The Mandelbear's Musings

It was rather an expensive weekend, but worthwhile. I really needed a break, and had dozens of things to do -- I'm glad I took the two days off again this week.

Saturday I ordered new batteries for Colleen's scooter. It turns out that they're available in 17, 18, 20, and 22 amp-hour in the same package. I got the big ones. Meanwhile, the old batteries are still working after a fashion. I'm reasonably certain that only one of the pair is dead.

We went out to Costco, where we bought a 32" TV. Samsung. It's only 720P; although abstractly I might have prefered 1080P, it really makes no difference at a 20' viewing distance. It fits neatly on the shelf above the printers, and I got it hooked up to both the BD player and the Mac mini. So, YAY!

Sunday, in addition to setting up the TV, I drove over to Naomi's and we went out for a walk. Nice! We'll have to do that more often. We had turkey for dinner -- Albertson's had 14lb birds for $.69/lb. There were 4lb turkey breasts in the same section that cost 50% more than a whole bird. Unfortunately, in spite of being labeled fresh, the bird was actually partly frozen. I scoched the top and set off the fire alarm. Fortunately just in the apartment; we had sense enough to open the porch door, not the hallway.

Monday, I went online and bought some furniture: two "Spinning Multimedia Tower"s, and a "Media Storage Lamp". The towers hold a huge number of disks -- over 1000 CDs each. We'll need both of them. The lamp is just the right size to stand in the space just in front of the recliners, and hopefully contain the pile of clutter that invariably accumulates there.

I went out for a walk in the late afternoon, and stopped in at Fred Myers to look at electronics. (Nominally, an ethernet switch, since I'm out of ports on the WiFi router.) While there, I saw a familiar figure heading toward the back of the store, and joined forces with Naomi. She drove me home, and stayed for a little while.

After N. left, James and Chaos arrived; I took them back to J's around 11pm so as not to have to drive with the drunks. I came back, and Colleen and toasted the New Year.

I also went online and made last-minute contributions to Planned Parenthood, Carleton College, and Heifer International. I have someone a goat for New Year's, which made Naomi (whose totem is a chamois) very happy. It was contagious, making for a particularly happy New Year's Eve.

Links in the notes, as usual. Hippo Gnu Ear, and may 2013 be a huge improvement over 2012.

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. Comment wherever you prefer; anonymous comments are allowed on DW only]

Well, well. An entire week. Which just happens to coincide with the end of the month, this time.

Did a little work on the network configuration, aimed at making things more stable in the DMZ (the area between the Internet modem/router (polaris) and the inside gateway/router (stargate)). In particular, I got rid of an obsolete DHCP reservation for cygnus, that was conflicting with stargate's static IP address. Gleep! No wonder stargate's WiFi dropped out every so often.

Also for computer geeks: I got Colleen a 7" tablet. It's a Jazz, on sale at Office Depot for $70. Markedly inferior to my Nexus 7, but it does what she wants it to: web browsing and email. The only problem right now is printing; that's going to require setting up Google cloudprint. Which is kind of stupid for talking to a CUPS printer, but...

I *finally* got autoraise back -- turns out that the compiz window manager doesn't actually listen to the desktop config items anymore; Ubuntu has hacked them up to accomodate the Unity desktop. Which is Unbearable.

A number of other geeky items that I ordered during the last week dribbled in, including a case and USB-OTG cable for the Nexus, a really tiny 32-GB USB drive, a couple of uSD cards and adapters (16- and 32-GB), and a couple of other items that suggest that I probably need to stay off of Amazon for a while.

We got Chaos a microwave oven (hers had died). Colleen got the amethyst necklace she'd commissioned at Orycon -- this involved a trip to Wayward.

Moving on, ... I don't really like the way my weight has been going. I think that much of the recent increase was due to going off my diuretic. It was an interesting experiment, but my BP's on the high edge of normal right now; it may be worthwhile going back on the meds.

Of course, my BP would probably go down if I lost 30 poumds, too. Which would be better for me in other ways as well.

The last time I successfully lost weight was my senior year in college. Over 40 years ago.

Humph. One of the things I really like about commuting by bus is that it gives me time to read. I'm not a particularly fast reader, a trait which is better adapted to poetry than to novels. I am, nevertheless, reading two books right now. The one on my Nexus (via Kindle) is Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by E. Gabriella Coleman -- an anthropologist's view of hacker culture. Fascinating.

The other, on my phone from Gutenberg via Cool Reader, is Pride and Prejudice, which has been highly recommended to me but was something I was always leery of. It's... ok, I guess. Perhaps someone more familiar with the genre could tell me whether it's meant to be funny -- there's an undercurrent of what appears to be wry amusement on the part of the author. Perhaps one problem is simply the lack of characters I can easily identify with. I'm curious, but not involved.

Anyway... details in the notes, as usual. I should probably try to get back on a twice/week schedule, shouldn't I?

A pretty good day -- worked on music in the morning, for the second day in a row. Mostly chord practice, again. It felt good, so I'm going to try to keep doing it. Also had the head of the bed up for the second time in a row (and again this morning); that also seems to be a win.

