morrowlife

Here’s the third – and quite possibly the last unless some Loyal Readers get their art thing going again – in my famous Penguin series. This one is once again courtesy of Loyal Reader Number Two, with photography by Loyal Reader Number Four. Slight image rotation and cropping by me.

It’s the weekend! And possibly our last irresponsible one for a long, long time. We go pay for the house on Monday morning and then pick up the keys on Thursday. After that, I’m sure there will be plenty to do on Saturdays. Tomorrow, by contrast, I hope to go to the pool and maybe do a little reading.

I remembered to go get our house closing money a mere few minutes before the bank closed this afternoon. It would have been embarrassing to have to delay Monday’s appointment so I could go to the bank first. I have the check in my hairy little paws, though, so Nothing Could Possibly Go Wrong Now.

We’ve started planning for our vacation, which is coming up in another week. Fun, fun, fun is on the camping schedule, along with a grueling sea-to-shining-sea driving regimen. We have no idea where we’ll be stopping at night, and we’re hoping to not have to make too many plans. I think we might want to get a campground listing book before we go, though, so we can call ahead every day if we feel the need. The Extended Morrow Family Campout plans are also moving ahead. Eighteen family members are scheduled to be there. Each group is providing one meal – we’ve got dinner on Saturday night. LRN4 is thinking about taco salad, but I countered with a suggestion for hamburgers. We’ll have to see what she decides. I didn’t mention to her that if she chooses hamburgers, she’s guaranteed that I’ll work on at least a little bit of the meal. In any case, we’re guaranteed to have a nice time being with everybody and I’m looking forward to seeing everybody one more time before we’re permanently Way Out West in Lardville.

Have a great weekend. Wake me up on Monday.

Here’s the second in my now-famous Penguin series. This one’s from Loyal Reader Number One, created using Blender. Since it’s computer generated, there’s technically no photography involved here, but I’m letting it slide this time.

Tonight’s post is really late and really short for a Very Good Reason. We picked up Loyal Reader Number Four from the airport! Her flight was quite late, though, so it was a long evening. We agreed not to come into the terminal, and it turns out SFO doesn’t have a cell phone lot, like so many of your better airports have these days, and heaven forbid you should actually stop in front of the terminal for a couple of minutes, so we did a lot of circling around. Loyal Reader Number One steadfastly refused to run into anything, though, so it was all right. LRN4 had a nice time and we’re really glad she’s home now.

So it was a great day, all in all. Gotta go to bed. See you tomorrow.

Here’s the first in my famous Penguin series. Thanks to Loyal Reader Number Two for creating this piece and to Loyal Reader Number Four for the photography. Just like yesterday. In this case, though, I broke every Morrowlife Great Art Rule and did some serious electronic correction. Looks good, says I. We’ll be featuring a few more of my Loyal Readers’ works in the next few days.

Where’s Loyal Reader Number Eleven when I need him? He makes a little bit of folding money by taking beautiful pictures of his clients’ Great Art and printing them on High-Quality Paper using a Fancy Printer with Expensive Ink. We don’t need to print the pictures, but we really ought to take high-quality photos of Loyal Reader Artwork. Maybe I can remember what he taught me about his technique. Or at least enough to make my Loyal Readers’ work look good. Not that the existing pictures aren’t good enough already. I’m just always looking for ways to improve the Loyal Reader Experience around here.

Speaking of Loyal Readers’ artwork, Loyal Reader Number Seven previously expressed interest in sending in some Art. I promised to email her an address to send it to, but I apparently don’t have the right address for her, since my message bounced back. Therefore, I’m going to give you an address in a highly cryptic fashion that spambots (hopefully) can’t figure out. Here it is: my first two initials (the second one is “a”) plus my last name at gmail dot com. Send in that Great Art, LRN7! And I’m sorry about the delay – I just couldn’t get the email thing to work.

Loyal Reader Number One and I need to get to the store to buy a bag of M&Ms, so it’s already time to quit. I promised to bring some M&Ms to a coworker who has a couple of candy machines at his desk. He normally provides the candy and the pennies, so I figure the least I can do is fill up the machines every once in a while.

Adios.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Two’s self-portrait. Beautiful! Not to mention totally lifelike. I like it.

