Penguicon 2012 may be history or nearly so, but Penguicon 2013 is another matter. This time I'm not waiting around and doing things at the last minute. No, this time I am giving myself, and you, nearly a year to ponder, think, consider, scheme, or conspire as the case may be.

I'd like to avoid repeat recipients if possible, so that it isn't "Oh, ACME only delivers to that group." That's at an individual level. It certainly makes sense for, say, a Guest of Honor to get something, but "So & so gets something every year" is what I am concerned about.

( Advise ACME )

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Current Mood: curious

1. Shed weight for real. Sure, I said that last year. Got a little ways and screwed it up. So badly that I was no better and possibly worse off this time around. The negatives show up a few ways. Sore back from the belt/pants seeming a bit tight at the lower back, even on the trip there & back. Limited time in-suit as Orvan. Simply feeling fat. Sore feet & joints. And that's the stuff I feel and notice. I don't measure blood pressure or blood sugars and a host of other things that are probably not what they really should be. I should be at least a few dozen pounds lighter.

1.a. Exercise. Yeah, reducing Calories is key, but being able to bend and breathe right will help, too.

2. That Renaissance Faire advice about drinking water or at least something without caffeine or alcohol between anything containing caffeine or alcohol? It applies outside of faire, too. Do things for taste, have just a taste, and it's okkay to say no. Drink more water. Lots more water. My liver should love me, though my bladder might be a bit annoyed.

3. Follow my own advice & limits for ACME Delivery stuff. Big bulky and heavy items are best avoided. They're hard enough to deal with out of suit. In suit they're much worse.

4. Get started MUCH earlier on ACME stuff. Any last minute scrambling should not be my own fault. My last minute prep. should be printing the final version of delivery list and packing up any last minute items suggested by others. My stuff should be ready to load in March, ideally.

5. See #1. Get out as Orvan more, even if just at con. People like him. Don't deprive them of the big ox. Besides, Orvan should have some fun, too.

5.a. Even if I don't leave the house, or even the room, put on the suit a few times years. It's a potent indicator and while the scale doesn't lie, the suit is a very powerful indicator of the state of things. Besides, it's fun - or damn well should be.

6. Don't screw this all up yet again. Use the rest of 2012 to make a better 2013.

I'm sure I forgot some things, but I think I hit the major ones.

Current Mood: blah
Current Music: Simbah - Gerry Mulligan Tentette

Sometime in the 1970s (before the Transformers toys and associated cartoon) my father acquired a few 15,000 volt transformers used for "neon" signs. They look something like this:


[source.]

These are the things that not only light up neon (and other gas) tubes, including old fluorescents that won't ignite on 120 V any more, but also make the Jacob's Ladder or be part of the power supply for high voltage equipment such as a CO2 laser. This is one of the "dangerous" things I grew up with, but as it was explained, "There are no really dangerous things, just dangerous people." If you think first and are careful, there is no problem. I 'played' with high voltage, but I wasn't reckless with it. Chances are the most dangerous part to me - or anyone else - was not the easily averted shock risk, but the build-up of ozone when there was arcing.

We found it sort of sadly amusing when one day in the 1980s a young neighborhood kid pointed at row of the things and asked what they were...

Kid: What are those?
Pa: Transformers.
Kid: *stares at them for a bit* What do they turn in to?

I never followed that cartoon and am utterly uninterested in it. I still think of the electrical device when I see or hear the word transformer.

Current Mood: nostalgic

The Minnesota Twins not long ago managed to bamboozle politicians into helping them with stadium financing - including bypassing a law requiring a referendum on such things in the to-be-afflicted area. Now the Vikings want a similar screw-the-people deal for themselves. As anyone who know me at all has figured out, I am against this. If the "investment" is so good, sell shares in the form of bonds and get financing. Since that is not happening, the logical conclusion is that the investment line is so much hogwash - after having been used to wash some rather filthy hogs.

Other sports structures have similar issues. In 2004 the Olympics returned to Greece and the Greeks built some then-shiny new things just for them. Here are a couple pictures of how they look now.[source]. Some investment that was! Only 8 years later, just more ruins - and not ones likely to attract people or generate a desire for preservation.

