State of the Starport: Shai Dorsai!

This is being posted from Dorsai, a dual-core AMD-64 machine that has been my main workstation, um... all year. There are enough differences between Emacs on Lenny and Etch that I'm still not particularly satisfied with the configuration; that will presumably change over the course of the next few months. Iceweasel, now based on Firefox 3, is another source of continuing dissatisfaction. But on the whole it's a lot better.

The Emacs problems are largely due to my having carried over a number of hacks from the days of Emacs 18; things are better now, but they're different. It was long past time to update, though, and I'm glad of the excuse to do some cleanup.

Today was largely occupied with moving the daily mirror drive from Harmony (the old workstation) back to Nova (the fileserver). This shouldn't have been a problem -- it had been there before -- but a blown power supply occupied a lot of my time, and some oddities about the ethernet configuration occupied the rest. I still don't have a working gigabit ethernet card, and the old power supply I used is noisy. So those will need attention pretty soon, as will upgrading both Nova and Dorsai to reasonable amounts of RAM.

And the little old HP desktop the kids brought down from upstairs now that they're planning on using Harmony as a Linux box simply won't boot at all. Grrr - probably power supply again, and of course being HP it's probably all proprietary inside.

Still, I'm not complaining. I managed to get through the year without spending outrageous amounts of money on computers, and that's something.

The next thing that needs major attention is our net connection. I'd been planning to drop the old AT&T DSL line in favor of the new one from Sonic. But a couple of shills from AT&T came by a couple of days ago to say that the neighborhood has fiber now (or will have it soon -- I missed that part). So that would strongly tilt the balance back in the other direction. That would also include internet phone and TV; the latter would be a major win over cable or satellite. Later. When I have time and brain cells.

Colleen[3]

Colleen is, as can be expected, still rather grumpy, but on the whole she seems to be getting slightly better care this time around. When I was there this morning she was getting the wound cleaned out and packed with silver-gel-soaked cloth tape. (While high on morphine, of course.)

She started on TPN last night. The plan is to switch her over to the portable pump tonight -- I'll be there for training -- and for her to come home on Monday. Surgery hasn't been scheduled; she has to be stronger. Not clear whether that can be done on TPN or by eating -- not that she'd object to eating lots of steak. She's planning on missing Conflikt in any case, and Selkit and Kat will be staying on another week to care for her. Big win logistically, though she and a lot of people will be disappointed.

Stop by Kaiser Santa Clara room 2371 and give her a hug on your way to the party at the Starport Saturday. Or call -- she has her cell phone.

Colleen[4]: Eeep

Went in to see Colleen this evening, to play a little guitar and get some training on the portable IV pump. OK, I understand that they don't see them all that often, and that the visiting nurses are the real experts on that equipment. But couldn't they have found someone who can teach, who's a native speaker of English, and knows more about the equipment and the process than I can figure out from five minutes of looking at it?

Fortunately it's a heck of a lot simpler than the pole-mounted IV pump I was trained on in the nursing home.

I also got a look at our latest cell phone bill, covering almost exactly the time Colleen was away from home. See title.