mdlbear

Work was moderately productive, not necessarily much code, but a few other things got done, and I spent some happy time reading all of the GNU Make manual. I took only a very short walk; it felt like rain was in the offing. Even a short walk is worthwhile, though.

I'm back to working on moving my fileserver onto a larger drive (from 500GB to 1500). Not a moment too soon -- the big partition is 99% full. Upgrading from Etch to Lenny is another matter, but I can postpone that.

It was a good day for friendship. In the morning I mailed a package up to Promusica with a contribution for Naomi and a slug for Callie, who has been unable to make her laptop recognize the USB hard drive I sent her.

The high point of the day was when I found myself smiling delightedly after hearing about an affectionate moment between C and N. Maybe I am getting better at recognizing my emotions -- this one was definitely mudita.

Marty and Colleen were telling me how much they enjoyed the weekend when I was away at OVFF. I don't remember which of them said something to the effect of "we'll have to see about doing that every month". But that makes me happy, too.

tetralizard came over in the evening to help me with a wishlist item: sorting the health care receipts. YAY!!!

Elseweb, KitchenAid is selling purple mixers again!! Ricoh has put out a press release about the latest bit of cool stuff to make it out of our lab and into production. And V-Innovate, the company my son-in-law works for, has a demo of their cool stuff up (Windows only for now, unfortunately).

mdlbear

Here's a good article on Gizmodo about Android. Things could get interesting.

mdlbear

I moved everything out of my old wallet and into a travel wallet with more slots for cards. A bit of a tight fit, though, and of course larger and heavier. So I may end up moving back. Or getting one with slightly wider slots.

It was a fairly productive day at work again. I'm not sure why I seem to have the most fun when I'm hacking on Makefiles, but there you have it. Perhaps it's because they automate so much of the repetitive, boring stuff. And also because debugging them can be... interesting.

Took a nice walk around the pond. Rather scattered thoughts, but I ended up pretty calm and somewhat refreshed.

Got a well-timed call from cflute, while we were on the way to our date-night dinner at Estrellita's, a Mexican place in Los Altos that's been there forever and has a wonderful mole poblano and excellent sangria. Also three different dipping salsas with their chips. We drove home the long way, of course.

Ended the evening making a signal boost post for pocketnaomi, and hunting down my old but still functional (and still unused) slug, since cflute's laptop doesn't want to recognize the USB hard drive I sent her. I'll send that and a check this morning.

Went to take a bath and ended up in the back tub, because I still haven't finished taking the drinks out of the front tub after our party last weekend. Oops.

dcamville
baycon

Armored Combat Passage of Arms: In this demonstration two companies of armored knights will engage is a 15^th C. style tournament using a variety of weapon forms and various armor styles. Come see Chivalric Combat at its finest! Attendees will be able to choose a Champion from one of the companies and see a variety of hand made arts and crafts as they were done in the Middle Ages.

The Knight Templars: Fact, Fiction & Fantasy: Why does a group of warrior monks created in the 12^th century still inspire writers, movie makers and conspiracy theorist today?  We will discuss the origins, rise and fall of the Knight Templars. We will look at the many myths and mysteries surrounding this Order. Come and see if you can unlock the mystery of the Knight Templars!

The Norse Gods and Mythology of the Vikings: The Norse pantheon of gods, goddesses, giants and heroes is rich and inspiring. This mythology has inspired writers, artists and designers for many, many years. Come find out about your favorite Norse god or hero and see if you have what it takes to go a-Viking!

mdlbear

... to tenderstone!!! Have a great one!!

mdlbear

My sister-of-choice, Naomi, needs help.

What would help most, of course, would be jobs for her and/or her partner Callie (cflute). But they also need to feed the kids and pay the rent while they work on finding jobs.

I figure that instead of sending money to a couple of charities working to cure diseases we don't have yet, we can send it to our friends this year.

There's an email address in her post for PayPal, or you can email her for her snail-mail address. Even a little bit would be helpful.

Thanks in advance,
==steve

theljstaff
news

The empire strikes back

RSS feeds again

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icanhaschzbrgr

Wii have killer CSI Deadly Intent contests!

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Enveloped in postcards

Photos of the week

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mdlbear

Today I'm thankful for...

• Colleen, of course. Always and for everything.
• Family of choice.
• Friends who offer to help, and me being sensible enough to accept it.
• Gainful -- and even socially useful -- employment.
• Eggs and sauteed leftovers for breakfast.

mdlbear

In spite of a little meditation in the morning and a walk around noon, my brain felt like mush all afternoon. Very scattered and difficult to concentrate. I finally did dive in to a Makefile and made some progress, though not as much as I would have liked, and fixed a bug in the one of the last two systems that actually still run my demo.

Spent most of the evening hiding out in the office until things thinned out somewhere between 10:30 and 11.

Quote from a comment made elsejournal: "I often wonder what it would be like to be, if not 'normal', at least enough like other people to be able to experience a few things in close enough to the same way as to find them comprehensible." It's an exageration, of course; many things about other people are comprehensible to me. With others, though, I'm never entirely sure.

Links: My sister-of-choice pocketnaomi pointed me at this post by osewalrus, in part to introduce me to the phrase "Elija moment". cflute pointed me at books about self-esteem by Nathaniel Branden and Jean Illsley Clarke. I'm currently starting on Ten Days to Self Esteem by David D Burns.

mdlbear

A productive day at work -- and at home, for that matter: I got my hotel reservations made for Loscon (having discovered over the weekend that they'd slipped through a crack somewhere between ConChord and OVFF). A good walk, and I scored an APC XS1500 at Fry's for about 2/3 the price of my first one, which I love (in large part because you can permanently disable the "on battery" beep).

But I spent much of the evening tired, sleepy, but restless and with a bit of a headache. At a couple of points I was wondering whether I had a mild case of the flu. Other times I wondered whether the restlessness was just missing a friend.

I had some sleep-time tea and went to bed early, at about 10:30. Some nice snuggle when Colleen joined me shortly thereafter.

For link sausage, Techdirt comes through with articles on music (UK Music Critic: This Is The Golden Age For Music and Yet Another (Yes, Another) Study Shows File Sharers Buy More) and the latest development in mapping software: Is Google Going Better Than Free On Navigation? Will That Set Off Antitrust Alarms?.

That one's fascinating. It links to Bill Gurley's article pointing that Google's turn-by-turn navigation software is cheaper than free -- if a manufacturer puts it on a device, they get a cut of the ad revenue. The article shows what happened to Tom-Tom's and Garmin's stock prices when Google's announcement came out. As Gurley points out elsewhere, "if a disruptive competitor can offer a product or service similar to yours for "free," and if they can make enough money to keep the lights on, then you likely have a problem."

mdlbear

I didn't take a walk yesterday; that probably explains the restlessness, though pocketnaomi was quick to suggest that what I really needed was a trip to Seattle. I really need a teleport, is what.

Several phone calls: I called Mom, Colleen called Callie and passed the phone to me after a while, and Callie called asking for help setting up the wireless router I'd sent up. I realized that I've probably learned a great deal through not asking people for help, but on the other hand I didn't learn to ask for help when I really need it. On the gripping hand, I'm slowly acquiring that skill now, but it's harder than it would have been forty years ago.

I was mortified to realize, on checking my history, that I hadn't booked our hotel rooms for Loscon yet. (I did it this morning.)

Spent some time looking at travel wallets and filing receipts.

Today's hot links are the Finding Free eBooks blog, and Musician Making A Living With Forty Committed True Fans at techdirt.