Current Mood: cynical

I may have been a bit late posting the ACME Delivery poll for Penguicon, but it was still over a month ago (27 January) and so far there have zero Penguicon responses. I clicked on the submit button so I could see any results and one fellow who isn't going submitted joke responses (that I do not mind) and that has been it. Right now, no suggestions of anything. And worse, I don't have ideas of my own. Correction, I have one. One. I could blame it on the Penguicon folks not having their Guests of Honor lined up and ready and listed on the web site - they claim they tend to have five or six but so far I see only two. But that isn't a solid reason. Even aside from Guests of Honor and Nifties I usually have at least a few ideas of my own.

And time is running out. While Penguicon is at the end of April, what that really means is that I need to be ready by the end of March if at all possible. I might be able to swing one or two things in April, but I'll be busy getting everything ready. And things that take time (paints, glues, shipping) can mean a project simply won't have the time to get finished - and then hauled on a 12 or so hour drive.

So right now, I have one idea. And I did just order a bunch of Cow Tales. Oh, and I recall being asked to make & bring some butterscotch fudge, so there's another little project to take up time near the last minute.

I know I haven't done as well last year. I was (and still am, dangit) way overweight and that kept my in-suit time way down and made dressing Orvan (or as Orvan) more problematic. Working on that. And then I used to post photos of Orvan's deliveries. A few years ago I wanted to included Jer's wedding photos and the tools I used didn't work well to add things, so I kept waiting and delaying and by the time I got things (and not just Jer's, someone else had something as well) I had forgotten so much I just let it go. And I didn't really get to things after that. I'm not sure I even sure I even have any of the photos from 2011.

I am starting to wonder if maybe I should let Orvan rest a while - though he really only shows up at Penguicon now. I haven't been able to afford, in time or money, RCFM or MFF or much of anything else for some time. I really only have two events a year now: Penguicon and the Siouxland Renaissance Festival, so I don't want to idle back any more.

Current Mood: frustrated

Via a couple locked posts...

( What Tarot Card are You? )

Current Mood: amused

I'd like to get a new (to me) butter dish. What I am thinking of is a two-piece (tray & cover) thing made of transparent heavy glass, more rectangular than curved, and with some simple design on the cover to aid grip and perhaps make it seem not so plain as just a chunk of glass. This is, to me, a fairly standard butter dish. It's what I grew up with. And, evidently, it's now hard to find at a sane price. Instead there are expensive opaque things, often with a knob of a handle atop the cover. Or, some poorly thought out curved thing that has three problems. One is that the curved glass with no design makes the stick of butter look odd due to the distortion of refraction. Another is that the cover isn't tall enough and contacts the stick of butter (was this intended as a means of centering, or was it just thoughtlessness?). But worst of all, it's smooth curved glass and thus unless it and your hand are both perfectly clean, it's hard to grip and can easily slip away.

It seems the curved abomination is the most commonly available design now. It's cheap. Oh, it might also be inexpensive to purchase, but really it's just cheap. It's crap. I'd rather have glass than plastic for this, but the dollar store plastic design is better. It mimics the glass design that works right. What bugs me is, how did that curved crap become the current standard so many places? What fool thought, "Hey, this looks neat." without evidently giving even a moment's thought to its actual use? This is another one of those problems that were solved long, long ago, but some twit had to break the design and others went along with the idiocy. Now the good design is hard to find or expensive and gets the label "Vintage." Huh?!

Current Mood: annoyed

The HD 3870 with the fan trouble did at least last long enough that I wasn't out of luck unable to use belgian for a while and waiting for the replacement. The replacement is (the name is silly, but the card is great) an MSI Twin FROZR III GTX 570. Ooh, is it fast. Then, at the price, weight, and power requirements, it had better be. The cooling system on this thing is heavy enough that the card seemed to self-seat. Once I had things aligned it just fell into the PCI-E slot, which caught me off guard, "Did that that just happen?". I'm glad I went with the gonzo power supply as this beast needs it. The cooling works. Despite the power requirements (38 Amps at 12 Volts - at least for the full system), it's been keeping in the high 50s to low-mid 60s C. And it's quiet. Not silent, but certainly quiet compared to what I had been hearing.

