Done yesterday (20111008 Sa)

[mdlbear]

A good day. Pretty good? No, good. The YD actually came downstairs and asked to play a game of chess with me! That's huge -- she claims the last time we played was a decade ago. She's probably right.

I also took a walk -- the usual 3 miles along Los Gatos Creek. Afterwards I went shopping, and had a nice talk with the girl at checkout while waiting for them to turn up one of the items I wanted to purchase. That was a 32GB keychain drive for $40, which is about half the going price.

To whoever left a candid anonymous comment on yesterday's "Done Yesterday" post, THANK YOU very much. About what I expected. It's worth noting that the UBF is now kept out of the house by court order, so that one is taken care of. As for the other disgusting creatures, I'm thinking of Planet Orange or Clark, though I'll take suggestions. We've made a lot of progress on our own over the last six months.

I also took the problematic laptop drive out of the gateway and replaced it with an 8GB microSD card in a keychain drive. Saves a couple of watts -- I'm not complaining. It seems to be pretty slow, at least on boot-up. A SATA flash drive would be a lot faster, but they're still pricy and I don't need the capacity right now. Maybe not ever.

Down in the notes you'll find some links about the dark side of Steve Jobs' legacy; there are paragraph-long quotes if you're not sure you want to click through.

1008 Sa
  * up 8:30; W=197; drugs, nose, teeth, dishes, light
  @ bodlon | Tree-conomics (ysabetwordsmith)  
  @ The Ferrett's Journal - In Which A Window Quietly Opens 
  * Songs for Saturday: I Had A Shuggoth
  & YD wanted to play chess!  Fair enough -- neither of us has played for
    years.  I took black, and still won despite a number of stupids mistakes.
    But it was nice to have some interaction with my daughter.
  & made smoked salmon omlette for lunch, using the "salmon candy" I got a
    week ago at Whole Paycheck.  Not all that good.  How could they call
    something that dry and tasteless, with no sugar at all, "candy"?  :P
  @ esr: On Steve Jobs’s passing
      Commerce is powerful, but culture is even more persistent. The lure of
    high profits from secrecy rent can slow down the long-term trend towards
    open source and user-controlled computing, but not really stop it. Jobs’s
    success at hypnotizing millions of people into a perverse love for the
    walled garden is more dangerous to freedom in the long term than Bill
    Gates’s efficient but brutal and unattractive corporatism. People feared
    and respected Microsoft, but they love and worship Apple – and that is
    precisely the problem, precisely the reason Jobs may in the end have done
    more harm than good. 
  @ Steve Jobs, Enemy of Nostalgia - NYTimes.com (via esr, above)
      Mr. Jobs’s magic has its costs. We can admire the design perfection and
    business acumen while acknowledging the truth: with Apple’s immense
    resources at his command he could have revolutionized the industry to make
    devices more humanely and more openly, and chose not to.  
  * walk:  Los Gatos Creek.  3mi  Good weather; only a little too warm.
  * Staples.  Swapped empty ink cart's for new ones.  Had a nice conversation
    with the (female) checkout clerk while waiting for them to track down the
    32GB USB stick that was on sale for $40 off.
  * Fry's.  Got a BT car speakerphone for $15 off because they hadn't taken
    Thursday's sale price down.  Took a while.  I want to see how well it
    works on a computer.
  * Dinner at Red Lobster - endless shrimp  We had drinks at home,
    which helped the price considerably.
  x Party at Howard Davidson's
  * stargate:  move / and /home to a flash drive
  * stargate:  (attempt to) set up grub
    grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sdb
  * stargate: mount sdb2 (new home) as /home