mdlbear | How geeky am I? (Reply)

Just after my last post I went in to work, telling the flower_cat that I was just going to put in a "half day", since I knew that we usually lock up at 3pm on the Friday before a holiday weekend. I found out when I got home that Colleen had been expecting me home for lunch. Sorry, Love -- when you get to work at 10am "half a day" does not end at Noon.

As I expected, I didn't get much actual work done, but there was some email I needed to attend to, a backup drive I'd forgotten to mount after the last reboot (when you boot a machine every six months or so you tend to forget), and some downloading to do.

Some of the downloading was due to the fact that VMware just started the beta program for Fusion, their desktop product for Intel Macs. The rest was due to the fact that I'm going to be working on Mom's old PC in a couple of weeks, archiving her files and wiping the disk. Not knowing exactly what vintage machine I was dealing with, I wanted to have a reasonable supply of up-to-date live Linux CDs to work from. I downloaded and burned Slax, DSL, and the latest Debian installer; I already had Ubuntu Edgy.

By that time it was closer to 4pm than to 3, so I headed for home. Along the way I managed to get in an hour's worth of walking, and my usual light lunch of mixed nuts and dried fruit (dates and figs at the moment).

Continuing in the vein of extreme geekiness, I spent most of the evening finishing up the Makefile recipes that import songs and fiction into the CDROM portion of my bonus CD, About Bleeding Time. Main things left to do for that are getting clean tracks out of the various concert recordings, writing the top-level web page, and making the CD art.

I've discovered that one of my favorite forms of hacking is writing Makefile rules and the scripts that I use in them. Make is the perfect tool for anything that involves updating and dependency-checking. It comes into things like CDs and songbooks because I'm constantly tweaking things all through the production process.

Now I'm going to finish my coffee and go out for a walk.