I saw Firestorm claim 90+ frames per second, for what that's worth - not much as the simulator only sends out a maximum of 45 frames each second. I've turned on some of the fancier settings and been amused by the color shading from various light sources.

Things aren't perfect, alas. They are, however, significantly better. If I had more than one Firestorm session going on belgian before and had more than one visible (not minimized) after a while I would get a hard video lockup. The screen would freeze and nothing would move. I could still ping the system and even ssh into it, so I could look around and do a clean reboot rather than hit the reset switch, but it was annoying. That no longer happens. I can have at least two sessions open, though a third does have a problem it's a milder one. When I minimize that instance, even with the other two minimized already, it is almost certain to crash. This, however, is only Firestorm crashing, not the system or the video. I doubt I can blame the video card for this. I suspect it simply lets me see something that may have been there all along.

I don't know what do do about it as nothing seems out of line. I have 6 cores and that's plenty for all that and gkrellm (system monitor) shows it. I have 16 GB of RAM and I'm not hitting swap. The video card (and system overall as far as I can tell) is runnning if not cool at least not hot). And yes, I really need to dig into the log files to see what is really happening. Then, this isn't really a pressing issue. I can certainly get by and don't really need to run more than two sessions. Come to that, I have entire other computers if I really need to that.

There's more good than bad, certainly. Now that I am rid of AMD/ATI's bletcherously wretched Catalyst setup program (which would segfault whenever I tried to actually do anything with it) on belgian I finally have a dual monitor setup. The nice new monitor has the more graphical programs (Opera, Firestorm) while the old 15 inch 4:3 monitor has most of the more textual programs (Pidgin for IM, X-chat for IRC, terminal, Exaile for music, and gkrellm). This separation works well and seems to make the best use of both monitors.

Current Mood: impressed

As I'd upgraded my primary computer, belgian, I'd been using the cast off parts to build a new(er) version of secondary desktop, percheron. Of course not everything got cast off and some things had to be bought, but I could wait and usually deal with things when NewEgg had a needed item on sale. One thing I had planned on was moving the video card when I upgraded belgian. Unfortunately the HD3870 that I planned to move developed fan troubles. Thus when I ordered the video card for the main machine, I also ordered another, lesser card (and a DVI cable) for the secondary.

Lesser is only so in comparison to the primary card I had been saving up for. Going from a GT 7300 to a GTX 550 is quite a jump. Things that seemed to take forever to resolve now show up rather quickly. Now I really want to set things up they way I had been thinking about: Rigged so I can use percheron while on the treadmill. That is apt to take some doing, but should be worth it. Also, this is unlikely to be the last upgrade. I expect to eventually change out the Sempron (very low end processor, now) to an Athlon or Phenom X4. That, however, can wait a while.

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: Mexican Radio - Wall of Voodoo

I'd been using an old laptop in the kitchen wanted something newer. A while ago I saw that the Toshiba Satellite L755D-S5104 (15.6 inch 1366x768 screen, Quad core, AMD/ATI HD6520 graphics from the A6 processor, 4 GB RAM expandable to 8 GB, 500 GB HDD) could be had for a low price, but was just above Best Buy's 18-month no-interest threshold. I went for it, planning to make it the new caspian. And then ran into trouble as I couldn't get a Linux distribution that filled my requirements to run on it.

Each distribution had some issue and with many I simply didn't get any video at all. I wound up going to PCLinuxOS's 32 bit version for a while as that at least gave me video. Then I tried Pardus when a DistroWatch comment said that worked for someone with similar problems. Alas, Pardus gave me other headaches, mainly dealing with audio and rather random behavior. More researched revealed the problem many distributions had: The HD6520 video system was too new and the 3.0 Linux kernel did not handle it well. The 3.2 kernel could supposedly deal with the HD6520. Looking around, there was something that had that and looked like it would solve my audio problems: Xubuntu 12.04, which is still in alpha.

Xubuntu 12.04 (alpha 2) is better than I expected an alpha to be. Sure, it has a couple bugs but so far none that cause me real trouble. They were minor setbacks at worst and either had almost trivial work-arounds or simply didn't matter to me. The result? I have what I set out to have: a 64-bit Linux that gives me video and audio properly and can run Firestorm.

