morrowlife

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Sixteen, stopping to smell the roses along the way. Ahhh!

That’s right, I now have sixteen Loyal Readers! I snared LRN16 with cute pictures of Loyal Reader Number Twelve. Very tricky. Don’t worry, LRN16, cute LRN12 pictures will be back tomorrow. And thanks for reading. And enjoy your Very Special Morrowlife Day, complete with your own picture and your name over there on the right on the actual Internet! Wow.

No post yesterday. I was . . . thinking. No, that couldn’t be it. I spent Sunday and Monday evenings until late into the night trying to get my email server working for the HRVA. I got the web server up on The Computer On a Dime a little bit earlier in the weekend. It’s working now, although all it consists of is a link to the old HRVA site. Time to switch.

Anyway, I had a much harder time getting my COaD email server up. I made it even harder by trying to use a woefully incomplete and misleading internet-based guide (to be fair, though, the guide does have some configuration guidelines that are useful after the server is up and running). On Monday, I switched to the excellent guide from linuxhomenetworking.com and got to work. I finally got it to receive emails last night and then got the sending part figured out earlier tonight. Now I have email accounts at: (1) work, (2) gardenvillesoftware, (3) morrowlife, (4) hrva, (5 -7) gmail, (8) juno, (9) yahoo, (10-11) hotmail, and (12) comcast. No shortage there. To paraphrase an old chestnut about TV, twelve accounts and there’s nothing to read.

Looking back at Friday’s post, I had high hopes for a productive weekend. On the one hand, I did get several things done, including a very nice baptism, a decent Sunday School lesson, and all my Christmas shopping. I also checked the pool water. However, the cars remain unwashed, many things remain un-put-away, and the Taurus remains unrepaired. There’s always next week, when I’ll be hope celebrating Christmas and enjoying being with the family. Maybe I can even get some of them to help me with the fun parts, like fixing the Taurus.

And now it’s late again and I really have to get to sleep. See you tomorrow.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Five, ready for her closeup. Maybe I zoomed in there just a little too much.

Worked pretty much a full day for free today. I could have used the day off today. Lots to do.

So, I’ll have to get it all done tomorrow. I need to fix the Taurus’s blinkers, find out where it’s leaking antifreeze from, install a new blind, do all my Christmas shopping, redesign the Gardenville Software website, prepare for a baptism on Sunday, prepare my Sunday School lesson, put a bunch of stuff away, get a car or two clean (rainfall permitting), check the pool, and I don’t remember what else.

Sooooo, I’ll spend the rest of the evening doing something fun and/or relaxing. Have a great weekend.

Here are Loyal Readers Numbers One, Two, and Three looking at a (surprise!) computer. Hello . . . hello . . . hello! Hello.

Shorter rides back and forth to work today. Maybe the fall/winter traffic slowdown is easing up a little. We can certainly hope so. I’ve been enjoying driving the Sable the last couple of weeks. It’s comfortable and powerful, and it has all the options I really want. With its cassette adapter, my iPod sounds better than in the Honda, in which I have to use my little FM radio transmitter. Too much interference in San Francisco’s radio-rich environment.

I didn’t do anything tonight other than hold Loyal Reader Number Twelve, but it was worth it. And now it’s bedtime. Yikes.

Well, I did do one other thing while I was holding her. Two, actually. I read a few pages from some recent issues of Free Software Magazine, and I watched most of the MST3K version of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. High-class entertainment, that. The brilliance of MST3K, of course, was that it made the absolutely worst movies into instant classics – true works of art. This one is highly recommended holiday viewing.

Free Software Magazine is also recommended, especially given its price (free). I haven’t seen an issue yet that doesn’t have something I’m interested in. I just finished a how-to article on RT-Linux and one on FlightGear, a free and very accurate flight simulator. In fact, the reviewer laments just a little that it’s too accurate, making it quite hard to fly. On the other hand, in addition to everything from a Cessna 172 through a 747 and Concorde, they also have Santa’s sleigh and a flying saucer. So there’s a wide choice of aircraft.

