[Geek] Status

Well, so far, so good. After getting Win98SE (why? Because it's what I legally own, that's why) onto its new hard drive, everything seemed to be hunky-dory. I had to boot back into Linux to download drivers for the video card and push them into the windows partition, and that seemed to work. But then the LAN driver and the audio card gave fits as I tried to install them. I got a ton of "file not found" errors whenever Windows wanted to look on the Win98SE CD-ROM.

It turns out that whatever driver was doing filesystem management couldn't read the CAB files as part of the filespec. What a pain. I eventually booted back into Linux, built cabextract, and decompressed the entire Win98SE CD into a temporary directory on the Windows partition. There! It better be able to find those files now.

ToDos:

Get sound working on Windows 98. Power Down the Linux Drives, then install Service Pack 1. Install entertainment package. Install MS Office and Quicken.

Build new kernel for Linux. Get CD-ROM burning working. Get cryptography working. Install NVidia linux driver. Run limited upgrade packages from FedoraCore2. Consider 2.6 kernel. Upgrade the following: gthumb, audacity, xscreensaver.

The children I deserve...

So, last night Omaha and I decided that, with Kouryou-chan on the verge of reading, we should head out to the bookstore and buy a couple "I can read" books. We ended up buying four, two of which are just perfect for her; the other two are a little tougher, but she'll get there soon. She was pretty good in the store for the most part although she didn't want to leave. (Actually, I'm not sure about one of the books, since it's designed to be confusing by playing with the words "see", "sea", and "saw" (as in both the past tense of see and an object for cutting things) and "seesaw" and, in order to make one riff work depicts the vandalism of playground equipment.)

On the way home, Omaha and I left the radio off so we could talk to one another, and then we hear Kouryou-chan in the back singing,

First you shake, shake, shake the Kouryou,
And then you squeeze
And the blood comes out,
'Cause when you squeeze people blood comes out,
'Cause when you squeeze people blood comes out,
'Cause when you squeeze people blood comes out,
But that doesn't work for robots
Because they have metal inside them.

And then she started giggling. "Kouryou-chan, where did you get such a horrible song?" I asked.

Then it occurred to me, we'd had this conversation recently, where we'd talked about how to squeeze fruit to get the juices out, since Omaha and I are familiarizing her with kitchen skills, and how "people juice" must be blood, since that's what people have inside them. "I guess it wouldn't be good to hug you so hard the juice comes out, huh?" She agreed that would be a bad idea.

I'm not sure where she got the bit about shaking, or robots. She's never been shaken in her life. Lots of the video fiction she sees has robots in it, so I suppose that's where she gets that part.

She just giggled and said, "I'm bored!" I offered to turn on the music. Omaha laughed and said, "You have to blog this."

I suppose it's a blessing to have a child who can so creatively put together such thoughts, but does she have to do it at the age when she, like most kids, is interested in gross things and bodily functions?

Anyway, we got home and I put her to bed. She was a bit of a crank, having that hyper energy kids do right before sleep time. She helped feed the cat, then went down and fetched the little toy greenhouse we bought a week ago and made sure all the plants had enough water. The sunflowers have started to sprout, but the pansies don't seem to be doing anything. We read a book about "Fred's Red Sled," and she took to it immediately, reading words reliably, although a lot of her hits were guesses based on context and rhyme.