Just a Monday...

[elfs]

It's funny how the little things drive you crazy. This morning I noticed that I had not yet installed either the thesaurus or the rhyming dictionary, and that frustrated me. I also didn't have the word count mode for Emacs installed, and that annoyed me too.

But I'm really very happy with Gentoo. It is fast, but part of that might be the XFCE enviroment over Gnome, which is becoming bloated. It's lightweight, because every utility on the system is one I personally chose to install. The 2.6.7 kernel is very responsive and does audio, video, and laptop suspension perfectly. Still, whoever wrote the PCMCIA mananger scripts was lazy, and the network scripts are therefor broken for laptops. About the only design decision I've had to manually override was the use of the DICT protocol for dictionary lookups, opting instead for WordNet. The DICT protocol handles advanced parts of speech, such as hyponyms, hypernyms, and the like, very poorly.

On the other hand, it's weird that I was walking to work with the Gnu C Compiler rebuilding itself in this small box tucked under my arm. Just a few years ago that would have been an all-day operation during which you didn't consider touching the machine. Now it was going while I listened to music and worked on a story. And it builds a java compiler, too.

I was enjoying this band, The Celtic Nots, when I stumbled on one of their older songs, and decided I couldn't stomach them anymore.

We've had enough of the paranoid lies
Of the NRA and the friends it buys
To promote the outdated legislation
Of the Founding Fathers of this great nation

Wonderful, huh? It was such a shrill piece of useful idiocy that I decided to pass on the rest of their oeuvre.

We have Yamaarashi-chan over for the week, which is wonderful. I also got her report card today, and she's doing very well. Her teacher said that she's "always willing to try new foods and adventures," which surprised us because getting either of the kids to try any new food is always an adventure. Well, we figure they'll figure it out. I'm still encouraging both of them to read for themselves; I don't want their school-learned skills atrophying over the summer. But the call of the wild is too much; they've been spending a good chunk of their days outdoors.

And poor Omaha is laid so low by allergies. I wish there was more we could do for her, but nothing seems to help but rest and twice-a-day showers to get the pollen off her body. We need to replace the filters in our HEPA system, but it's pricey, like ninety bucks or so.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Word count mode? (googles) Oh, JEEZ, I wish I'd've had this last year....

Figures it would be by a Japanese, too, coming from you. :)

Let'em play during the summer; they've got nine months of rain ahead of them when it's over. Just a little practice every day or two and they won't lose it. (Besides, I betcha the little one at least will go read of her own volition... I know I did.)

Something you might try for poor Omaha is L-histidine... it's a lefthanded histamine, kinda like Sucrolose.... just a thought....

[grayfoxofwinter.livejournal.com]

Useful idiocy is unfortunate. Some bands are really good, and they screw it up with nonsense political BS. The best bands keep out of politics any way possible.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I've heard bands do politics well. It's called subtlety which this band simply decided to toss out the window in favor of a screed. I don't do screeds set to music.

[poetpaladin.livejournal.com]

We need more people with more guns. Especially women. Men would be sooo much more courteous and respectful...

More guns

[(Anonymous)]

You know, if more people had guns, we'd have less shootings in this country.

Re: More guns

[dwarfrage.livejournal.com]

Eh, in all honesty, we'd probably have more, of course, if we had more gun TRAINING we'd have less accidental shootings in this country. Which I'm all for. I support the NRA cause I only want people to shoot the people they want to shoot, not those they don't.

Re: More guns

[poetpaladin.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't say less shootings.

Getting rid of Gnome is a major speed boost...

[norikos-author.livejournal.com]

I switched to _KDE_, for fucksakes, and the speed difference was noticable. And KDE doesn't have the 'You do it our way. There is no else, because we don't give you options. And if you don't like our way, you're too stupid to understand why it's better' attitude that Gnome has, which is nice -- the final straw was the article about how the reason people don't like the new spatial nautilus was because they've used windows and just don't understand how much _better_ a spatial browser is.

Feh.

Shalon Wood

Re: Getting rid of Gnome is a major speed boost...

[elfs.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of GTK underneath XFCE, but it is quite responsive. Since Lain is just a little P2/266 with 128MB of ram and a 6Gb drive, I need every precious cycle, every smaller app, every battery-saving moment I can extract!

[http://users.livejournal.com/dominic-m-/]

For air filters HEPA is wayy to overrated. Filters cost way to much, great filtering but costs a fortune. What I have is one of those ORICK air filters they showed off in an infomertial. Easy to clean filter and works just as good as one of those HEPA filters. No more indoor allergey problems for me at all.