Last night Cleopatra (as we have come to call the cat Faith brought home on Thursday) gave birth to kittens! We had gone out to dinner and when we returned, Faith found that we had two new additions in the cat-room. Mama, however was not quite finished and proceeded to bring four more kittens into the world before we finally fell asleep. By morning, one more had joined us for a total of seven cute little kittens! We have two black & white, two brown & black (tortoise shell), one orange, one tan & white and one calico.
We finally received the bookcase we ordered from Bova and put it in Logan’s room. As a result, we spent nearly the whole weekend rearranging and cleaning his room. As anyone with children knows, this was an effort of truly Herculean proportions!
Spent a few hours today at SoluTech attending a free XML seminar. The information presented was quite useful and timely. The presenter spoke very well and only spent the last ten minutes or so selling the classes that they offer. The rest of the two hours was spent on the understanding and application of XML. The biggest nugget for me was the existence of and migration to XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations ) This replaces the entire concept of the DTD with an XML based version. This leads to all sorts of interesting possibilities!!! (perhaps an XML based journal!)
Well, after numerous configuration changes and tweaks, it appears that I do not have a suitable scsi adapter for the Phillips CDR I mentioned. No matter what I tried, The system could never see it. So instead, I installed a second hard drive (18 gig) and a second cd-rom. These all work flawlessly, so I guess that is the way the box will stay. (at least for a while!)
I took a half a day today so that I could visit Dad at the hospital. He is already up and walking around! Amazing! The doctor says he should be home in a day or two. It will take a bit before he gets back to “normal”, but overall it looks as if the surgery was a complete success!
Faith has adopted another stray cat. This one is rather pregnant, so it looks like we will yet again have kittens in the house! (hint, hint: eight to ten weeks from when they are born we will be putting them up for adoption!)
I installed a Phillips CDD-2600 cd-burner into an external scsi cage and attached it to my Sparc Ultra II (my current desktop at work). I haven’t gotten cdrecord to work just yet, but I haven’t installed the recommended block drivers yet. Instead, I decided that since I had the machine in a state to be meddled with, I went ahead and installed Solaris 8 (that’s the same as 2.8) just to play with it. Hmm… It’s cool, it’s flashy, it’s bloated. I may put RedHat back on it and use it that way…. Decisions, decisions!
We met with Logan’s third grade teacher, Mrs Jobe at the Woerther Elementary Open House. I am very pleased with the curriculum as well as with his teacher! It looks to be a good year for our little man!
Well, Dad had his surgery today. he went in at 5:00am this morning to Des Peres Hospital. He went in to have five vertebrae fused and a steel rod inserted along side his spine. The surgury was only supposed to take four hours, but ended up taking an extra two. It turns out the surgeon found more damage to his spine and ended up really giving him the ole’ roto rooter routine! Dad is resting now, and I will visit again tomorrow. He should be home by the end of the week. After about six weeks of physical therapy, he should be able to go back to work.
Charlie pointed out that my neato little pop-up stats boxes don’t pop for Netscape. That’s frustrating. Well, I went ahead and did a bit of javascript to display the info in the status bar at the bottom of the browser when the mouse hovers over the link. I won’t be able to try it w/ Mozilla until tomorrow, so I will have to wait and see….
Yesterday, we spent the afternoon over at my Mom & Dad’s for a barbecue. We talked about several things, but most notably we discussed the possibility of moving the family to the Florida Keys to run an inter-island air cargo business. It’s just a pipe dream, but it sure does sound promising!
As you can see, I’ve been tinkering a bit more with this site as well as the statistics stuff. The javascript is really cool, but I’ve been striving to stay as simple as possible. By positioning the mouse over any of the links, the associated information will be displayed in a pop-up box. This is yet another attempt at oversimplifying my pages. I may be taking this a bit too far now that I’m not even using javascript but who knows, I may go back to it in time. I have also created a header template in my code so that adding another entry is quite easy- just cut, paste and edit!
Yesterday, Logan and I met up with my brother and his son, Brandon so that we could go to the air show. The heat made the show almost unbearable! As usual the Blue Angels were really amazing. Before the airshow, we walked around the static display and looked at all the aircraft on display. There was an old B-17 that was open for a walkthrough (for a small donation) so I went through with Logan and Brandon. I was able to take some very good shots of the cockpit and the inide of the bomb bay (with bombs intact) and related the story of my Uncle Ken (he was a co-pilot during WWII) and how he was forced to stand on the tiny catwalk and physically kick the bombs out of the plane over Berlin when the release lines had frozen. I was very excited to see how the pictures turned out. A bit later I checked to see how many shots I still had left on the current role and was suprised to see that I was only on picteru number sixteen. Wait a minute, wasn’t that the same number I was on when I grabbed the camera this morning??? Oh geez! Would you believe it? There was no bloody film in the thing!!! (I’m still mad about this) I only gave the camera ( a Pentax P30T, by the way) a cursory glance that morning and simply noted that the film advance was on number sixteen, so obviously, I still had some film left, right? Heh. Oh well. I did manage to shoot off four roles anyway- I may post some of the pictures eventually.
John and Anne stopped by to pick up their new kittens (Gizmo and Gonzo). That’s the last of the foster kids. I am very happy to see them both going to the same home. I know that they will be well cared for.
At work I hobbled together a little script that produces over twenty pages of output relating to the status of one of my sun boxes. Kind of cool, actually- it just runs several accounting commands (prtconf, showrev, etc…) and spits the output to a file. I know have a very simple and efficient (read “cronnable”) way of maintaining my system documentation!
Met up with Mark after work today. I haven’t seen him in over six months… I went down to his apartment for the first time. It is a very cool downtown (as in off Washington and Eighteenth) artist’s loft. He has a spectacular view of the downtown skyline! We went to eat at MeKong (3131 S Grand- vietnamese) where I discovered that although I really enjoyed most of the food and especially the coffee/condensed milk over ice thing, I am not particularly fond of peanut sauce! Afterwards we walked down to Cheap Trix to see all the interesting people getting interesting things pierced. After this, we paid a visit to Papa Legba’s shop down on Gravois for a bit of that old time hoodoo. Papa was quite gracious to give Mark a standing discount at his shop. (Papa was not in, but the gentleman behind the counter recognized Mark and passed the information along) Quite entertaining! The “guy-behind-the-counter” also informed me that Al DiMeola will be playing the Sheldon later this month! ( I doubt thta I will be able to make it, but it doesn’t hurt to wish!)
Jeff, Journal | Jeff | 
September 10, 2000 7:10 pm | 
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