06.30.01

Two years ago today, Faith and I were re-married. That was the turning point, I think, as life has just been getting better ever since! Our family has expanded and we have slowly been renovating our house and little by little we have been carving out a niche where we can raise our children and enjoy life. I am looking forward to spending many more years together!

06.28.01

Neil writes in his journal that he is no longer an author. He goes on to state that he is now a “New York Times” bestselling author! “American Gods” is number 10 at the moment, and I’m sure it’ll go higher! I’ve been a fan of his work ever since Sandman #1 (I still have most of the first year and a half of the comics’ run). He is truly a master of the short story, and his collaberation with Terry Pratchett (of “Discworld” fame) on “Good Omens” borders on literary perfection (at least as far as my tastes go)

06.27.01

Tracey was kind enough to send a note regarding the appearance of my website in various browsers including Konqeuror (a part of the KDE base distro. Hmm… a new browser? But would it run on FreeBSD? It only took a couple of healthy downloads to find out! Yes!!! And quite well, I might add. This just may usurp Netscape as my browser of choice. Emacs/W3 almost does the job, but it just renders way too slow for me. Konqeuror seems to handle nearly everything well- frames, divs, etc… My stylesheet will need to be re-worked a bit to handle the new browser, and yes that means I will probably re-design the site again. Live with it. It’s my hobby and my page. Of course, constructive criticism is always welcome!

That reminds me, I have moved all of my dotfiles to a central directory aptly named “dotfiles” so if you might have linked to any of my files, you might want to double check to make sure the link is correct.

FYI- Yes, I like V-8, Yes, freshly juiced would be much better, and no, I still haven’t seen “Pi”

06.27.01

Slow day, the A/C went out at work making conditions there miserable at best. They finally repaired and recharged the system around 3:30, and by 4:30 things were actually starting to cool off.

Neil Gaiman’s new book, “American Gods” is now out!!! I stopped by the bookstore on the way home and read the first chapter. Looks quite promising! Border’s didn;t have it discounted yet, but I’m sure it’ll be a best seller by the weekend!

06.26.01

Finally got a chance to watch ” Finding Forrester ” after work today. I was really very impressed! Not exactly what I would call a must see for everyone, but I think that most of the regulars that read this journal would find it quite entertaining.

06.25.01

Woohoo!!! Ronan and Keenan had their doctor’s visit today! I knew that they had been gaining weight like crazy, but they are now each seven pounds, fifteen ounces!! That’s close enough for me to say eight pounds! Doc says they look great, but he still wants to keep them on the more expensive formula for now. (almost $13.00/can at Schnuck’s- which is the only place I’ve been able to find Similac/NeoShure- which we go through at about a can every day and a half.) I’m soo happy with how well the boys are doing!!!

Logan the entrepreneur- He built a small kool-aid stand today and sold thirteen cookies at 15 cents a piece and small cups of kool-aid for 20 cents. He made nearly seven dollars!! (I’m not sure how that math adds up) What does he want to do with his new found wealth? Believe it or not, Poke-anything was not even close! He and his henchmen want to invest in some pieces of iron. They are trying to re-inforce “Fort Dragon” (that would be the small fort we built several weeks ago in the back yard) so that it will be tornado-proof. Quite ambitious.

As part of our new functional management groups, I now have root access to all of the unix boxes in the five state region, and the other admins have access to mine. This was no big deal until today. As Joe was in the midst of a project, one of the other admins happened to log into the box he was working on and decided to make some changes to the directory structure where Joe was working. Hrmph. Quite frustrating when other people in your own workgroup don’t have enough common courtesy to at least let you know they are going to make changes on your box. Don’t get me wrong, the admin had every right to be in there, it just would have been nice to know beforehand. (oh, and I’m not even bothered that he took one of my scripts, rewrote it completely and re-implemented it on one of my boxes- AND didn’t bother to tell me about it.-nope, not bothered at all.)

06.24.01

Kind of a slow day, as far as they can be around here. I did manage to finally install a wall of pegboard in the garage so that I could organize my tools. I still need to get a lot more of the hooks, but it is beginning to look like I actually know where everything is supposed to go! I still need another slow weekend to finish cleaning out and organizing the rest of the garage, but at least I made a bit of headway!

06.23.01

I have been on the lookout for a new monitor for Logan as of late, so this morning I figured I would hit a few garage sales and see what I could find. I think I must have seen at least forty or fifty different sales and trudged through about fifteen of them before I even saw one piece of computer equipment. Of course, the one piece I did see was a 14 inch Acer Multimedia monitor w/ keyboard and mouse for ten dollars! So, the monitor and speakers work great, (except that the max resolution is 800×600) and I just put the mouse and keyboard on the pile in my office with the rest of the spares. I also managed to find a very nice changing table for the twins that I managed to get for twenty dollars.

Once home, I fired up the lawn mower for the first time since it came back from the repair shop. Other than the fact that it now runs, I think I can actually tell a marked improvement in performance. (it’s amazing what a difference a sharpened blade can make!)

Mark and Leslie came over for dinner (barbecue and such) Mark brought over three different bottles of wine to sample (He and Leslie are quite the wine snobs now! ::grin::) The first bottle (a german reisling) was probably one of the best wines I’ve ever had. Unfortunately, since the first was so good, the other two paled by comparison. The conversation was quite lively and varied and we all agreed that we should do this more often. Both Faith and I think that Mark has finally met his match and we couldn’t be happier for the both of them.

06.22.01

Wow. Carrol O’Conner has passed. I grew up on Archie and Edith. Thank goodness for re-runs.

Thanks to some helpful direction from Charlie, I know have a functional copy of Emacs/W3. I did end up having to upgrade my copy of Texinfo to version 4.0 in order to get W3 to install properly.

Looks like a bit of extra work for us for a while. One of our major Oracle machines in Dallas cratered big time. Turns out that the admin down there wasn’t exactly following procedures for back-ups either. So it looks as if the data is now gone for good. The upshot is that the server we had planned on deploying in St. Louis just got bumped up to critical status, so we have been planning and engineering at an accelerated rate.

My car decided to make a horrible sound on the way home from work. It turned out to just be that the elbow hose for the turbo charger had come loose (completely- it was just laying in the engine well) So I put it back on and tightened it down a bit and it appears that it will hold for at least a little while.

06.21.01

One of the regional managers at work was kind enough to invite me to go to the ballgame today! That doesn’t happen very often, so I accepted.

eh, we lost. Got rained on a bit. A rainy day at the ballpark sure beats a great day at work!