This post is brought to you courtesy of Computer on a Dime. That’s right, it’s a totally Linux post. I transferred some photos over to the new machine via one of my thumb drives. Had to figure out how to mount the drive again. It was pretty easy to find something on the net that tells how to do it, but Linux won’t really be ready for the desktop (at least for non-nerds) until it can automount thumb drives. I wonder what it will do with a CD-ROM. Anyway, I got the photos transferred over to the Linux box and now I’m running my normal blogging software on Firefox. Yoo hoo.

I need to figure out how to make blog posts offline after we move to Lardville. I want to write on the train during the trip home every afternoon. Even though there’s a Wifi car, I hear it doesn’t always work well. Offline posting is something Blogger simply won’t allow, of course. Might have to change to a non-hosted blogging client to make it work. I have to make the decision pretty soon, though – train riding starts in less than a month, and it’s a pretty complex change.

Speaking of which, I need to send away for my free one-week commuter train ticket. Real Soon Now.

Speaking of things happening soon, I have a proposal for my Loyal Readers. As you may know, the family is going to be out of town for the first couple of weeks on August. Since we’ll be camping, it’s almost a sure thing I won’t have an internet connection and won’t be able to make any Morrowlife blog posts for two whole weeks. This is bordering on the tragic. My proposal is for my Loyal Readers to take up the slack. I’ll post a brief message right before we leave and the Loyal Readers can keep things going via comments. What do you think?

See you tomorrow.

Here’s a Great Work of Aboriginal Art, courtesy of Loyal Reader Number Two (photo by Loyal Reader Number Four, I believe). Good work, mate! Crikey!

It was an eventful weekend. Loyal Reader Number Four left on Saturday afternoon and she andLoyal Reader Number Five are together in Park City, Utah for a few days with the McCulloch Women’s Clan. It sounds like they’re having a good time. We miss you, LRN4, in spite of the fact that you bought us food before you left so we won’t starve. We also miss LRN5, of course, but we don’t normally get to see her quite as often.

We got serious about the Computer on a Dime on Saturday evening. They were having a great sale at Fry’s on an AMD Athlon 64 with a decent motherboard, so I got it and the other necessary parts to make a new computer. I went slightly over budget, but still got an excellent deal on a very powerful computer. We got it put together and installed the 64-bit version of Fedora Core 5, which is my favorite Linux. It wasn’t really hard to put it together, but getting it up and running was a little more time-consuming. First, we had the jumpers for the hard drive (100 MB for fifty bucks) and the DVD burner mixed up, so we had to take them back out and get them right. We started downloading Fedora’s six CDs, and we tried to install a couple of live CD Linuxes in the meantime. Unfortunately, neither of the live CDs (Knoppix and Ubuntu) could format the hard disk. I finally decided to install (shudder) Windows (link warning: Windows sounds) to get the drive formatted. It worked, and by the time that was done, the first of the Fedora disks was available, so we immediately got rid of Windows and got the real installation going. Unfortunately, the download took overnight, so we didn’t get the whole thing installed until Sunday morning, after which we took a couple more hours to download and install all the updates.

Our goal was to make the computer “headless,” which means that it has no keyboard, monitor, or mouse. We borrowed those items from LRN4’s computer (thanks!) to get it going, and then got a VNC server installed and running properly. Now we can access the Linux box from any of the other computers just as if we were logged directly in to it. It’s truly a thing of beauty.

I started playing with Wine (the software, not the beverage!) last night. I think it’s still not ready for prime time (link warning – cheesy TV sound), but I’ll see what I can get installed and working. For those still trying to crack the Linux code, Wine is software that tries to emulate Windows on a Linux machine, allowing you to run any Windows programs you absolutely need while keeping your computer Microsoft-free. It’s a great idea that’s getting a lot of attention, but there’s still a lot of work to do.

Next up: the case mod (although probably not before we get into the new house).

Loyal Reader Number One was sick this weekend. He couldn’t go to church, so LRN2 and I went by ourselves. Fortunately, LRN1 is feeling better now. In fact, he was well enough for a heapin’ helpin’ of Hungry Man this evening. That ought to be enough proof of his complete recovery for anyone.

Time to hit the jacuzzi. See you tomorrow.