* Joe burned a copy of FreeBSD 4.1.1 (the one that comes with all the RSA stuff!!)and brought it to work so I could play with it. Spent most of the afternoon installing it on my laptop. found out that if you don’t remove all those scsi devices that aren’t really there the system will try and find them anyway (at least on the first boot- I recompiled the kernel to remove them before I even rebooted a second time) and it will take like 30-35 minutes to boot. Granted my laptop is only a P150 w/48 megs, but come on! Even Windoze came up faster than that!!! Of course after recompiling the kernel, it’s super fast! Now I just need to get a working internet connection and then I can download and play with Sawfish on my laptop as well as my Ultra at work!
* Took a bit of comp time for working last night and slept in for a couple of hours before heading into work.
* On a tip from Charlie, I plucked the little cmos battery from my Quadra 605 and brought it to Radio Shack on my lunch hour. (Charlie suggested that a dead battery sometimes would cause the 605 to not sync it’s video signal) The battery was dead and so I replaced it. (I also managed to pick up a CueCat while I was there- just in case…) Once home, I popped the little battery into the Quadra and reconfigured the little video dongle and BAMMO! Welcome to Macintosh right there on my standard svga monitor!!! This is really cool!
* Started looking around the web for Quadra info… I need to find an ethernet card for it and a straight 68040 so I can run NetBSD on it and put it on my network at home.
* Logan and I found a really cool site tonight! We were looking for all sorts of information on the International Space Station and found the coolest VRML site This is a definite must see! Download a VRML browser (or plug-in) and download the VRML package from that site and have a blast! This was the kind of stuff I always wished for back during the days of SkyLab
* Spent most of the afternoon on a conference call negotiating the final little tidbits required to get the equipment for Circuit Switched Data installed next week. That includes five different locations, with six installs total. (Two systems are co-located in the same building) This is actually an exciting project as I will be installing and maintaining the equipment that finally will allow our customers to browse the web from their cellphones.
* My boss, Jennifer and her boss, Jim took Joe (my employee) out to lunch today for a kind of “Attaboy” since he has been working quite a bit on projects that no longer pertain to him (he did so at the request of upper management- therefore I felt that upper management should say “thank you”) We had lunch on the patio of Tucker’s. As always an enjoyable lunch.
* Yet again, more night work. It’s not so bad when it’s planned, but in the last week I think I have been awakened every single night except for Saturday night. Usually it has been very stupid questions (see previous posts) So tonight, I figured I’d head them off at the pass and go ahead and work a few hours tonight and just go in late in the morning.
* It looks like I will be driving to Wichita next week. I need to install a Cisco 7200, a generic sniffer and an ethernet switch. Management figures it would be easiest if I just bring it there myself. Oh well- I figure if I do all this myself, then I will most likely get some Cisco training out of it later this year. (I hope!)
* On friday I went to The MacStore to find a cable for that Quadra. I was warned about the prices there, and sure enough they wanted twenty to forty dollars for an adapter. The lady that helped me was nice enough to make a copy of the switch settings for the adapter they carried so I could play with the adapter I have at home. I didn’t realize until I was home that the sheet showed eight switches and mine only has six. ::argh:: I fiddled with it for a while before finally noticing that my 17″ AOC monitor actually has three different inputs on the back: standard VGA, composite RGB and what appears to be a Mac interface!!! So sometime this week I will go get a simple mac cable and try that!
* Friday night we went to Logan’s first Cub Scout meeting and met the new leaders. They also raised quite a bit of money for the pack with a raffle of cakes that were brought in by the families of a particular den. This was our den’s turn so we brought an Oreo cake that Faith purchased (they no longer allow hand-baked goods- what has this world become?)
* Mark finally updated his juornal and removed the frames from his site. (maybe now it will work with Mozilla!)
* Saturday was a rather hectic day! (saturdays seem to be getting more and more that way!!!) We spent the afternoon over at Mom & Dad’s to celebrate birthdays for Dad, Karen( my sister) and Courtney (my nephew’s girlfriend). Dad is recovering from surgery still. It’s going slow. Too slow for him, I’m sure.