I've made my decision on the netbook -- I'm going for the dual-core version. The going price online appears to be $440; locally it's more like $500 plus tax. It may be worthwhile looking while I'm in Portland for Orycon.

I set up an online account at my credit union, finally. But I had trouble trying to set up a transfer; it'll probably take another phone call.

Some social time in the living room, and a little singing. I don't have a gig at Orycon, but probably ought to practice some of my own songs anyway.

Made an entry in my private journal, which I haven't been doing much on a regular basis -- maybe once every month or two -- but should. Spent the late evening after that in what felt like a very weird combination of feelings, mostly on the depressed side, which I made no attempt to sort out. Do I get credit for noticing that I have feelings?

Some links in the notes. Check out Zander Nyrond's song: Occupy the Earth. And Jawbone's wristband thingie looks interesting.

A long, tiring day -- I woke up around 3:30 and as far as I know didn't get back to sleep. Finally gave up at 4:50 and made myself some breakfast. At least I got some good snuggle -- Colleen wasn't all that sleepy either. (Though she did go to sleep around 4am.)

Work was interrupted by a loud virtual crash as the LDAP server went down taking a large chunk of our infrastructure with it. Not me, though; I still use /etc/passwd and have distributed version control via git. Still didn't get much done in the afternoon, but getting two bugs fixed in the morning didn't hurt either my mood or my reputation.

Some good conversations in the evening, both in person and via IM. And Moira, who just acquired an iPad, gave us a Kindle. So we have two, now, which means that I can have one. Much lighter (though more fragile) than my netbook. Will have to see if it can be practical as a go-anywhere songbook.

My dreams included going to a hotel, where somehow I knew I would be going to work at soon. I didn't want to change jobs, especially not if it meant going into management or something customer-facing. I slept pretty soundly, though.

As I mentioned upwhen, I went to Fry's yesterday: the main purchases were a 4GB microSD card, a cheap bluetooth headset, and a power supply for Nova to replace the functional but noisy one I had to put in a month or so ago.

The headset was the cheapest I could find; a little Plantronics job that charges via what looks like a micro-USB plug. Haven't had occasion to try it yet. The microSD was a 4GB Kingston that came with SD, mini-SD, and USB adapters; it'll be $10 after the rebate.

The PSU was the cheapest I could find with a 120mm fan, a 500W supply from Apevia, whoever they are. In spite of the fact that it's rated significantly higher than the 380W Antec it replaced, it appears to be more efficient: UPS load went from 26% to 22% of 480VA. So that's a win.

The office is noticably quieter now, though there's still some fan noise from the miniITX system I'm using as a router.

The main thing still pending hardware-wise is the AT&T fiber hookup; I really need to get email redirected off the old service in preparation for that.

I don't normally post links to video clips, but these (all found on gizmodo.com) are exceptional:

Amazing Rube Goldberg Machine Goes On and On, Does Nothing

As advertised. The most impressive I've seen -- must have taken days to set up.

Video of the Motion-Sensing Wave LED Coffee Table in Action

Surely $2500 isn't too much to pay for something this beautiful, especially when you realize it's also a cat toy...

Renault's Auto Ballet of Destruction

Slow-motion car ads are a dime a dozen, but how often do you see one designed to show off the fact that your cars are top-rated in a crash test? The finale is, um..., impressive.

A day full of annoyances. Trying to get an authorization code to transfer thestarport.org out of Network Solutions Problems, and discovering that the email they were sending wasn't getting through. Turns out our sysadmin had installed a new spam-filtering appliance on Monday, which of course had a new address. The DNS hadn't propagated to Netsol yet. And the problem I was having yesterday was that the mail server for what used to be the lab's domain when I set up my contact info, rsv.ricoh.com, was down. Naturally it took until 11am or so for our admin to arrive and fix it. But by that time I'd already changed my contact email address to point to my home address here at thestarport.org.

Went out at noon to Fry's (taking the fact that my ankle is bothering me as a sufficient excuse to skip my usual walk) to buy an MP3 player. The ad assured me that the Samsung I bought would play ogg files, and indeed they have a reputation for doing so. Just to be sure, I checked several other vendors (having noticed that many of the boxes had phone numbers on them) and determined that, no, none of them played oggs.

What I didn't discover until I got the damned thing back to work was that it's totally locked down, and will only play files if you transfer them with Windows Media Player. So much for Samsung -- my respect for them just went down several notches.

Actually got a little work done in the latter part of the afternoon (mostly nailing down and documenting the encrypted blob format that finagler's software is writing) before trying to get an appointment with my doctor. The next available one was August 1^st until I mentioned the ankle, at which point I got one for this Friday. OK, I understand about triage. By this time it was 5:05 and the opthalmology department was closed, in spite of the entry in the phone directory that said the appointment desk was open until 5:30.

Back to Fry's to exchange the MP3 player. One thing about Fry's -- they'll take their stuff back for just about any reason. That's why I keep going there.

Aside to whoever took the glass bottles out for recycling: would it have killed you to unstack the bins and put the bottles in the one labeled "glass" instead of just setting them down in the driveway?