Did I mention that it's a busy month?

Between trying to get some demos going at work, and trying to get an album ready at home, and getting ready for Consonance less than three weeks from now, and a songwriting workshop next weekend, things are a little busy here.

This evening I've scheduled a practice session with Joyce Uggla, who sang with me at Worldcon; I'm trying to find songs that I can do with both her and cflute (waves). The tentative setlist is here (suggestions welcome). I've always imagined Demon Lover with flute on the woman's part and guitar on the man's, and everything I do with a chorus will benefit from an extra voice.

Later this week -- preferably tomorrow -- I need to check out a couple of Linux CRM packages so I can set up the customer database (suggestions welcome; Debian packages vastly preferred) and get chaoswolf (waves) started on the data-entry, upgrade my main server from Sarge to Etch so I can actually run said packages, and get some last-minute re-takes done.

Meanwhile, take a look at the amazing CD cover photo-shoot by artbeco (waves) -- additional comments are still welcome. I'm also soliciting suggestions for track order on the album.

Upgrade notes

Last night I upgraded my current desktop machine, an 800MHz Mini-ITX box, by adding a video card and 128MB of RAM. It's almost useable now. Iceweasel is still a little slow, but at least it isn't swapping, so I can actually get work done. I'll have to scrounge around and see whether I have any 256MB PC100 sticks -- there are only two memory slots and one PCI slot, so my options are limited.

Making some progress

Joyce had to reschedule our practice session, so I've been catching up on a few other things, like making sure that all my lyrics pages link to the corresponding PDF, OGG, and MP3 files (if they exist, of course). (Making sure they get rebuilt when new oggs or mp3s get added is left as an exercise for another day.) I do have a tentative setlist, though.

Next thing I'm planning to do this evening is upgrade my main internal fileserver (nova) from Debian Sarge (the current stable release) to Etch (testing, and soon to be stable). I've done this on several systems by now and so far it's gone pretty smoothly. Email might get disrupted for a while, but hopefully not too long. (update about an hour and a half for the upgrade, as it turns out.)

The major accomplishment at work was getting the touchscreen on my old Linux tablet PC working in Etch. We have two of them -- they were originally made by Element Computing (now defunct) and shipped with a hacked-up Xandros installed. The software was distinctly flaky, and I was never able to find a version of Linux that worked well until a couple of weeks ago. I finally figured out the proper incantation for the touchscreen, which turns out to use the "fpit" (Fujitsu) driver. It was called something different in XFree86.

Tomorrow's task will be making the touchscreen continue to work when it's rotated into portrait position, set up an auto-login for the account we're running the demos in, and then duplicate the whole thing on the other machine. And then try to get the built-in wireless card working. Should be... um... interesting. Yeah, that's the word.