The Mandelbear's Musings

A pretty good day. I even got a walk in, though I cut it a little short because I was getting some foot pain. Naturally it went away as soon as I turned around. (It's because I have shoes with three different insoles. I get arch pain sometimes when readjusting between them. :P )

Quite a lot of puttering around the websites and associated makefiles, including finally getting HyperSpace-Express.com online. After owning it for how many years? Did I mention that I procrastinate?

Speaking of procrastination, I also got No Greater Love fully chorded out. About 2 weeks late, but in time for Tempered Glass's Orycon gig. Which is next Saturday evening. Eeek!

Lots of good links under the cut. Don Marti provided a lot of them, including a few great git links, one of which had this marvelous quote:

It is easy to shoot your foot off with git, but also easy to revert to a previous foot and merge it with your current leg.

OK, wtf did I do to my left knee? Grumble.

Apart from that, it's been a pretty quiet day, spent entirely at home except for an hour's walk around the Rose Garden at 12:30.

The chaoswolf has been having a quiet barbecue/potluck party to celebrate her birthday (a day early); I got stuck doing the barbecuing, of course. Not too bad; chipuni came out to keep me company, and we had a good conversation, if a little short. Made some of Colleen's infamous onion-and-blue-cheese burgers; yummy, but they tend to make a mess all over whatever you're cooking on. Somebody will have to clean the grill.

What time I haven't spent cooking or walking has been spent puttering around the website; steve.savitzky.net/Songs/ is now basically complete, with all the links fixed. (I'll need to do a little more work before I add any more songs; there's no code to add new song directories at present.) But at least it's functional, and the links on the lyrics pages are right. Other parts of the site are mostly functional.

Publishing is still messed up; basically nobody but me can maintain it at the moment. That's ok for now, but there are other sites in the same tree that will need to have other people working on them.

The front door is open; the house is cooling off. It'll be heading toward cold by the time we go to bed.

The flower_cat has been spending the afternoon making 8 jars of peach butter; they still have to cool off, then get boiled again. I helped with the stirring. Colleen's mom was a terrible cook, but she knew how to can fruit, and taught her daughter well. Yum.

I've spent most of the evening working on the massive directory reorganization I've described here. It's a project fraught with minor pitfalls -- it's easy to assume, as I did, that two directories called Doc in different parts of the tree are the same, when they're not even closely related. I'll probably finish over the weekend.

It occurs to me that I've done a few things this last week and not blogged about them. Bad bear!

The wheelchair ramps, which I threw together in a hurry last Monday, are mostly done now; I did most of the finishing this afternoon. There are two: a 6-foot ramp up the two steps from the sidewalk, and a 3-foot ramp going up from the porch to the door-sill. The long ramp still needs a second coat of varnish; it was getting late. I'll do it tomorrow. Things were complicated by the fact that Varathane Diamond Finish, their water-based indoor/outdoor polyurethane varnish, is no longer being made; there are now several different lines of indoor and outdoor water-based finishes, and the packaging is different enough that it took me three stores yesterday to realize that they actually had something I could use.

We went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium today; took the wheelchair for Colleen. I couldn't find handicapped parking anyplace nearby; ended up in the usual parking lot after dropping off Colleen and the kids. Good trip anyway. The original plan had been to save money by eating a big breakfast at home and going back home for lunch, but we were hungry enough to need a stop at The Whole Enchilada on the way back. Tasty, though.

Got gnome-games installed on Colleen's EeePC, and Wednesday Jordan Uggla got a player installed that handles Live365, so the Cat's happy.

The main computer/web work for me, still in progress, is a major reorganization of steve.savitzky.net. More on that one in another post.

This post is an attempt to get my thoughts in order about how the household web space is evolving. Mostly cut-tagged, because it's mainly of interest only to household members working on websites (waves at chaoswolf) and to that subset of my readers who are working on websites and/or have a home fileserver.

I still have to work out how web-based collaboration will happen; that will be of interest to members of Tres Gique, as well as anyone else thinking of collaborating with me on a website, CD, cookbook, or any other project. Clearly, simple uploading isn't enough at that point. More on that further upwhen.

I actually got a couple of things done today (surprise, surprise). First, I finished mounting all the pieces of my new recording system. You'll notice I didn't say "packaging" -- said pieces are all mounted "open-face" on a plastic clipboard, using 4-40 screws, standoffs, threaded rod, and a little bit of wishful thinking. However, the new motherboard booted up with the old hard drive, which is now the only moving part in the whole system. It's quiet, which is a Good Thing in a recording system. If the sound of the disk drive gets noticable, I'll go to a CF card. It really needs a re-install based on Etch.

The other thing I did was put up web pages for the two future albums: Amethyst Rose and Hackers' Heaven. Mainly because I promised myself and the Net that I would have them up by now. Two days late, and lacking even preliminary songlists, but better late than nothing.

Spent the afternoon (after a full morning of extremely useful meetings with some people from a company we're working closely with at work) hanging out in theStarport's office with a telecommuting cflute and doing some badly-needed reorganization on my web directories.

Specifically, I needed to get my Album directories under CVS control, and fix up the Makefiles so that they work either in the web staging-directory environment (where they do uploads, formatting, and the like) or in the recording/disk-burning environment. All it takes is a conditional in the Makefiles, but it's something I've been meaning to do for months.

Next are the Tracks and Songs directories. Tracks is straightforward with a little extra scripting; Songs will require a significant amount of makefile hacking to switch from the present arrangement of separate working and web directories.