The Mandelbear's Musings

Most of the day -- a lot more than I wanted to spend -- was taken up by upgrading my netbook. I repartitioned it to give it separate root and home partitions. The new home/old root partition stayed bootable, which was a Good Thing, because I had trouble with Debian. The 3GB partition I set up was too small for a full desktop install, so I had to redo it with just a basic X system plus gnome. The other problem was finding the firmware for the stupid Broadcom wifi -- that turned out to be in firmware-b43-lpphy-installer.

Meanwhile, I tried installing the latest Ubuntu. It offered to upgrade the existing install, so I let it. Bletch. Even their alleged "classic" look is thoroughly wretched -- it looks like Gnome, but you can't add launchers to the panel! Esr's right -- they've jumped the shark.

Anyway, I finally have a usable Debian, so I'll happily delete Ubuntu and free up a whole lot of space. I'm sad about Ubuntu -- they've always given me a smooth install experience, recognizing all my devices out of the box. But their new UI is so dumbed-down as to be unusable.

I also rode my bike downtown to City Hall to spend some more time with Occupy San Jose. It's 2.9 miles each way, according to Google Maps, which also found me a nice safe route. Wish I'd known about that while I worked near the airport. (For reference, it's via Park Avenue, which has bike lanes on both sides of the railroad underpass.) I'm seriously out of shape -- between not walking much and not having gotten on my bike in nearly a year, it was an effort getting home.

So, all-in-all not too bad of a day, though there are as usual too many things left undone. I really wanted to have done more music, for example. But there it is.

Not many links, but Millions Withdrawn from Bank of America and Wells Fargo is encouraging. (A couple of local churches moved $4M into a credit union.)

The main event was a shopping expedition, to REI, for bike accessories. Mainly a helmet, but along the way I couldn't resist three new pairs of socks. Some of the oldest ones have gotten threadbare.

Changed the sheets, washed one of the quilts, made lamb chili for dinner, didn't take a walk.

Some really nice snuggle, though, and I slept well modulo a dream involving some weird party food and coming back to find that a a leak in the ceiling had sogged my half of the bed and made parts of the kitchen floor so rotten you could put your foot through it into the slimy water filling the crawl space. It appeared to be our house, though the layout was completely unrecognizable.

Dreams about unfamiliar houses probably map onto unexplored parts of my mind. Not so sure I want to go poking around this one.

Several good links under the cut.

I rode my bike for about an hour and a half -- well, counting a 10-20 minute rest stop. Basically the proposed commute route, taking Taylor to the Guadalupe River Trail. There's a really harrowing underpass on Taylor, and my lowest gear was barely adequate for the last underpass before the airport. At which point it turned into a dirt road, and I turned around. I'm not going to be commuting by bike any time soon, I suspect. I was pretty well wiped out the rest of the day.

I also got the new WiFi router configured, as a pure access point and 5-port switch. Not the most secure configuration, but by far the most convenient. And got the old MiniITX box back up and configured as a basic desktop, for use by guests. And made a beef chuck roast and salad for dinner.

And sang for Naomi, Colleen, and (house guest) Eileen.

Maybe it's not too surprising that I slept until 11am this morning.

Lots of good links under the cut.

On the whole a very good day. Hey, it started out with a crab&egg scramble, included a dinner of sea scallops and white corn with white wine, and ended with singing, a hot bath, and snuggle.

In between there was a successful shopping trip. I scored a Netgear WNR3500L router at Fry's for $89 (last time I looked they were running about $150), and a Dahon Espresso folding bicycle at Cardinal in Palo Alto. They were having a sale: $350 for any bike in the store. (There was one out in front for $500 that I really wanted, but...)

I had to leave Gryphon in something of a hurry -- they had a couple of Martin tenor guitars, and a bass uke (strung with thick rubber strings and no bigger than a travel guitar -- yummy). I didn't dare touch the used Martin...

There's a certain amount of second-thinking going on right now. I wanted the router because my current wireless router doesn't operate in bridge mode (and also because the 3500L is open source, with gigabit networking, 802-11N, and a USB port). But really I could have gotten by for another year or so without it, and now I have to wonder what's the best way to integrate it into the network.

The bike, similarly, is a 26" model with 21 speeds; should I have gotten a 16" one with only 7 speeds, but that folds down a lot smaller? This one does fit in a specially-made suitcase, so I could fly with it...

Well, enough of second thoughts. I made the best decisions I could with the information I had, and I did so quickly without hours or days of waffling the way I usually do. I came home a happy Bear, and I'm not complaining.

Several people are starting to ask about the next CD(s), though...