Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to the lovely and talented lysana!!! Have a great one!!

Gleep! and the weekend so far

This time two weeks from now my little girl will have been someone's wife for about four hours. Gleep! I'm happy, proud, and all that, but I'm also feeling old.

There were a couple of times this morning where, if I had timed it right, I could have gone out for a walk and not gotten wet. I didn't. I did manage to go out to Office Max and Staples and get a box of printer paper, new ink cartridges for the HP inkjet, and a little rolling computer cart for the bedroom.

The printer cartridges didn't fix the problem. In fact, there appears to have been nothing wrong with the old ones. It's still sitting there with a flashing red exclamation mark and a little line on the LCD that keeps going round and round. I am a grumpy bear. I should know better: eventually everything HP makes just mysteriously stops working and turns into an inert pile of crap.

The computer cart is a win, though. It just fits on the short wall to the left of the bathroom door, which means that my chair will be right next to the bookshelves instead of pulled out into the room. And I'll be able to turn my head only 90 degrees to see Colleen. Win.

I still haven't worked out where I'm going to move the junk that was piled in that corner, or exactly where the rest of the recording gear is going. But it'll be a big improvement, and I'm not complaining.

I've also been woodworking with the Wolfling to build her a simple pine box for her to put kitchen gadgets in. Just butt joints and screws, but she wants a sort of rough look, and it'll match the big box of Penzey's spices that we gave her as a wedding present.

Two weeks! Gleep!

Shai Dorsai!

In this case, of course, Dorsai is the computer in the bedroom. (This being thestarport.org, all the machines are named after places that could plausibly have starports. The machines that are used for recording and editing music are, naturally, places mentioned in filksongs: the laptop is Argo, and the other workstation is Harmony.) Anyway, it works: I'm posting from it.

The little rolling desk isn't terribly solid, and because it overlaps the bookshelves on the left there isn't room for anything but my Lenovo Thinkpad keyboard. Which is pretty good, and has pointing devices that there otherwise wouldn't be room for, but it's not a Model M.

In addition, it's running Ubuntu Studio instead of Etch; not all my usual fonts are installed (so windows come out the wrong size and don't quite fit properly), (added 02-24: the font problem turned out to be a bad line in .Xdefaults) and it's running Emacs 22.1. I'm not quite ready to make the transition to the new Gnus. OTOH it's fast as a bat. I'd forgotten just how fast it is...

There are still a few piles of stuff scattered around the bedroom that were pulled out of the corner, and the chair isn't particularly comfortable. The recording rig hasn't been reconfigured yet; I'm not sure where the microphones and preamps belong, and there are no monitor speakers (so, basically, I don't have sound on this machine yet).

But, Colleen really likes having me in the bedroom with her, even though she can't see me from where she's sitting. And it does feel comfortable. Moving back and forth between the two systems is slightly painful: I have to kill the browser, and move my IM presence. Not a full solution. It'll take me a while to make the transition smooth; it will probably involve switching to Ubuntu or Lenny on all the clients.