for what may be coming up. ...unless it's going to be one of the rainy years; then I'll be having to time things between the rain drops again <g>. Still, I'll take it for the moment. Gardening season may be upon us!

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

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