Anyway, now I’m working on an article about creating a “managed” website, meaning one that uses a Content Management System (CMS), like Drupal, which currently powers the (pitifully neglected) HRVA website. As many Loyal Readers know, I’m getting ready to redo the Gardenville Software website to make it contain actual software, and I’m looking for the ideal CMS. I want it to be easy to maintain, while making it look all Web 2.0-ish and cool. The plan is to start with the program written the other day by LRN1 that changes the color on his Mac’s screen based on the amount of light the Arduino sees on a sensor. The cool thing about this project is that it contains just a little bit of circuitry on the Arduino, a simple but non-trivial program on the Arduino, and a cool little program on the Mac. I think it would be well-received by the microcontroller community as an excellent springboard for others who want to integrate the Arduino with their computers. I’m also interested in hearing what LRN1’s next project will be.

I may have to start riding the train again. As much as I enjoy listening to podcasts, it has occurred to me that the majority of my free time on any given day takes place during my commute. Maybe I should start using it differently. There are lots of things I want to read, and I could get some writing done too. I wish they would get the onboard Wifi working again (although that might make me less productive, come to think of it). On the other hand, with the new podcasts I added to the iPod the other night, I’m now only on show 12 of 114, with more arriving every day. That’s a lot of catching up to do. Decisions, decisions.

It’s my off Friday tomorrow! Unfortunately, I’ll be spending it at work. For free. With an additional four hours on the road. And I have so much to do right now. Fortunately, I at least enjoy the work, and there’s plenty of it.

And finally, as far as I’m concerned, nothing says Christmas like this. Bon appetit! I guess when Dasher, Dancer, and Prancer start getting a little too slow…

See you tomorrow.

Here’s a group of happy, peppy Loyal Readers in front of the Happiest Ride on Earth. It was the first place we went on Disneyland Day. I can’t say exactly why, though. I guess it was because we found out the Matterhorn was closed for cleaning and repair and we were so confused we simply kept wandering until we found a line to stand in. Could we help it that it turned out to be the sappiest ride there? I can’t remember which Loyal Reader commented right after we got off that one that Disneyland wasn’t turning out to be as cool as he had been led to believe. Fortunately, it was all uphill from there.

I’ve had to resort to the Wonders of Blogger again today. Wednesday evenings can really get busy. I tend to get home from work at about 7:00 and I have to be at my church meeting at 8:30. That gives plenty of time to grab some dinner and visit with Loyal Reader Number Four for a few minutes. I don’t generally get home from the meeting until about 10:00, and then it’s to bed if I want to have any chance of getting up on time in the morning. Poor, poor me. Pity me.

More news on Thursday night. See you then.

Here’s a famous cruise ship, getting ready to ply the dangerous waters of Anaheim. We had a great time on our cruise, although it did seem a little short. Not to mention that the boat wasn’t exactly luxurious. But we did see hippos, elephants, gorillas, and headhunters, which you don’t generally see every day.

I was in danger of catching up with my podcasts the other day, so I decided to try out a few others. I found interesting-looking ones from Popular Mechanics, IT Conversations, Mac Geek Gab, and Inside Mac News. The jury is still out on all of them, but I have high hopes for them all. I have listened to a couple of IT Conversations episodes and one Mac Geek Gab. All three were interesting except for one of the IT Conversations. However, they cover a different subject every week, so I’m not giving up on it yet. We’ll just have to see. At least I have plenty of things to listen to now.

Otherwise a quiet day. No new Arduino programs – although I’m still contemplating pretty seriously getting FreeRTOS running on it. It would require me to make a programmer, which prefers to talk to a PC parallel port, which a Mac doesn’t have. I have some machines that could talk to it, though, so we’ll see.

Rough commute for everybody in town this morning. It was raining. I left home early enough that I still got to work on time, but I wanted to be a little early. Not too bad on the way home, though.

And now it’s already late. See you tomorrow.