The Same River.

ZOMG. It’s amazing how much happier I am when the nightly builds go off without a hitch.

Loving freeway traffic in rush hour. Accidents rule!

Come to find out a carcass truck had “lost its load” all over the I-80 eastbound lanes. It’s not the most squicky thing I’ve ever seen but identifiable body parts on the road is right up there. The smell of cooking bacon was unmistakable and I’ve sworn off commercial meat products again.

Finally fixed the linkies for the Millionaire’s Holiday.

Other people’s installer code sucks. It’s an immutable law of nature.

Just realized the dead router replacement from July broke much of the Millionaire’s Holiday.

Simple Home File Server Based On Ubuntu | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials is a nice little howto article that netted me a file server to use for daily backups. Elz’s hard drive melting down last weekend finally got my ass in gear to put this together. Of course, not before she lost all of her email and address book. I was able to save the photos and music collection though. Hooray for partitions!

At any rate, if’n you’re looking for a quick and dirty network file server, you could do a lot worse than this. OTOH, if’n you’re looking for a micro-powered, highly tailored file server, you can probably do a lot better. All I know is that I now have all of our machines dumping nightly backups to a file server, and have the foundation for a home media center once I get myself together for that project.

From the “Everyone loves this but you never seemed to get off your ass to try it yourself” files I bring you Growl. In and of itself it’s pretty innocuous—just an operating system alert widget. However, when you plug in all sorts of applications it keeps you from ⌘-Tabbing or space jumping all over the place to get alerts of incoming stuff. Alerts just pop up wherever you happen to be when “things happen.” Currently I’m monitoring:

1. Mail.app
2. iTunes
3. Hardware
4. CC.NET

In the past half hour I think I’ve increased my productivity twofold just because I’m not jumping to different spaces every time I get email.

Related, I’ve installed CC Menu to monitor all the freaking builds going on at work. This frees up a bit of space in my cramped RDC connection to my worktop as the monitor now runs in my menu bar and I can open the project window and move it off to the side on the secondary monitor. Sure, it might be easier to just work directly on the worktop but I’m just that committed to using my powerbook. Who says mac fans aren’t zealous?

Not that I encourage spam, or even read a minuscule portion of it, but this struck me as oddly humorous. This one comes from “muriel” with the subject line something along the lines of “did you get my previous email…”

We’re always working to get you the best on the market

http://www.geocities.com/[some gibberish here]/

and senior media executives.[3] As a measure of the club’s exclusivity, it is reported the waiting
overseas. Californian guests are generally limited to attendance at the “Spring Jinxes”, in June,

It just leaves me wondering what exactly the “Spring Jinxes” are and why this is a constraint only for Californian guests. Maybe muriel will write back with more information…

So you want to get your message out to the masses. You want a soap box from which you can teach the world a thing or two about the world. You want to make a difference, foster change, foment revolution. You’ve got two birds in each hand having scoured the bushes and you’re ready to share a really fish and loaf miracle.

Well, son, that’s completely admirable. Question is, are you aware you are already standing on the kind of soap box your ancestors, both literal and figurative, could only dream of? Do you realize that this here Internet can reach nearly every nation; every culture; every single person who is not more immediately concerned with scratching an existence from some hard-scrabble desert floor? It is here, waiting for you seize the opportunity to shower us with your wisdom.

Oh, wait, you did realize this? So what is the problem then? Why are you standing here, bitching?

A-ha. You don’t have an audience. Well, that there Constitution—or at least the tattered remains thereof—doesn’t guarantee you an audience. Nope. An audience must be earned. You have to grow an audience like you would a bonsai tree. This isn’t your standard refrigerator science experiment kind of growing. You have to sit with your audience, keep them involved, play to their vanity. If they want to be entertained, you have to entertain them. If they want to feel intelligent you have to package your message with a certain distain for the common.

So you’re okay with that level of commitment? Are you sure? Because, from the looks of things, you’re not really doing a good job of that so far. But, okay, your word is gold. From here on out you are the man and the flock is just around the corner…waiting to consume your message.

You do have a message, don’t you? After all, your obsession with a soap box is grounded in preaching this message, right? So, then, start with an audience of one. What is your message?

…

Hey. You. Stop already. You lost me at about your third sentence there. That is, if what was coming out of your mouth could be considered as something remotely resembling the rules of grammar. You are familiar with grammar, no?

Well, see, here’s the deal. Your message? Yeah. It needs to be short enough to remember. They say the human brain can hold up to seven chunks of information at any given time. Seven. It would behoove you to distill that thing down into seven words, preferable fewer.

Sure, go ahead and write a manifesto, a treatise, a five volume disquisition on what ever it is that keeps that bug up your ass. Set it all down in writing with annotation, explication, appendices, and proper citation. Just don’t spew that at every opportunity. You have seven words. Use them judiciously.

So, again, what is it you are after? Why do you continue to bother us? What possible reason do you have for inserting yourself into our daily routines? Because, honestly, we don’t care. We all want our own soap box too.

You’re not the only one who has figured it all out. In fact, after hearing your spiel you obviously don’t have your shit together in the least. You’re going to have to compete with the rest of us trying to everyone to listen. Your precious Internet, the thing that provides you your global soapbox? Yeah, that. You ever wonder why you are gifted with such an opportunity? Well, it certainly isn’t because you are a unique, special snowflake. You get your shake at the Internet because we all do. You get it because the barrier to entry is so incredible low, especially here in the first world.

So, yeah, go ahead sucker. Have at it. Just keep in mind that it isn’t guaranteed, it isn’t easy, and you sure as hell aren’t the best one out there.

So one week ago today Elz calls me (!!) and asks if I want to hear the good or bad news first. The way things had been going for her at the hospital I asked for the bad news first. The bad new: she didn’t have a ride home. Which, of course, means that the good news was they were releasing her.

Can’t say as it wasn’t a surprise. She was still on some pretty heavy O₂ and they had shot her up with morphine just the night before. I didn’t think we were getting out of there before the weekend. But, happy day, she came home.

The first few days were kind of scary because she was still so physically beat. OTOH, getting her out of a place where her most comfortable position was sitting in a chair hunched over a table with her head in her hands seemed to do wonders. The swelling everywhere went down pretty rapidly and her mood perked up exponentially. We even went outside once or twice over the weekend.

Home for a week now and she’s mostly back up to snuff. We still bump the O₂ up every so often during physically demanding tasks but the snappy wit and willingness to laugh at nearly anything is back. Things are good at the house and everyone is way less tense these days.

In other news…

The garden is coming along slowly. Flea beetles are doing battle with the eggplant and the rabbits decimated my first row of snap peas. The rain is keeping everything kind of stunted too. The grapes look gorgeous this year although one of the concord vines is kind of meh. Not sure what’s wrong there but it looks like it is muddling through. The mulberries are about 3 - 5 days from feasting and I think we’re going to get raspberries this year too. We got jack from the raspberries and mulberries last year due to the late frost so we’re trés eager this time around. Ice cream and pie crust is at the ready.

That’s all the big news for now I guess. Just wanted to push the previous entry off the top of the page because it’s increasingly irrelevant.