The old laptop? I'm not sure if I'll do anything with it. It is 10+ years old after all. However it does run, if slowly, and nothing is actually wrong with it. I have this feeling it should be doing something, but I've no idea what. There is a name available for it on the network: shan.

Current Mood: geeky

I'm not asking for a ridiculously compressed evaluation of your day, nor am I demanding the artificial spread of such an alleged test. Good memes spread all by themselves, without chain-letter-like contrived artifice.

Penguicon may be a few months away, but that doesn't mean it can be ignored. Better to be ready early than rush at the last minute.

I'd like to avoid repeat recipients if possible, so that it isn't "Oh, ACME only delivers to that group." That's at an individual level. It certainly makes sense for the Guests of Honor to get something, but "So & so gets something every year" is what I am concerned about.

( Advise ACME )

NOTE: Friends replies are NOT screened and will be visible.

Current Mood: curious

It's not about the artwork - though this year the calendar features the first twelve of "The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries" from Howard Tayler's Schlock Mercenary comic, rather than pictures of horses as has been the case the last several years.

This is about the numbers. Or the size and color of them. This calendar reminds me one from a few years ago. Both have small numbers for the dates. That's great if you're up close and need space to write lots of stuff for that date. It's not so great from a distance where you simply want to see the numeric date.

The next year, after the tiny type a while back, I found a calendar I liked with nice big date numbers. But they were various, muted, nearly (if not) pastel colors which also made them harder to read from a distance. And the colors were random. It wasn't "Holidays are red" or "Mondays are blue, Tuesdays are orange,..." Thus no useful information was added but the decoration made the thing less useful than it should have been.

It strikes me as odd that these problems exist. A calendar isn't a new or terrible complex thing[1]. They've been around for a long, long time. One would expect readability from common uses (halfway across a small room doesn't seem to be asking too much) would be one of those well and truly solved problems. Evidently it is not.

Current Mood: disappointed

I've just read an article going around where Thomas Edison's great-grandson claims Thomas would have loved the law forcing a change in lighting by eliminating the current style of 100 Watt incandescent bulb. He says that this is due to Thomas having been for progress and improvement.

Not so fast. While I like CFL and really like LED (or hope to when it gets even better) I realize these are my choices. They are not everyone's choices. Some have issues with CFL and/or LED. They both do, currently, have some problems. So do incandescents. It's a matter of choosing which problems one wishes to deal with.

Now, when the incandescent bulb was invented, it had some significant problems. Short life. No standards for fixtures. No infrastructure - Edison had to design and build a power grid and all the fiddly pieces of it. And while he got some parts wrong (DC, anyone?) the end result is with us. But even he didn't use the new lights. That's right, Edison's own lab was lit by gas well after the light bulb had been invented.

Take a look around and you'll see plenty of electric lighting, whether incandescent, fluorescent, LED, or some else still - clearly, the electric light won over gas (and kerosene, and candles, and...) for illumination. And I do not know of any law that keeps me from turning off all the electric lights in my house and lighting it by some other means.[1] So if the law didn't cause change, what did? Superiority. That is, superiority as seen by the customer. No flames. No gas to build up if a flame is blown out. No oil to spill and make a mess or fire. No fiddling around with matches. No trimming candle wicks. Just flip a switch.

To get rid of incandescent lighting no law is needed. What is needed is a light source seen as superior by the person who is to use it. Anything else is interference and bound to end in failure one way or another. It is not beyond the realm of possibility for people with the right engineering talent to even produce their own bulbs - one doesn't even need a vacuum pump, but just inert gas and some glass-blowing skill. Smuggling bulbs could also happen. As could theft and re-sale. Hello black market. Prohibition didn't work with alcohol, doesn't work with drugs, doesn't work with firearms, and somehow it will magically work with light bulbs? Tell me another one.

I do not believe that the incandescent bulb will completely disappear, at least not for some time. What would be used in an oven, for example? While I think the mercury fear-mongering over CFL is just that, fear-mongering, I don't want any mercury containing device in my oven. Also the oven would be too hot for the electronics for CFL and LED power supplies, as well as the LEDs themselves. I do, however, expect something (right now, I'd guess LED, but something better might come along) to eventually replace most incandescent lighting.

