Yesterday at the Faire

The Maker Faire, that is. Went up with selkit and the chaoswolf; the flower_cat wanted to go but wasn't feeling up to that much walking. This was my first faire; it won't be the last.

Lots of fun things to see. The Wolfling was bored -- not my problem, though I'm still puzzled about where we went wrong in her upbringing. I mean, flamethrowers, battle bots, weird funky vehicles, weird funky music-making robots... what's not to like?

Microsoft had a whole hall to themselves, the featured product was the upcoming "home server". Had a nice discussion about backup, which is its main new feature. They can apparently make an incremental, compressed, "cluster-level" image of a live filesystem. Of course, that means it's tied to their proprietary filesystem, it's hard to get individual files out of the backup, and it's sensitive to errors. I'll stick to rsync and cp -p, thanks.

Took more pictures than I usually do, but they're still on the camera and I haven't been maintaining any kind of web-accessible gallery in any case. Have to work on that. After the album is done.

(Geeky side-note: Trantor has been up all night with X running, so I'm reasonably certain the too-fast memory was the problem.)

Slightly Fried Bear

Before going out for my walk I cooked up suitable license boilerplate and applied it to the programs and makefile templates in my tools directory, in preparation for burning it onto about a hundred CD-ROMs starting tomorrow. Spent the last hour or so debugging the scripts that process my song lyrics -- I'll have to do some editing tomorrow to put the copyright notices in the right format. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

After my walk (4 miles by Los Gatos Creek) I went to Office Max and scored 200 slimline jewel cases in a 2-for-one sale, which made them a mere $0.15 each. Came home and created the glabels templates for the single-page inserts, composed the labels, and printed a couple of test copies. It turns out that the Memorex and Avery blanks are somewhat different in their spacing (and totally different in their layout if you want to do tray cards), but I now have templates for both.

The Gnome label-maker, glabels, is a major win.

After the flower_cat and chaoswolf got back from their seemingly-interminable Baycon meeting we went out for Chinese at Jasmine in Los Gatos -- it's been one of our favorites for at least 25 years. Discovered that selkit has a copy of Adobe Illustrator with him, so I'll bribe commission him to do the layout for CC&S. After Baycon.

I've moved over to Trantor, the new workstation, almost completely at this point. It's still running in 32-bit mode, but it's more than fast enough for what I'm doing, so I'm not going to worry about it for a while.