Got some sun...

Omaha has been struggling all weekend with the toolset she needs to make her trip to Boston next week for MacWorld and she's always a little hard to live with around deadline time-- very stressed, very worried, very "I'm going to miss something." I've already been busy pulling up my ToDo list in emacs and making sure I'm covered with everything I need to do while she's away-- feed the kids, do the laundry, vacuum the floors; if I don't have it routinized and in the list, it just won't get done these days. And since both kids are on drugs these days (Kouryou-chan has a regimen of antibiotics now for a bacterial lung infection that's been making her hack a nasty cough at night), that really has to go onto the calendar-- with alarm clock settings.

Saturday, fallenpegasus agreed to watch Kouryou-chan for a few hours while Omaha and I went riding along the Burke-Gilman trail, covering only about ten miles, but it was still a good ride. It was half of what we'd planned to ride that day, but Omaha had had more problems than she'd anticipated with her laptop getting it ready for her trip and we ran out of time to do more. Thank goodness for sunscreen; the weather turned out to be gorgeous, that kind of "big sky" weather where the clouds are deep and far away and give the sky texture and form. We climbed a nature preserve observation tower, bunnies fled in our presence, and at one point passed what had to be a swan or cormorant with seven little baby chicks, standing in the Green river and nibbling on something.

I also weeded out a good chunk of the norhern beds. There's still much to do back there, but it's starting to look like someone's taking care of it.

Later in the evening, I had to teach Omaha how to slimjim open a Macintosh CD-Rom drive. The lever for those is on the right side, not the left as in most models, and there's no marker for it.

Bittorrent puts direct connection to shame...

So, yesterday, I wanted to download the new Gentoo disk images for my laptop so I could upgrade it (I'm running 2004.1, and 2005.1 is out now). I tried a direct connection and it told me it would take 8 hours via HTTP for the whole 700MB file.

I usually think of bittorrent as slow. I'm used to it taking days, weeks, or even months to complete a torrent. But I decided, what the heck, I'll pull down the torrent file for Gentoo 2005.1 and see how long it would take. At least, unlike HTTP, the resume wouldn't be expensive.

It took two hours with bittorrent. Cool!