A more comprehensive weekend report...
May. 19th, 2003 10:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsAfter work Friday I made my way over to my favorite coffee shop to sit for a few minutes and relax before proceeding on the rest of my weekend. I managed to hammer out a thousand words or so on the laptop despite the battery's twonky misbehavior. There's a bug in the battery subBIOS that seems to misinterpret the "full" status, causing it to stop charging at 75%. Even worse, I lost some time dealing with the fact that as the battery drops below 15%, every loss of a percentage point is an alarm event, and I had the alarm event hooked up to Hal telling me, "Dave... my mind is going. I can feel it." Once was enough, but once every two minutes was more than I was willing to tolerate.
I'm a little frustrated by what I wrote. It's good; it had been living at the back of my head for weeks and I finally managed to sit down long enough to get it out. Over the day, I put down three thousand words all told, about a thousand of it expository backstory, the kind of "in our last episode..." stuff that's needed in a long serial where some readers may be a little lost as to what's happening, or a refresher since the last book came out months or even years ago. Which is exactly the problem. I've written the opening chapter of book three of a trilogy. Now I need to go back, finish the first book, and write the second. Unfortunately, the second is a war... and I'm no good at writing wars.
Picked up Yamaarashi-chan from her mother's house and got her home around six or so. Omaha and I cooked pizza, which we ate in front of the TV set (gasp, shock, horrors), something we almost never do. But we were feeling lazy and it was such a busy day. It was the first time I've actually watched TV in three weeks. Afterwards, we let the kids watch Studio Ghibli's Panda, Go Panda, which is arguably much better fare than anything being put out by Disney these days.
Saturday, we woke up late in the morning and I tossed together a breakfast of pancakes for the kids while I had granola and Omaha scrambled an egg sandwich for herself. We had scheduled the day for cleaning house, given that at six people would be showing up form my birthday. I had to run all the way into downtown and up 15th to fetch my cooler back from a friend we'd lent it to, Peter Throckmorton, who's currently suffering with a serious bout of pneumonia. He looked better than he'd let on in his journal, but his energy levels are obviously close to unconsciousness. Here's hope he gets better soon. Hmm. Maybe I can find some cute, puffy-cheeked Catholic school girl named Hope to send his way...
Anyway, after getting home I made lunch. Egg-salad sandwiches: four eggs hard-boiled, two stalks of celery and two tablespoons of shallots, minced, mayonnaise and honey mustard. Wonderful stuff; between two adults and two kids we polished it off.
We engaged in an orgy of household maintenance in which floors were scrubbed, carpets sucked, couches washed, and clutter uncluttered, we sat back and waited for people to show up. Having invited nearly twenty, we planned for twelve, but in the end only five showed. After Omaha's heartbreaking concerns over party planning, I admit to feeling a little put out myself.
She baked a lovely cake, we had brie and crackers (mmm...), I burned one batch of kettle corn but succeeded with a second try, and there were wonderful fruit plates and Pegasus made deviled eggs that were scrumptious. Y'all missed out if you didn't show.
Still, it was short notice, and I did get some very nifty swag from my friends.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fallenpegasus gave me a sweet Graphire2 pad that integrated with my Linux box without so much as blinking, and the drawing package on X11/Gimp handled it without pause. riverheart and charlesk gave me the most disturbing food book, describing it this way: "You've heard of food porn? This is food hentai." Indeed it was.
But Omaha had the big surprise: a new computer. Not complete, mind you, but in pieces: motherboard, case, power supply, CPU, memory, video card, sound card all in separate boxes. I hope to snag a cheap hard drive from work (my company does storge devices; we've got tons of drives lying around that are too old, too small, or otherwise unusable in our products, but are perfectly fine for home use) because all the ones I have at home are either ridiculous (2.5G, 3.4G, 4.2G) or full (the 20G and the 120G-- really) and I have no way to back them up. I put it all together with an extra IDE controller card to support up to 8 drives. I hope not to stress the 350W power supply too much... yeah, right.
But the sad reality is that it would take a few days to put it together, and I don't have that. There is no time period I can see for the next two weeks that allows me to assemble the system correctly. I've got most of the hardware put together, but I have to build a multi-boot MBR, install Windows 98 on one partition, Linux on the other... Oy. The two-gig drive would make a nice Swap partition, I suppose And then I have to strip down the old linux box, put in the 4-gig, and turn it into the household router to stick in the wiring closet with a nice 8-port hub and a modem.
After most of the partygoers had left, Omaha, FallenPegasus and I watched the original X-Men movie, just as a refresher for the sequel.
Sunday, Omaha made us French toast for breakfast after she and I did another whirlwind cleaning of the kitchen. The kids, to my amazement, got dressed more or less by themselves. And then it was time to head out for many things. I stopped by the computer store for a spare MB standoff-- the MB box shorted me one-- and a static strap.
