How geeky am I?

Just after my last post I went in to work, telling the flower_cat that I was just going to put in a "half day", since I knew that we usually lock up at 3pm on the Friday before a holiday weekend. I found out when I got home that Colleen had been expecting me home for lunch. Sorry, Love -- when you get to work at 10am "half a day" does not end at Noon.

As I expected, I didn't get much actual work done, but there was some email I needed to attend to, a backup drive I'd forgotten to mount after the last reboot (when you boot a machine every six months or so you tend to forget), and some downloading to do.

Some of the downloading was due to the fact that VMware just started the beta program for Fusion, their desktop product for Intel Macs. The rest was due to the fact that I'm going to be working on Mom's old PC in a couple of weeks, archiving her files and wiping the disk. Not knowing exactly what vintage machine I was dealing with, I wanted to have a reasonable supply of up-to-date live Linux CDs to work from. I downloaded and burned Slax, DSL, and the latest Debian installer; I already had Ubuntu Edgy.

By that time it was closer to 4pm than to 3, so I headed for home. Along the way I managed to get in an hour's worth of walking, and my usual light lunch of mixed nuts and dried fruit (dates and figs at the moment).

Continuing in the vein of extreme geekiness, I spent most of the evening finishing up the Makefile recipes that import songs and fiction into the CDROM portion of my bonus CD, About Bleeding Time. Main things left to do for that are getting clean tracks out of the various concert recordings, writing the top-level web page, and making the CD art.

I've discovered that one of my favorite forms of hacking is writing Makefile rules and the scripts that I use in them. Make is the perfect tool for anything that involves updating and dependency-checking. It comes into things like CDs and songbooks because I'm constantly tweaking things all through the production process.

Now I'm going to finish my coffee and go out for a walk.

This is getting annoying

For the last several months the machine I'm currently using as my desktop machine has had the annoying habit of freezing up on occasion. It seems to be a thermal problem -- at first it only happened when 3-D screensavers came on, then about a month ago it started happening while transcoding video files. It's happened three times today, for no apparent reason. The fans are working -- noisily, but they're working.

I really don't want to spend any more money on computers this year. Especially since next year I'll presumably have some business income that I'll want to offset. But this machine's days are numbered. Probably in 5 bits or less.

Saturday Summary

I managed to squeeze in a walk, at about 11:30, between a late breakfast and an afternoon party. Feeling pressed for time, I just walked in the neighborhood rather than driving up to Los Gatos Creek. It's not a bad walk, but completely flat. Across W. San Carlos, left on Dana, down a couple of blocks past the schools my daughters used to attend, to the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden. Once around the outside, then through the roses on the East side, around most of the rest of it, and back home. Almost an hour.

There were very few roses in bloom, but many had buds. Quite a few fresh-looking buds on the Royal Amethyst, plus a few larger ones that were brown on the outside; probably frost damage.

The party was a cookie exchange. OK; a bit boring. I stayed in the kitchen with the women; their husbands were watching football and playing video games. Some good conversation in the kitchen, and more food. We left before dinner -- the flower_cat's back was beginning to hurt. One thing B's kitchen doesn't have is comfortable chairs at the table.

Most of the rest of the day, apart from making coffee and breakfast, and doing a load of dishes, was working on the CDROM content for About Bleeding Time. There isn't really very much original content; mostly it's pulled in from elsewhere on the fileserver. Just a couple of web pages to hold it together. Progress is being made.