The Time Sink

Time for another round of "Get a Life" <g>! ...as I head off to another week in corporate American, abandoning Shelley to handle the receipt of a couch, a bed for Daniel and a refrigerator over the next day or so. Two of those were planned and budgeted items; the third was decidedly not! ...and it wreaked havoc with the weekend plans to no small end.

We did manage to get some gardening done, with the help of Mr. Brad; hopefully the weeds won't grow back before next weekend when we go for round two! ...but now's the time to get after them, when the ground is soft from the rains. Which reminds me I wanted to get some paving blocks in over by the side gate while that ground was still soft enough to work. Ah, well, maybe just another day or two...

I did manage to button up TuX yesterday... I figure I've messed with his innards enough to tell me he's stable; now it's time to start playing with the current distros. ...or even just let him live his life for a while with a Red Hat. ...although, I'm wondering why the heck I cannot seem to get a clean kernel or KDE library download with the automated system. I get larger files and most everything else okay, but those two get hung ever time I try. Time to see about a mirror and then see if the automated system will catch the dependencies. No matter, email is live there for all my accounts and that's what matters most.

"...blinking like a gerbil on methamphetamines." Ya' know, there's just something about the way Brian draws his word pictures...

...and I didn't draw a blank on my trial at downloading RedHat RPMS and sliding them into the Updates folder. Two went through like gangbusters (and the auto-update function found them on its next pass and removed them from the queue, which let me slam some dependent updates through); one failed for expected dependencies (Mozilla; I hadn't brought the bundle); and one failed for unexpected dependencies (it wanted the prior version of itself; strange, in that the auto-update was only trying to grab the current version...). Time to make a list of what fails with the auto-update and download them independently. ...but I am very curious why this is happening.

...but I'm even more curious to get into Samba in a network with mixed Windows OSes. ...and to see how long it will take me to get one or both of the media readers for the cameras working. I suspect I should only have to mess with the fstab portion of things: when I took a look at my hardware as reported back to the RedHat servers (...and you thought only Redmond stuff phoned home?), I found both of the USB readers listed by brand and model number. Cool.

Well, the blog's swung over to Spring 1.01... I suspect if we get a wet March, there may be a 2.0 version out sometime in April. ...and that puts the blog progression at something like 5.2 or so.

Let's see... If we ignore the EditThisPage site and consider the first blog incarnation as the series that used the plain table format (images link to live pages) :

...then we have version two with the first CSS baby steps:

...and back to a tables-based version given to me by Carey Henderson out of the kindness of his heart:

...and then to full CSS-driven positioning for winter:

...and now to the current version:

I see the process as more evolutionary than revolutionary; generally I make a style change or two throughout the life of the current incarnation (permalinks for example) and then swing the site style and overall look. In the case of this week's work, the main change was to allow the page to work in browsers with higher resolutions. Prior designs were for 800x600; this one should have no upper limit.

...and no, it really won't work all that well in 640x480 since the left column is fixed-sized at 200 pixels and my photos are usually 400 pixels; but it is viewable. ...and for those still using 4.x series browsers, it is perfectly usable in IE4 and NS4, although Netscape 4 really doesn't like the links header and wraps it.

...and of course, the Daynotes pages here keep chugging along at version 1.301 or so, tables-based, HTML 4.0 (Trans), white background, no Javascript mouseovers, nothing fancy except for the XML feed.

K'... What's left to do? We have Brad pretty well ensconced in his own room (well, barring last night's sleepover); and Daniel is now ready to dial his room in. We need a task lamp or two; and I guess I'd better look real hard at the budget and see about that motherboard to build Brad's computer (hey, I was correct about how that computer split was going to happen: Daniel wants the current machine and Brad wants nothing to do with it; sometimes things do work out).

So, since Brad is now the sole tenant of his space, and Daniel has a fresh slate to draw on (including two of my workstation desks), I guess it's time to get some infrastructure started. ...and then get some computers in place. ...and feed the partridge. ...and get Freesco running. ...and, and, and.

Hmmm.... It's nearly 1500; how time flies when you're not too concerned about it <g>! Yep, I ended up taking the day off. I wanted to replace the IDE cables on the Win2k box and I figured that was a good enough excuse. ...and see? It's way past noon and I haven't even started on it yet. Then again, I slept in until an obscene hour, made a new latte (Mandarin Orange and Cinnamon), took a walk around the block, decided the weather was way too fine to stay inside, went out blading for a while, showered, made breakfast just a little while ago and......

Even more hmmmm... It's now 2030 and I'm just getting back here. I guess that's a clue to go back to what I was doing, which was just general puttering and playing that still had Things Getting Done...

Just another day in sunny California! The winds are still blowing, so the air quality isn't too bad; the storm track is still off shore; and it was just too nice a day to stay inside. ...other than taxes had to be done (started at 0030 this morning) and the checkbook had to finally get balanced). ...but not until Brad and I got out for a walk around the neighborhood <g>! Yeah, maybe I'll have something up on the blog later...

So, a coupla' other things on the list are either in progress or knocked out. ...and I'm playing with KOrganizer on the Linux boxen in hopes of having a task manager once again (don't go there!!!) since with all the craziness around here it's way too easy for me to forget things. Of course, everytime I go there I get all sorts of distracted with the goodies to play with...

Lazy day... The taxes are done and ready for Shelley to drop off in the morning; I managed both a walk with Brad and one of his friends and some time blading after church; the garbage is out and one or two other things got done.

The only thing I missed was a nap. Heh. The sun is so warm these days that the spring air just begs me to kick back and take a load off. That makes it very hard to work for very long at any one thing. ...and since it's so nice outside, my brain has started the switch to summer mode; that's where I don't come back in the house for more than a few minutes from the time I get up in the morning until well after the sun goes down in the evening.

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

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