Afterwards, we headed out for the University Street Fair, where we again ran into Pegasus andshemayazi, who missed my birthday but handed me some amazingly sexy clothes anyway which she and everyone else agreed made me look "very yummy." But I still need a pair of nice boots.
We wandered the street fair, surprised that neither street preachers nor the pro-choice league had booths this year. They usually do. The kids were overwhelmed, and Yamaarashi-chan kept trying to skip out of sight. I was more than a little worried because I had forgotton to write my cell phone number on her hand and was minus a pen. We managed to walk the length of the fair without too much incident. There was a drum troupe, the apparent leader of which was a Senegalese man with the blackest skin I've ever seen, and he had the sexiest arms... mmmm... He blew out the doors on the phrase, "tall, dark, and handsome!" The kids danced up a storm, but one of my ears rattled painfully with the volume.
We stopped at Shemayazi's house where she gave me the lovely clothes and her partner loaned me his copy of Jedi Knight 2 since he was done with it. Not that I have time to play it, or a machine complete enough to run it on, but I'll find a way.
Afterwards, Omaha went off to a Yanni concert and I headed home, dropping Yamaarashi-chan off at her mother's house first. I put Kouryou-chan in front of the TV with Kimba the White Lion by Tezuka while I heated up some pizza for the two of us.
Then it was bath and bedtime, and she became a monster. She did so much "will to power" time that we ran out of time to read books. I put her to bed without any. I feel bad about that, because I love reading to her, but she needs to learn that she loses priveleges when she doesn't fall into scheduled time. She has so much free time, and she knows the household routines, that she shouldn't be surprised, but she's at that age where everything is a chance to explore her limits.
This morning the contents of /etc and /usr/local were backing up onto the huge hard-drive in the hopes that I can afford to rebuild the system using the 20GB drive, split into a 10GB partition for Windows, a 10GB partition for Linux, and the 120GB drive for /home. Which really needs to be cleaned out.
But with a 2.7GhZ athlon, Nautilus might actually run at something approaching real-time.
I'm a little frustrated by what I wrote. It's good; it had been living at the back of my head for weeks and I finally managed to sit down long enough to get it out. Over the day, I put down three thousand words all told, about a thousand of it expository backstory, the kind of "in our last episode..." stuff that's needed in a long serial where some readers may be a little lost as to what's happening, or a refresher since the last book came out months or even years ago. Which is exactly the problem. I've written the opening chapter of book three of a trilogy. Now I need to go back, finish the first book, and write the second. Unfortunately, the second is a war... and I'm no good at writing wars.
Picked up Yamaarashi-chan from her mother's house and got her home around six or so. Omaha and I cooked pizza, which we ate in front of the TV set (gasp, shock, horrors), something we almost never do. But we were feeling lazy and it was such a busy day. It was the first time I've actually watched TV in three weeks. Afterwards, we let the kids watch Studio Ghibli's Panda, Go Panda, which is arguably much better fare than anything being put out by Disney these days.
Saturday, we woke up late in the morning and I tossed together a breakfast of pancakes for the kids while I had granola and Omaha scrambled an egg sandwich for herself. We had scheduled the day for cleaning house, given that at six people would be showing up form my birthday. I had to run all the way into downtown and up 15th to fetch my cooler back from a friend we'd lent it to, Peter Throckmorton, who's currently suffering with a serious bout of pneumonia. He looked better than he'd let on in his journal, but his energy levels are obviously close to unconsciousness. Here's hope he gets better soon. Hmm. Maybe I can find some cute, puffy-cheeked Catholic school girl named Hope to send his way...
Anyway, after getting home I made lunch. Egg-salad sandwiches: four eggs hard-boiled, two stalks of celery and two tablespoons of shallots, minced, mayonnaise and honey mustard. Wonderful stuff; between two adults and two kids we polished it off.
We engaged in an orgy of household maintenance in which floors were scrubbed, carpets sucked, couches washed, and clutter uncluttered, we sat back and waited for people to show up. Having invited nearly twenty, we planned for twelve, but in the end only five showed. After Omaha's heartbreaking concerns over party planning, I admit to feeling a little put out myself.
She baked a lovely cake, we had brie and crackers (mmm...), I burned one batch of kettle corn but succeeded with a second try, and there were wonderful fruit plates and Pegasus made deviled eggs that were scrumptious. Y'all missed out if you didn't show.
