State of the Bear

Music: Have spent most of the last hour and a half marking and splitting up Monday's and Wednesday's practice session. And I still need to move the DNS for tres-gique.* over to Dreamhost, and renew a couple of currently-little-used domains.

My idea for a single of Quiet Victories never materialized, obviously. But I noticed a rather inexpensive disk duplicator at Fry's... If I can find a printer with enough throughput it might be worthwhile. Otherwise, I'll have to settle for whipping the website into shape and printing booklets, which might be better anyway.

Health: The Ace ankle wrap seems to be working well; I think I can get through a weekend on just one pair of low shoes if I have to. Hopefully I won't have to in most cases, but it's good to know for air travel.

I seem to be getting enough sleep on a midnight-to-6am schedule, as long as Colleen isn't too restless.

For the last month or two my weight has been stuck stubbornly within a pound or so of 185, in spite of what I fondly hope has been a low-carb diet. May have to get more aggressive on that score. At least it's been on the low side of 185 for the last week, rather than on the high side.

Neighbors: Had a good talk with the next-door neighbors yesterday evening. They seem to be bearing up well under their losses, but between water and smoke damage they've apparently lost almost everything. The house appears to be structurally sound, though; repairs will be comparatively inexpensive in that direction. The fire was caused by an exploding part on the controller board in the washer; Belen had started a load just before she left. It's a good thing she did leave, though; apparently the next thing to catch was some plastic part in the washer, and the combustion products were highly toxic. PVC, probably. Maytag front-loader. Same kind that we have, though they've apparently been having lots of trouble with the controller, and we haven't. Knock wood.

(no subject)

My Younger Daughter is starting to scare me. First she starts writing songs; now she's learning to play guitar -- and doing pretty damned well for the first day. Better than M, in the office across the hall from mine, was doing at that stage. Runs in the family.

Got her a guitar book this afternoon -- "Beginning Guitar for Adults". After we got back from spending the morning at Kaiser (Colleen was having more gastrointestinal problems, plus a pain behind one eye that turned out to be a clogged sinus) and had some lunch (leftovers), Colleen sent me out of the house pointed in the general direction of Gryphon, saying she didn't expect me back much before 6:00.

She should know better.

I actually got the book at The Starving Musician, where I also got a D whistle for myself. They also had a sweet Ovation, maybe one cut above mine: thin body, black with flame decoration. Sounded a bit sweeter than Ruby. Pretty, too. $375. If I'd known that the Y.D. would be coveting Ruby... (Tempted to go back and get it just so I could name it Flame Darling, which might well have been Colleen's name if she'd been born a day later...)

From there I went up 280 to Palo Alto, parked at Fry's, and walked the half-block over to Gryphon. Dangerous place. There was a used Martin 12-string there. Only about $1200. Very easy playing. I could feel my heartrate increasing as I played QV on it. Pure guitar lust. Eeeep!

Just barely made it to Fry's with my checking account intact. Only thing I really needed there was a compact tripod which I'd been wanting for the Zoom H2.

Took my walk along Park Avenue to California Avenue and back; probably about two miles.

Got home around 5:45.

Clearing my tabs: Don Marti on Google Chrome

Don Marti www/google-chrome.html

The idea of tabs being first class citizens makes a lot of sense, but why have a sub-window-manager that just manages browser windows in tabs, when you could have a tabbed window manager that can manage everything? I might want a browser and a spreadsheet to share a tab.

So the right "browser" for a Linux environment might just be a really fast HTML/JavaScript viewer that talks to a separate HTTP client/cache, a Google Gears server, and a preferences/history server -- all of which are also available to the rest of the desktop. The browser isn't necessarily the only thing that wants to speak HTTP, use Gears, or store preferences. And the "browser" application could fit into a tabbed window or a standalone window, just as the window manager would let you do for anything else on the desktop.

I'm in complete agreement. I already have a tabbed window manager (the venerable CTWM). I want very much to have all the browsers operating out of my home directory, which is shared among half-a-dozen machines using NFS, to share the same flat file preference file, bookmarks, and history. I wouldn't mind throwing my shell and emacs windows into that mix as well. I already have a text box with command history and completion -- it's called xterm.