* Saturday night we went to Steohan & Christine’s home to celebrate Stephan’s 30th (that makes four birthdays in one day!) What a great time! We spent most of the evening with new friends Gina & Mike discussing the merits of DIY from a homeowner’s perspective (namely a lack of merit!) and just what precisely is wrong with the school system these days. Really a great conversation! I look forward to meeting with them again.
* Sunday I slept in!!!! Finally a decent night’s sleep! It was wonderful, and since Faith spent the day with Connie, I just lounged all day long! No work, no play, just some serious Veg-time!!!
* Okay, just for the sake of documentation: I had a dream sunday morning wherein I was being directed by an elderly Tibetan adept through a large throng of people, up an impossibly narrow access tube so that I could rescue what appeared to be a small Tibetan child in full ceremonial regalia. Okay, now I’ve had dreams like these before, no big deal (although the lucidity and detail is always alarming!) but later in the day as I was flipping through the channels I happened upon Eddie Murphy in “The Golden Child” (I bet you saw that one coming!) What scene? The one where Eddie exclaims (paraphrased) “I can’t believe I am going to Nepal to help save the Golden Child just because of some dream I had” Kind of made me think. Now, I am probably predisposed to this particular fantasy, but as I have noted to some friends that I have been experiencing a certain affinity with the Buddhists as of late. They seem to be at every turn, but not quite in my path, just slightly askew. I dreamt that I spoke with the Dalai Lama. I ran into (not quite into, but close) four traditional buddhist monks at the Air Show. (Not the airport, and they were not Hare’ Krishna’s - I ran into them in Kansas City). So, I figure I might as well start documenting all these little occurances to see if a pattern emerges. Nepal! N-E-P-A-L! Viva Nepal! Viva Nepal!
* Also did a bit of redesigning to the site. Cleaned up the code just a bit, tweaked some tables, added some color and added the line items ala’ Charlie.
I ended up working almost all night last night, so I didn’t get a chance to update until just now. We had a major fiasco applying a craft (the equivalent to an O/S patch). Lack of experience, coupled with a lack of documentation resulted in a lack of cell sites on the air for a small amount of time in the wee hours of the Kansas City morning. I had a meeting scheduled for 10:00am this morning, so no chance to sleep in. I did manage to get to work in time for the meeting (it was a strategy type meeting regarding the future plans of our voice-mail platform), but the vendors that were to be presenting didn’t show up until 11:30. After a rather informative 3 hours we had lunch brought in and I figured that I would get to go home and get some sleep. I figured wrong. I arrived back at my desk to find a frantic message from our IS dept requesting my help with one of their servers. It turns out that in their procedure manuals it states that when all else fails notify the Systems Admin. It actually lists me by name. Kind of neat. Kind of a pain in the butt. So I spent the remainder of my afternoon extolling the virtues of vold when trying to read a cd-rom on a Sun machine.
Spent most of the evening trying to get a Mac Quadra 605 hooked up to a standard vga monitor. Still no luck. I have an adapter, but it wouldn’t do the job. I may stop at The MacStore and pick up an actual Mac to VGA cable.
And now I get another call from KC to solve somebody else’s emergency.. (I could get used to not getting calls like these anymore…) So, I’m off to work yet again.
Yesterday I met with John for lunch at Balducci’s (near Westport, very nice place) and we discussed finances in great detail. Very informative lunch. Afterwords I stopped by Software Plus to try and find a Lisp reference manual. I still haven’t figured out my Sawfish themes and thought a book might help. Well, there wasn’t a Lisp book to be had. However, on the bargain table was a copy of Sams “Teach Yourself EMACS” (If you don’t know about emacs, go here) Emacs is a lisp driven editor for unix. It is also almost everything else you need for unix. Or Windows. Or MacOS. Amazing. Really. So I re-installed emacs on my UltraSparc at work and lo and behold it all starts making sense! I could really get addicted to this Lisp stuff. Now my environment under X (Sawfish) and almost any tool I need (web-browser, telnet client, extremely powerful editor) are all controlled via Lisp. I will be updating my Sunfish page to reflect all these changes as well as post copies of my dotfiles.
It appears that this journalling thing is taking off! We now number six people! WooHoo! That makes an even dozen!!! In addition to Mark’s page, Charlie’s brother Aaron has joined the fray!