Still, it was short notice, and I did get some very nifty swag from my friends.
fallenpegasus gave me a sweet Graphire2 pad that integrated with my Linux box without so much as blinking, and the drawing package on X11/Gimp handled it without pause. riverheart and charlesk gave me the most disturbing food book, describing it this way: "You've heard of food porn? This is food hentai." Indeed it was.But Omaha had the big surprise: a new computer. Not complete, mind you, but in pieces: motherboard, case, power supply, CPU, memory, video card, sound card all in separate boxes. I hope to snag a cheap hard drive from work (my company does storge devices; we've got tons of drives lying around that are too old, too small, or otherwise unusable in our products, but are perfectly fine for home use) because all the ones I have at home are either ridiculous (2.5G, 3.4G, 4.2G) or full (the 20G and the 120G-- really) and I have no way to back them up. I put it all together with an extra IDE controller card to support up to 8 drives. I hope not to stress the 350W power supply too much... yeah, right.
But the sad reality is that it would take a few days to put it together, and I don't have that. There is no time period I can see for the next two weeks that allows me to assemble the system correctly. I've got most of the hardware put together, but I have to build a multi-boot MBR, install Windows 98 on one partition, Linux on the other... Oy. The two-gig drive would make a nice Swap partition, I suppose And then I have to strip down the old linux box, put in the 4-gig, and turn it into the household router to stick in the wiring closet with a nice 8-port hub and a modem.
After most of the partygoers had left, Omaha, FallenPegasus and I watched the original X-Men movie, just as a refresher for the sequel.
Sunday, Omaha made us French toast for breakfast after she and I did another whirlwind cleaning of the kitchen. The kids, to my amazement, got dressed more or less by themselves. And then it was time to head out for many things. I stopped by the computer store for a spare MB standoff-- the MB box shorted me one-- and a static strap.
Afterwards, we headed out for the University Street Fair, where we again ran into Pegasus and
shemayazi, who missed my birthday but handed me some amazingly sexy clothes anyway which she and everyone else agreed made me look "very yummy." But I still need a pair of nice boots.We wandered the street fair, surprised that neither street preachers nor the pro-choice league had booths this year. They usually do. The kids were overwhelmed, and Yamaarashi-chan kept trying to skip out of sight. I was more than a little worried because I had forgotton to write my cell phone number on her hand and was minus a pen. We managed to walk the length of the fair without too much incident. There was a drum troupe, the apparent leader of which was a Senegalese man with the blackest skin I've ever seen, and he had the sexiest arms... mmmm... He blew out the doors on the phrase, "tall, dark, and handsome!" The kids danced up a storm, but one of my ears rattled painfully with the volume.
We stopped at Shemayazi's house where she gave me the lovely clothes and her partner loaned me his copy of Jedi Knight 2 since he was done with it. Not that I have time to play it, or a machine complete enough to run it on, but I'll find a way.
Afterwards, Omaha went off to a Yanni concert and I headed home, dropping Yamaarashi-chan off at her mother's house first. I put Kouryou-chan in front of the TV with Kimba the White Lion by Tezuka while I heated up some pizza for the two of us.
Then it was bath and bedtime, and she became a monster. She did so much "will to power" time that we ran out of time to read books. I put her to bed without any. I feel bad about that, because I love reading to her, but she needs to learn that she loses priveleges when she doesn't fall into scheduled time. She has so much free time, and she knows the household routines, that she shouldn't be surprised, but she's at that age where everything is a chance to explore her limits.
This morning the contents of /etc and /usr/local were backing up onto the huge hard-drive in the hopes that I can afford to rebuild the system using the 20GB drive, split into a 10GB partition for Windows, a 10GB partition for Linux, and the 120GB drive for /home. Which really needs to be cleaned out.
But with a 2.7GhZ athlon, Nautilus might actually run at something approaching real-time.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Happy Bday!!!
Date: 2003-05-19 11:56 am (UTC)As I said on Omahas' LJ, I would have showed up to the bday party if I possibly could have. ^___^ I didn't even realize it was your bday until her post. =/ Sorry.
I wish I had the time and energy lately to sit down and draw like you write. :) At least now you have your lovely Graphire2 (mine integrated with my SuSE install without having to install anything new either ^_^) to play with. Hope you have fun with it! ^_^
no subject
Date: 2003-05-19 04:41 pm (UTC)Oh, poor Elf (not!)
Date: 2003-05-20 07:25 am (UTC)Elf, hear me now:
BURN YOUR PORN ONTO A CD!!!
120 G of porn is just too much, dear.
Re: Oh, poor Elf (not!)
From:Re: Oh, poor Elf (not!)
From:you computer
Date: 2003-05-20 10:55 pm (UTC)but as for getting your parts cheap i know a good site for finding the lowest prices for that kind of stuff try pricewatch.com
Your kind offer
Date: 2003-05-21 04:06 pm (UTC)Still waiting... :}
Peter