As you may have noticed, I have been playing with my stylesheets here. That’s why my menus have been going off to the right if you use Internet Exploder. Under Netscape, everything looks great! ( I mean, the site looks the way I intended it to, whether it appeals to you or not) Opera does a mostly OK job of rendering everything except for one or two minor issues with the date line of my journal entries. (I don’t know how it looks in Emacs/W3- my w3 broke when I upgraded to Emacs21). The whole point of this little exercise is to see just how much control of the website I can place in my stylesheet and just how little really needs to go into each page. If you’re interested, my stylesheet is here. Any suggestions? Just let me know!
Joe is going to be driving to Little Rock, AR tomorrow to pick up our new Oracle server (this is for a different database than the one previously mentioned) It is a rather large Sun Enterprise 3500 that we will beef up with all sorts of extra ram and processors! I figured as long as Joe was going there (that’s where our supervisors are), that this would be a great opportunity to get rid of all of our surplus equipment. We loaded up the company car with several sparc fives, a couple of tens, several tape drives, external cdroms and a whole bunch of mulit-pack hard drives. This equipment will be put to better use as trade-in fodder for the newer equipmment that we want, and besides, I really needed some leg room in my cube!
Sunday, the whole family came over to visit for Father’s day and to celebrate my mother’s birthday and my sister-in-law’s birthday. I barbecued beef bratwurst and hot dogs. My mom brought over some really great potato salad and baked beans. Kim (my sister-in-law) made devilled eggs, and my sister brought a very tasty pineapple cake type dessert. We (my sister, brother and I) got Mom some hostas plants and a new freestanding, multi-directional light fixture for her art room. We gave Dad a gift certificate to Lowe’s, Sears and to Longhorn Steakhouse. (mmmm… good steaks! -yes that was a plug for Mark’s restaurant in Chesterfield Valley) I received a wonderful card from Faith and another card from my boys. (I still like saying that -boys) as well as a new CD holder for my car (the exact one I’ve been eye’ing for some time) and Gladiator on DVD. All in all I have to say that I think these Father’s Day gatherings are just getting better!
After I got home from a rather long (at least it seemed long) day at work (spent three hours on a conference call discussing website design and implementation) I worked a bit on Logan’s fort. Several of the boys in the neighborhood were kind enough to donate a bunch of scrap wood to ” help with building the fort ” So now there is once again extra wood (mostly small pieces, riddled with half-hammered nails) strewn about the yard. Oh well, at least they’re having fun.
06.17.01
Today Keenan and Ronan are six weeks old!!! (the time is already flying by!)
A week ago last Friday, I dropped off my lawn mower at the local repair shop to see how much it would cost to get it back up and running. In the meantime, I have been using an old manual lawn mower to cut my grass, which I used again today.
Put in a new digital programmable thermostat to help regulate the temperature in the house. The old one was not in the best of shape. I think it must have been the original thermostat in the house. This thing even had dust bunnies in the coil! At any rate, the new thermostat works great! (and is much better at making minor adjustments to the temperature in the house!)
In an effort to reduce the amount of time that I have to edit webpages at work (yes, I am now one of three official network webmasters for Cingular Wireless intra not inter – so you won’t ever see the work I do there out here in the wild) I wrote a nifty little perlscript to generate webpages on the fly based on the contents of a sub-directory. It only grabs the html files, ignores the directories and other superfluous files and creates a formatted page of links. Kinda neat, not exactly a stretch as far as programming, but useful nonetheless. Now every time someone adds a new report, the website automatically reflects that.
Made a few minor changes to the website. I’m sure that I will continue to tweak this new format for a while (at least until I completely change it again!) I think that if I used old website designs as journal entries, there would be a whole lot more of them and they would be a lot more frequent!
Well, once again I’ve changed the format of the website. The new design takes up less than three megs total. There are still a few items to take care of ( linking the twins’ avi files to the gallery page, etc…) The last change that I made was only a surface change, this time, I’ve re-structured the whole site. So if you’ve linked to any files here, you may want to verify that it is still in the same place.
The lack of updates for the last week is not an indication of nothing going on to report. On the contrary, it is just now that I’ve found a few spare moments to jot these notes down. (what free time I did have, I used to redesign the website)
I took Monday off of work so that I could accompany Faith and the twins to Children’s Hospital to talk to the specialist regarding Ronan’s urinary reflux issue. Good news! although the condition is somewhat serious and will need monitoring for the next few years, it is not nearly as bad as we thought. No surgery will be required, only low doses of antibiotics for the next several months. With Keenan being an identical twin, we decided to have him screened for this issue as well. We received the good news today that he shows no signs of the reflux whatsoever.
Worked two nights this week, Tuesday night and Wednesday night. The nightwork was mostly uneventful ( I did run into one stubborn server that just didn’t want to acknowledge the network once it was re-booted, but I quickly coerced it otherwise) I ran into the biggest issues during the day. Miscommunication is a very strange thing. Within a matter of sentences, I had managed to raise the ire of several of my co-workers, while my own managed to reach escape velocity and orbited for several hours before finally returning to earth. Tomorrow I have to go in and try to straighten out this little mess. Boy I love office politics.