It has been a very busy weekend! Yesterday we spent the morning at a financial seminar that just may change our lives (more on that in a bit!) Afterwords we went out to John & Anne’s new house in St. Charles for a delicious lunch! We spent the afternoon learning about finances (mutual funds, conventional & Roth IRA’s etc…) It was a very enlightening afternoon! Amongst many many other things, he clued us in on The Motley Fool which is a great site for all things financial. Afterwords we headed over to my brother’s house to celebrate my niece, Shannon’s 17th birthday. She sure is growing up fast! We spent most of the evening there until about 8:30 when we headed up to the Holiday Inn at 270 & the Rock Road where the Wolfhounds were holding a reunion. Why did we go? One of my best friends from high school is married to a Wolfhound and it was our first chance to get together since graduation. Kristen was one of the three people in school with a Ford Mustang. There was me, Eddie Wichmann (Hey Eddie, you out there?) and Kristen. We spent a couple of hours at the hotel with them. Jim is a very personable guy and boy was he ever in demand at the reunion! He couldn’t get away for anything! Each time he would pull himself away from one conversation, someone else would call him over! It was really great to see Kristen again after all these years! She still looks the same (although I think this was the first time I’ve ever seen her in a dress and not in jeans!!!) They drove all the way to St. Louis from El Campo, TX where they live. We made tentative plans to get together over the holidays when they will be back up this way. We plan to meet up again next April in Houston when we will be there after our cruise.
So tonight, we met with John and Austin from Primerica to go over our financial situation. Good news! We are exactly were we thought we are! No suprises! They came up with a plan to accelerate our payments on the house and can get the mortgage paid off in twelve years! That beats the heck out of 30!!! Hmm…. I think I will just sit and stew on this one a bit more before I give out any more details. Sorry, I just want to think things through and watch carefully how certain things progress over the next few days. Stay tuned for updates!
Mark has officially joined the ranks of the “OJA” (On-Line Journaller’s Association) I have added a link accordingly.
Lastly, a sad note. Kit-kat has passed. My sincerest condolences to Charlie and Tracy
Mixed feelings today. On one hand I am excited about some software stuff (more on that later). On the other hand, I am absolutely shocked at the numbing stupidity of some people!
(This comes after reading Charlie’s entry for Sep 12)
Charlie and Tracy have been having a bit of a rough time with poor Kit-kat and some jerk goes and says some rather nasty things to Charlie about the cat. You know what? I don’t know what was said, but I am damn sure Charlie and Tracy are doing everything they can to help their cat! There is no way he or Tracy would EVER knowingly harm an innocent! Anyone how knows them should know that! ::ggrrr!!!::
I do soo love his comeback!!!! See figure one
So I got sawfish to finally compile and install on my solaris box at work today. It took several different libraries to get it to install, and I really got hung up on the GTK+ libraries (turns out I ended up editing the makefile by hand) but once I got those to compile, the rest went very quick. Now I have a very extensible window manager in severe need of background management, themes, etc… Ah yes, I did start on my “SunFish” (sawfish on Solaris) page. You can find it here. It’s a work in progress and well reflect what happens with sawfish on my machine.
Thank you to those who expressed their sympathies regarding the previous entry. I still don’t feel comfortable talking about it. Perhaps another day. Yes they are members of our family, if only briefly.
Sawfish looks to be quite a promising window manager for Solaris. That is if I can ever get the required libraries (and their requirements) installed on Solaris8. If and when I do get this running I think I must dedicate a page to the installation and configuration of Sawfish on Solaris 8. I think the list so far is at six or seven separate libraries that are needed in order to get it to even compile. Frustrating. (but fun!!!)
My driver’s license expired last week. Oops. So today I took a half day of comp time ( I worked an extra seven hours Friday night, so that’s fair- right???) to get my class E (chauffeur’s) license. Went to the License Bureau and took a look at one of the little manuals. I read it in the car while eating Lion’s Choice) and went in and took the test. Heh, I was rather nervous. Not that I thought the test would be hard, but it has been seventeen years since I last took the test. Well, I passed and now I have another six years before I have to think about it again. (although renewals don’t require a test)
We have lost one of our kittens. She fell ill today and passed away in my arms.The sadness is overwhelming.
Jeff, Journal | Jeff | 
September 28, 2000 7:20 pm | 
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