The weekend so far

This morning the Younger Daughter and I went to the grand re-opening of the Rosegarden branch of the San Jose library -- it's walking distance from the house, and has been under construction for the last two years or so. Spectacular building; very nice. The Y.D. appears to have grown another half inch overnight. She's now some 5'6.5". You can stop any time now, kid.

Went to Kanef's housefilk (mostly in honor of Cindy McQuillin). Wore my purple shirt. There was lots of chocolate; the flower_cat made chicken mole enchiladas. Chocolate and chili peppers -- what's not to like. Yum. Lots of good music, too; mostly Cindy's, but I got a lot of chances to sing my own stuff where it fit ("Vampire Megabyte", "World Inside the Crystal", "Keep the Dream Alive", "Rocket Rider's Prayer", "Thrillseekers' Waltz"; a couple of others. The chaoswolf sang "Nine-to-Five Barbarian" (Bill Sutton) and "The Toolmakers", one of mine that I haven't done for years. She's gotten darned good -- sings a capella and on key.

bizarre

Spent the morning setting up my new VIA EPIA 5000 board, a fanless, 500MHz Mini-ITX board. Very weird: it has a tendency to shut itself off in the middle of booting, except when there's a CD-ROM drive attached. Or else it's something else. I'm also using a compact flash drive in an IDE adapter; it's possible that the power supply just needs a larger or more consistent load. Or maybe it's just plain flaky -- I'm not sure yet.

The alleged excuse for this thing is to have a silent X terminal for recording, and it is silent. Scary, even with a reasonably quiet but not fanless power supply. The video seems a little flickery, but that might just be the cables (which are ancient). If it manages to stay up without crashing I'm going to like it.

I originally tried installing DSL on it, and in fact succeeded, but DSL insists on running the blasted Knoppix autodetect stuff even when it's on a hard drive, and insists on firing up an X session. I'd probably be better off with a pure X terminal, but in fact what I ended up installing was plain old Debian Etch, which I'm very comfortable with. Works great. It's using half of its 160MB of RAM, and less than 40% of a 1.2GB partition on the flash. I may chop it down if I decide I need the 2GB flash for something more useful.