That will happen when a few things happen, and not all have happened yet:

* LED light output can be truly equal to common incandescent ratings - up to at least 100W.

* LED light can be had at color temperatures (and ranges!) people are used to.

* LED bulb supplies run cooler - so can be used in enclosed fixtures.

* LED pricing drops, similar to how CFL pricing has.

All these need to happen. If a person can't tell the difference between an LED and incandescent bulb, can use the LED in the current fixtures, and doesn't see the price as being far greater than any power savings, THEN the LED wins, and deservedly so. A law mandating a change indicates a failure to make a product so much better than people switch to it willingly.

Maybe one day incandescent bulbs will be seen as quaint relics, much like cylinder phonograph records. That day is not here yet. Want everyone to switch? Don't pass a law; build a better bulb.

I started trying LED lighting in 2009 with disappointing results. In 2010, things were better though the "40 Watt equivalent" was not really a true equivalent, but dimmer. Since then the price has been dropping some, the choice of color temperatures improving, and the brightness increasing. Today I bought two LED bulbs of different make. Both claim to be 60 W equivalent and put out 800 lumens. That might be a bit under a true 60 W incandescent (wikipedia has a chart claiming 850 lm for 60 W) but not by much. They are bright enough.

One is still heavy and has a color temperature still in the soft/warm white range of 3000 Kelvin. The other is a more cool white at 4000 Kelvins (roughly, reading the fine print it says 3880 K) which I prefer.

I will be using the light(er) bulb in a desk lamp and the heavier one, for now, in the office to replace the not really 40 W equivalent that went out. I plan to eventually change out all the office fixture with the new, brighter, whiter bulbs like the desk lamp will have.

The downside, such as it is, is that the new LED bulbs use almost as power as equivalently bright CFLs. But they are instant-on, which is a bonus.

The "burnt out" LED that is being replaced is frustrating. It didn't last even half a year (though all the others are still going, so far), but it's not completely dead. If I push this way or that, it will light or flicker a bit. This screams "cold solder joint" to me. It would be simple to fix - if I could get at the solder joints. The bulb is not made to be be repaired, so there's no nice obvious way to get it open. I haven't studied it in great detail to see if there's a way that isn't so nice, which won't ruin the bulb in some other way.

Still, it's been more (Moore?) than 18 months since I started looking at LED lighting and I'm finally seeing things about like I want: Roughly 60 W equivalence, a good white (not 2700 Kelvin yellow - eww), and getting lighter in weight. If the efficiency of the drivers can be increased (thus decreasing heat issues) so that they can be used in enclosed fixtures things would be about ideal. Granted, the price is still higher than CFL, but that is also coming down.

I can't see re-lamping the house entirely in LED yet, and perhaps not even at the slow attrition rate of replacing the CFLs as they fail. But as things seem to be going, in a few years I might well end swapping out a few more.

Notice I haven't said a thing about mercury? I consider that to be something that ought to be all but a non-issue. There's mercury in regular fluorescent tubes, in many thermostats, in older thermometers and some other instruments and devices. Those are probably much more significant and yet generally seem to be ignored. While mercury isn't harmless, it's not worth nearly as much worry as some "OMG CFL EVILBAD!" articles try make of it.

Current Mood: hopeful
Current Music: Brains! - Voltaire

* Make your own Penn State/State Pen joke. *

As those who know me know, I am not a sports fan and tend to think of anyone involved with such as more likely of being guilty of something than the averages of probability would indicate. Note that I am not defending what happened. I am explaining how I think the failure mode worked.

Joe Paterno was, from what I can tell, the guy that all the stuff about "good sportsmanship" was about. He didn't jump to the NFL when offered the chance. He didn't use illegal or even questionable recruiting gimmicks. He followed up on the academics of his players. Oh, and he also managed to build teams that tended to win without having used various shady practices. Sounds like a great guy, right? Overall he likely he is. But he made a couple errors, very critical errors, and they really reduce to one.

