morrowlife

Here’s the basement at the Philadelphia railroad station, down where they keep the tracks. Taken on one of my several trips there when we lived outside of DC.

Okay day. It rained this morning and the traffic was wretched. Got there late, so I made up for it by leaving early. It’s been a nice afternoon at home. I really needed that.

Actually, I really need to spend a week camping. Can’t wait for Monday.

Moe is officially working! I’m transferring all its old files back over to it now. My machine says it will take another 287 hours. I’m hoping that’s an overestimation. By at least a few hours.

Loyal Reader Number Two and I have been watching Zoolander on TV. Very amusing.

I just checked again and it’s down to 80 hours now. I’m hoping it’ll be done by morning.

Checked again. Down to 71 hours.

Okay, I’ll stop checking now (50 hours).

See you tomorrow.

Here are Loyal Readers Numbers One and Twelve communicating. Not so well.

No post yesterday. I was trying to get Curly’s email program changed back to mail.app. It took hours to figure it out, but I finally got it done by deleting all of its preferences and emails. It strangely was able to remember all of its email accounts, which was really a good thing. I copied all the emails from Entourage and we’re good to go. Very frustrating problem that was, though.

I’m also test-driving iWork. I simply won’t pay Microsoft’s asking price for Office for Mac. Not even the student price.

Juggernaut update – I’m at $2.02. Last time I checked, I believe I was at $2.01. So the juggernaut rolls on. Keep those clicks coming, Loyal Readers!

Little else to report. I’m in the middle of trying to update Moe’s BIOS, which is a risky operation at best. It might kill him outright. On the other hand, it might fix him. On the other hand, it probably won’t change anything. Time will tell.

Drove the convertible home with the top down. It was light for the entire trip, and I didn’t have to roll up the windows. Spring is coming! Or I guess it’s here already.

I’m off to work on Moe. See you tomorrow.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Three with our favorite item from the wedding in Las Vegas the other day – the chocolate fountain. Every home should have one of these. It was a little messy (especially the way I used it), but it produced the results.

LRN3 sure looks nice in a suit, doesn’t he?

Extremely Short Shrift tonight. We got kind of a late start to Home Evening, and then jacuzzified for activity, which always takes a little extra time. Not that we’re complaining – we love to do it.

Fine weekend. Sunday was extremely busy, as usual. Saturday was quite the opposite. Got a couple of non-memorable things done (as reported on Friday’s blog) and spent some time relaxing. Ahhh.

Started working on a little Mac application that will eventually read image files (such as digital photographs), reverse the bits in each pixel, and save. Got the idea from an article on steganography, but that’s not exactly what I’m doing. My idea is just to see what such files will look like (I think they’ll look like noise, but we’ll see – I’ll post some examples after the tool is done) and to actually get some Mac programming experience beyond canned tutorials. It’s been quite an eye-opener. The learning curve is steep, but not nearly as bad as pre-OS X Mac programming was. It’s quite easy to make something pretty.

Chatted with the Loyal Readers about the business during jacuzzification. We’re concentrating on two projects right now. One is Waterlogged and the other is Loyal Reader Number One’s CRM communications enhancement tool. I think it has definite possibilities, so it needs the appropriate level of attention. I think Waterlogged is ready right now for Beta testers, and we’re going to try to get some. It still needs a few features and a lot of CSS magic, but those can come during the beta testing phase. We need to publish some software!

Time for bed. See you tomorrow.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Fifteen helping get ready for the wedding the other day. The one in Las Vegas, that is. She didn’t make it to last week’s Manteca wedding.

Wonders of Blogger. Reason is in following paragraphs.

See Loyal Reader Number One’s comment on Thursday’s post. Frank is temporarily dead – his brains got fried. We’re bidding on a new brain on eBay now (so far we’re the high bid at $.01 with about 21 hours to go!) and will probably have him fixed within a few days. In the meantime, Moe’s old brain continues to function. Mostly.

He gave us quite a scare last night, though. I put Frank’s memory stick in him and tried bumping up the memory’s speed, and Moe freaked out. Set the speed back to its nominal, slow value and that cleared up, fortunately. I ended up taking Frank’s memory back out.

Tried installing FreeNAS on Moe. It would think it was going to install and would start to format the disks, but it would fail, leaving the disks unformatted. Messed around with that for quite a while until I gave up and reinstalled Ubuntu Server. I’m assuming FreeNAS didn’t like Moe’s older hardware. Or something.

Anyway. Got Moe back up and running under Ubuntu server on its 40GB drive. Tried formatting and mounting its 100GB and 200GB drives. They seemed to work but be a little flaky, so I rebooted. Got a kernel panic, from which I never recovered. So I went to bed. Very late.

Hence, no post yesterday.

So far today, I’ve gotten Moe back up and running yet again and I’m trying to figure out what to do with the big disks. We’ll get it figured out. Probably about the time we get a replacement CPU and cooler for Moe II and do a motherboardectomy. Then it’s back to FreeNAS. Which I like very much.

Anyway. Last night’s baptism went very well. Then we went to Modesto Junior College for LRN1’s honors recital. Found out the recital wasn’t actually at MJC. Pushed on further south to CSU Stanislaus, where we found the hall. We were there in plenty of time. LRN1 wasn’t as happy with his performance as he would like to be, but it went fine and it was a nice recital. And I like the hall at Stanislaus much more than the one at MJC.

Lots to do today – need to clean the pool filters while it’s nice and sunny, finish setting up Moe and get him put back away in the game room, finish the taxes and get them ready to mail, and probably do a whole bunch of other things I can’t think of right now. Loyal Readers Numbers Five and Twelve are here too, so there’s some mucking about with the granddaughter to do also.

Life’s good. See you on Monday.

Here’s a computer I put together on the loft’s coffee table this evening, using a motherboard given to me by my colleague Dick and a bunch of other parts I had stored in a box in the garage, in the electronics closet, and/or lying around. It’s three times faster than Moe, so it’s very likely its motherboard will become Moe’s new heart. It appears that its PS2 keyboard connector isn’t working, but that’s not a problem, since Moe has no keyboard, mouse, or monitor and won’t need one in its new role as a FreeNAS server. Note the Swiss Army power button over there between the keyboard and the motherboard. Nothing but the best at this house!

The monitor there shows an in-progress installation of Ubuntu Server, which worked perfectly. I’ve since installed FreeNAS on it just to get a feel for how to work it. It’s not extremely obvious, but the interface is very nice and the documentation is quite good, considering it was written by people for whom English is not a first language.

Update: With Loyal Reader Number One’s help, we now have Frank running a Samba server, to which Curly is currently connected. Cool. I’m leaving it turned on all night to burn in a little, and tomorrow Frank becomes Moe. Incidentally, LRN1 and I did a little transfer speed comparison between Moe and Frank, and Frank is about 40% faster. That’s significant for a file server.

Normal work day. Normal commute day (on the train). Watched a few TV shows, read about 60 pages in my new book (it’s a management book – details tomorrow, perhaps), listened to nearly four chapters in my current audio book (Three Men In a Boat). Also worked.

It’s late. See you tomorrow.