After work yesterday I drove out to Babies-R-Us to pick up the new cribs. Very quick trip. We had gone out the night before and picked out and payed for the two that we wanted, so all I had to do was wrestle them into the back of the van and bring them home to be put together. I was able to put them both together with minimal fuss, and they really look nice (although, you can still smell the varnish a bit, so we will let them stand for a while before the boys get to move in!)
Just this afternoon I finally was able to configure Gnus to completely manage my email at the office. The trick? I didn’t realize that gnus now has imap support! I just added the following to my .gnus file (the one at work, not the one I have posted here)
(setq gnus-select method '(nnimap "myexchangeserver"
(nnimap-expunge-on-close ask)
(nnimap-list-pattern ("INBOX" "Sent"))
(nnimap-address "myexchangeserver.my.domain.com")))
It still needs a bit of tweaking (splitting and all that sort of stuff) but at least it is now working! I can check my work e-mail with Gnus and it will leave the messages on the server if I so desire when I am finished. Why would I want to do that? Well, for one, it allows me to check my email from various locations and I don’t have to worry about saving my email file since the exchange server gets backup up nightly (it does get backed up nightly, doesn’t it????)
Played around a bit with setting up a PPP connection between my HP360 and my laptop. Made some headway, but I still can’t get a connection. Oh well, just one more thing to mess with.
I made some room on the server here and was able to transfer the video clips of the twins from Charlie’s webserver, where he was kind enough to let me store the files until I could find more space. ::Thank you, Charlie!:: Now, the twins page is updated with the new links, so you should be able to download the clips and view them!
“Do you listen?”
“huh?”
“Do you listen?”
“to what?”
“not what, who”
“who?”
“yes, who”
“who??”
“You know, them”
“them?”
“you know, the voices”
…
“ummm….”
“I didn’t think so.”
Spent the last two days almost exclusively at work trying to get Oracle to install on a Solaris8 box. After wrestling with this and not getting anywhere, I discovered that, out of the box, Oracle 8.1.7 is not exactly compatible with Solaris8. Solaris2.6, Solaris7, yes. 8, no. Hrmph… I’m sure I’m just missing a patch from Oracle or something. Instead of trying to hunt down the incompatibility (it has something to do with shared memory- and yes, I did re-tune the Solaris kernel to support Oracle), I decided to try and install Oracle 8.1.5 (I happened to have the CD in my cube, so why not?) 8.1.5 installed flawlessly! The database initialized and came right on line! So, I figured since that went so well, that I would just try and upgrade to 8.1.6 (so we get all the extra nifty little tools!)
06.03.01
Ronan and Keenan had a doctor’s appointment on Friday that didn’t exactly go as well as I had hoped. Before Ronan was born, the ultrasounds showed signs of fluid in one of his kidneys. We had hoped that it would go away (as did the doctors) but it seems to have gotten worse. On a scale from one to five, five being the worst, one of his kidneys is a two and the other a four. We now have appointments next week at Children’s Hospital to see a specialist and have both boys checked. They call it some sort of urinary-kidney-reflux thing. I can only hope that the doctors at Children’s can resolve this easily.
With all the attention on the twins lately, I decided I needed to spend some one on one time with Logan. We did a bit of running around saturday (including picking up a new futon for the basement- I threw out all the old furniture when we had the carpet replaced…oh yeah, I guess I’ve forgotten to mention that the carpet looks great! what a difference!) …anyway, we went to the movies and saw Shrek. Technically superior animation, a nice little storyline, and a whole lot of belly laughs! We had a great time! I think this is a movie that I will want to own when it comes out. Some of the humor was definitely geared towards adults and yes, it was obvious at times, but I can’t remember the last time we laughed so much at a movie!
So I have finally found a possible replacement for my beloved Newton. The HP 360LX that I bought off of Ebay arrived late last week and I have been playing with it ever since! First impressions: The keyboard is much better than I thought it would be- still it is a bit cramped, but it is manageable. The screen resolution is nice and crisp, making it easy to read documents and the paper-white backlight is amazingly bright! WindowsCE 2.0 isn’t all that bad. The latest ActiveSync product from micro$oft is very nice and syncs effortlessly with my windoze box at home. The machine can be a bit sluggish at times and I have managed to lock it up once or twice (or three times) but that was mainly due to not RTFM first. Go figure. At one point, I did manage to actually delete everything I had stored in it by mistyping a response to a boot message. The pcmcia slot is really nice, unfortunately, you need to be connected to the AC adapter to utilize it without sucking your batteries dry. I have already taken advantage of the compact flash slot -I found a forty-eight meg CF at Target’s for $42.50! Quite a nice price! So I snagged it and upped the ram in the HP to a total of 56 meg. Not bad for a handheld! First thing I installed on it: MicroEmacs for SH3. It’s nice, but not quite as robust as I would like. General Paranoyaxc Software have a great page with all sorts of gnu stuff for CE (including Perl and Gnu Emacs!!!) I’ve downloaded the files, and played a bit, but I think I will need to manually edit the registries to get the software to work. (but it will be worth it!) The next step, after I’ve gotten a bit more comfortable with the unit, I want to attempt load Linux on it! Of course I wanted to utilize a BSD (NetBSD has a port for SH3, but it is a very early attempt, and quite frankly, I think I have a better shot at getting Linux to load at this point.) I’ll keep you posted on that one.
Jeff, Journal | Jeff | 
June 20, 2001 9:19 pm | 
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