One error was that when he found out about the abuse (as I understand it, he did not witness it himself, but was told of it) he went to campus authorities rather than the real police. The other was that he didn't follow up on that, as he did with his players, and make sure that those authorities were really doing their jobs and acting on that information rather than ignoring or suppressing it. Those are really one error: He trusted University authorities to act as adults and do their jobs. For all I know, there might have been a mild followup that was met with, "We're still looking into it, don't worry about it." or such. It would not surprise me if something on the order happened - but that is mere speculation on my part.

But money and prestige were involved, and that's when adults are most likely to play childish (not childlike) games and ignore or suppress things they do not wish to deal with. The price is that now there is a Big Scandal of things going on for some time, involving multiple people, rather than a much smaller scandal that Got Fixed. People keep forgetting or missing a lesson of Watergate (besides "Don't do illegal things"...) which is that a coverup makes things worse[1]. But the big lesson that should be taken away from all this? Do not trust an organization to properly investigate itself. To get results, you must go outside the organization that needs investigation. Sadly, I do not expect this to change and in a while another scandal that could have been averted or corrected sooner will blow up.

Current Mood: pessimistic
Current Music: Highly Illogical - Leonard Nimoy

In August I was bringing older computers back into operation and wound up needing a newer monitor and picked up a "newer" monitor in the form of a rather old 15 inch LCD that did 1024x768. That got pressed into service as my main monitor for a while as in early September my 19 inch LCD (1280x1024) quit. Before I got to attempting repairs, I wound up upgrading to a nice 23 inch LCD with LED backlight (1920x1080).

Last week I finally got around to re-reading a thread on the Bad Caps forum regarding problematic Samxon capacitors in the Samsung SyncMaster 930B and then ordered some new (and hopefully much better) capacitors.

The new capacitors arrived yesterday. They were installed this morning. The old monitor works again. It took longer than I hoped, but it wasn't anything actually difficult, just a bunch of fiddly stuff. I'm really glad I took several pictures of the monitor as I took it apart those weeks ago. They took a lot of guesswork out of re-assembly.

Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: 15 Days Under the Hood - Jack Tempchin

I have accounts on both LiveJournal and InsaneJournal and am beginning to even ponder Dreamwidth despite some limitations. Posting on more than one account (same name - they are, in essense, mirrors of each other) gets increasingly annoying as the number of mirrors goes up. Naturally, I would like to automate this and have "write once, post everywhere" but I have yet to see a client that will do that. I know some sites let you (auto-re-)post to ONE other site, but I don't want to be limited.

The ideal client lets me use all the features of LiveJournal (I have a Permanent account) and InsaneJournal (another Permanent) account) so that I set the title, the text, the groups (if any), the icon, the tags, mood, etc. And both IJ and LJ get posted to and the results look identical save for LJ and IJ branding. For Dreamwidth (if I go there at all) I'd want a nice way for it to fall back to the limited icon set I'd have there, since as I understand it I simply cannot get a Permanent account there and thus Be Done with things - that's why I have those - my personal convenience.) It should also allow me to edit once and fix any goofs without having to do it two or more times. Having a selection that lets me choose to only apply a change in some places would be nice, but not essential. Oh yeah, and it must run on Linux - without WINE - and not be a plug-in to some program I seldom use, so no Firefox plug-in nonsense. While I have a Google+ account, I really only use that to read - I don't care to post there until I can use my preferred identify without Google's kiddies throwing a tantrum and potentially wrecking my phone.[1] Also, the G+ API, like the G+ marketing department, is still in its infancy so I do not expect any current clients to properly support G+, nor do I really need one to.

So far, I have yet to see such a thing, but I could easily be overlooking something. Anything I ought to be looking at?

Current Mood: curious

Well, maybe. I know I'm "not exactly normal." Thank goodness. Or a rather non-default childhood, as I've been recently reminded. Still, it's a bit of a jolt to have some of it recognized thus (via Twitter):

*giggle* Well, @DJBronxelf, I suspect a great deal of so called "strangeness" can be explained with "It's just @vakkotaur."

Current Mood: amused

In September I had decided that I would not drink alcohol in October. I wanted to be sure that I wasn't slowly running into genetics from one of my great-grandfathers. I stopped not on 1 October, nor even on 30 September but a couple days before - no last minute cheats, carryover, etc. It started well enough, though I caught myself thinking "I could use a drink" a time or two, more often it was a food pairing thing. A salad might suggest a little sherry, pizza brought beer to mind - that sort of thing.

I didn't make it. But drinking my uncle's wine to toast my father, well, that was not the time or place to go teetotaler, even if it was temporary. That happened twice. On the 5th and 6th or the 6th and 7th. It doesn't matter. After that, the dry spell resumed. From various reasons, it was a really good month to have decided not to drink anything. Let's just say that October could be summed up as a month of Mondays. The "I could use a drink" line of reasoning might have been invoked more often than would have been healthy.

It's now November, but I didn't really make it through October (I chose a month with 31 days, too. I saw someone once pick February for something like this and sure it's just a couple days, but it still felt like a cheat to me.) So despite having some time off, I won't be having a beer or a glass of wine or whatever with supper tonight. I can wait. The 9th would certainly be the 31-day mark from the last drink, but I'll be waiting until the 11th. And one will be plenty, I expect.

Current Mood: calm

I had been letting Firestorm run even when I wasn't around or awake as a virtual presence made some sense even then. The situation changed several weeks ago and I stopped keeping a near-constant presence via Firestorm. One morning recently I got home and found belgian's CPU fan alarm was buzzing. The system had not failed. It was just that Winter is approaching.

I had the side of the case off for something or other and hadn't put it back into place yet. It was a very cool morning, and Firestorm wasn't running. Firestorm seems to keep one core (or one core's worth of CPU...) fairly busy. Thus the CPU got cool enough that the motherboard controlled fan wasn't needed (there is a second, uncontrolled fan, set to slow). The motherboard BIOS, however, doesn't have a very smart alarm. It makes noise if the fan isn't running - no matter if the reason it isn't running is that the system itself switched it off as unneeded.

So I put the cover back in place (after giving the idled fan a quick manual spin to hear the alarm shut off for the bit it was spinning) and fired up Firestorm to burn some cycles and warm things up. As if I hadn't already known it, this all showed that the CPU cooler really does the job.

Current Mood: impressed

Way back in the mists of time... er, alright, it was probably September 30 jmaynard & I went to Manktao to check out Five Guys and I figured I'd at least look at LCD monitors and perhaps see what I liked best and then order from NewEgg. We looked at two or three places and, to my surprise, the best deal was actually at Best Buy. I had been pondering a big 27-inch monitor but the resolution wasn't any better at that size so it'd just be bigger pixels. The 23-inch monitors seemed reasonably priced and comparing a few, the AOC looked the best.

I hesitated and so we went and had lunch and I thought about it some. Checking NewEgg the prices were about the same with the shipping and there was the matter of having it right away. So we went back & I (eventually... oy, it took forever to get a clerk's attention) bought it. So now I'm not using the old 1024x768 LCD but a nice new 1920x1080 LED backlit 23-inch on belgian. I still haven't truly seen about repairing the 19-inch LCD. If I can repair it I then need to decide if I want to use that for percheron or maybe even use it as a second monitor on belgian.

Current Mood: calm

While dealing with things in Wisconsin earlier this month, Xubuntu 10.04 annoyed me for the last time. I wound up having to boot into Windows to get some things done since 10.04 just plain quit doing a thing or two I needed. That was, of course, the last straw. There was simply NO more reason to keep 10.04 around.

So a couple weeks ago I downloaded Xubuntu 11.10 and tried it as a LiveCD on andalusian. I still had to install the 32-bit compatibility libraries, but they worked - and the laptop's wireless hardware was recognized, which I consider a Big Win over needing to recompile the wireless driver at each kernel update as I did with 10.04. Another win was that once the wireless was set up, after the actual install to hard drive, the settings were retained. Maybe this was the case before, but not having hardware recognized by default meant I didn't encounter it. I left things sit for a while (been rather busy with various other things of late...) and only recently ran some updates. Another win: Upon rebooting I did not need to manually restart the local wireless connection as I did before.

I'd heard there were some issues with 11.10, but so far I've not run into them. I am considering updating belgian to 11.10 as well. While it is an improvement, I still hope to run PCLinuxOS. The 64 bit version of that is still in testing (not even beta yet, let alone Release Candidate...) though if 11.10 had given me trouble I was considering going to 32-bit PCLOS with the PAE kernel - a hack to let 32-bit software use 64-bit memory space after a fashion. Why PCLOS? Because after using PCLOS for a few years, *buntu, even with the improvements, still feels 'almost' to me.

Current Mood: good

Wednesday the fifth I was looking forward to a couple nights off away from any work and pretty much relaxing. Maybe I'd fiddle one computer or another and I'd probably bake a cake. Then the phone rang.

"I think your father is having a heart attack." is the memorable line. Backing a up bit... the night before, all seemed normal. My folks had gone out and they'd split a rib eye and had a pleasant time. The morning started normally as well, with Pa having a nice breakfast. He went into the living room and sat down to watch some TV and, as I have come understand, a bit later while my mother was on the phone with someone he sat up a bit and said "I don't feel so good." He went out and sat on the porch, then moved to the steps (there are but two) and started to lean over. The phone call was ended quickly and, "Should I call 911?" "Yes." She called, and got him onto the ground so if anything had to be done, he was already in position for whatever it might be.

Not too much later he stopped breathing. She did CPR. (Has or had the certification and did work some time at the local hospital.) He started breathing again. About then a police officer showed up and was about to start chest compressions but was stopped, "No, he's breathing." "Yes, he is." And where was the ambulance? A radio call revealed it was about a mile away. Ambulance arrived, not sure if anything was done on the ground, but he was picked up and put into the ambulance and something more was done... doors closed.

That is when I got the phone call. Nothing either of us could do and I was told not to start out for Merrill until she knew more one way or another. When that called ended, she called my sister and I assume a very similar conversation took place.

Meanwhile, in Fairmont... Jay called a fellow he know who knows more than a little of cardiology and said that while he could not be sure, from what was described to him (now third-hand, at least) it sounded like a coronary and tried to be reassuring. That call ended and Jay said, "Go pack." I didn't get it right off, evidently I need to hear the rest, "Go pack (your stuff for the trip to Merrill)." I did, or got most things in place. I decided I really needed a shower if we were going anywhere and so did. And just as I was turning off the water, the phone rang...

It was my cousin Betty who didn't realize (despite efforts on his part to explain) that Jay was not me. So, on speaker, she told Jay and I heard the bad news. Betty was careful not to let my mother do much - no phoning, certainly no driving - just then. More packing followed and various arrangements made to deal with my sudden absence from the area. I didn't say anything right then on LJ or Twitter as I really didn't feel like advertising my absence and I was rather preoccupied.

Somehow I managed to get some sleep on the trip to Merrill. Arriving, we found some funeral arrangements were made but more were needed and that happened the next day. The funeral was Saturday the 8th (the anniversary of his plane crash a few years ago - and a few other nasty things less related.) Jay & I returned to Fairmont on Sunday the 9th due my resuming work schedule.

In between there was much meeting with friends and family and sorting through stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. And we only scratched the surface, really. I foresee more than a few trips to deal with everything, and the problem of how to merge some things into the house here in Fairmont which seemed big when we moved in.

My sister stayed longer and is likely returning to Minneapolis today. So much needed (and needs) to be done. And I'm glad my mother wasn't alone on the 15th - wedding anniversary. I expect this coming week, which includes my mother's birthday, will not be easy either.

Current Mood: sad

There are many, many things I could talk about but right now I'll settle on a more mundane one. I've been running ConnochaetOS on caspian for a while and some things about it grate a bit. So when I heard someone gushing about Bodhi Linux that could run on even a 386, I decided to try it. I am both impressed and disappointed in the result.

Impressed: It boots as a LiveCD, even on caspian. Takes a long, long time, but it does come up.

Disappointed: Like ConnochaetOS it defaults to an ugly 800x600 rather than correct 1024x786, but the showstopper is: Network? What's a network?

I can deal with the resolution, but the network issue? No. Not fiddling with that, not right now. I'll keep running Conn...OS and maybe try Bodhi again later. And since I've heard that the plan is to move away from being Debian-based (something I consider as a Good Thing) later may be better.

Current Mood: disappointed