Author: Gerry

Family

Hiking and Sledding

With the couple of inches of snow we got overnight into today, I told the kids we’d go for a hike and then go sledding. They got snow shoes for Christmas so they were excited to get a chance to use them. Plus, we were going to a big hill for sledding, how much better could it get?

Of course, all of this stuff seems great in theory. The reality of it usually has some sort of snag that I foresee, but strategically choose to ignore. In this case, the hike throuh the snow is cool because of the snow shoes. Unfortunately, it takes time to get from point A to point B- and it’s tiring. The other tidbit I omitted was that long hills are great for sledding down- not so great for walking back up. Especially after a 20 minute hike to get to the hill.

The boy was excited enough that he didn’t complain at all. I even got a chance to reinforce the “awesomeness” of his snow shoes. There was a point where the new snow covered up some older snow so my feet sunk way down. I pointed this out to him and he was very satisfied in the knowledge that his snow shoes worked so well.

The lass was a slightly different story. She lagged behind and I ended up carrying her for the last third of the way to the hill. When we were done- she was really done. I held her hand and made her walk the whole way home. She was fighting back tears from fatigue and the effort of trudging through the snow.

The Wife was waiting for them when we got back. She even made some hot chocolate. I played with the dogs for awhile before I finally trudged back in the house myself.

A nice way to spend a morning.

Politics

Rats From a Sinking Ship

I’ve lost count, at this point, of the number of Congressmen whom have decidedto call it quits rather than run for re-election. Based on the rise of the TeaParty, the seeming public rejection of the President’s policy choices, and thecontinued decline in confidence of government (Congress in particular) it’s hardfor me not to conclude we’re witnessing the “git’n while the git’ns good.’

The ones that come next will be interesting. How capable as governors will theybe? My own opinion is that the destruction will have to be both deep and wide.Politicians currently being groomed, or those who have been waiting in the wingswill need to be flushed from the system if We-the-People are going to trulyreassert our role as the boss of our country.

Interesting times, to say the least.

Misc

Those Sun Life Commercials

Post author By Gerry
Post date February 14, 2010
No Comments on Those Sun Life Commercials

Who comes up with those commercials for Sun Life? What the hell are thesupposed to be proving? That Sun Life employs idiots and morons in theirmarketing department?

Really, other than that they are an insurance company, what do we get from thosecommercials? Crikey, even the people they talk with in THEIR commercials can’tstand them. Why should anyone else?

Methinks that heads need to roll. Starting with the two on those goons in theircommercials…

Misc

Concussion Update- 2 Weeks

Today being the 2-week recovery mark, I just thought I’d note my current condition related to the concussion.

I still have ringing in my ears, though it is greatly reduced from when it started. I’m can’t tell as yet, but there is clearly the opportunity for permanent hearing damage. I haven’t noticed anything in terms of volume, but I have noticed issues with higher frequency ranges. Sounds like “shh” or hissing, ‘s’ sounds there is definitely an effect.

As for pain, there basically isn’t any. Coughing and sneezing are fine. The only thing that bothers my head is popping my ears.

One thing I’ve wondered about, now that I’ve had the experience, is what it would have been like to suffer a concussion during football. I’m certain that, had I suffered this identical sort of event during a game, I would not have finished the game. But I am also certain I would have played the following week.

That’s where I wonder- how susceptible would I be to another one? How well would I have been able to handle playing? Would I even have given it a seconds thought? Remember, before accusing me of braggadocio, that wouldn’t have made me unique or special in any way. I can recall other guys who suffered concussions from repeated collison playing after a couple days rest. That’s just what was done.

I think about a guy like Muhammad Ali whom suffered multiple concussions over his career. Clearly, something I don’t want to aspire to. One is enough.

Yet, oddly, given slightly different circumstances I would have subjected myself to the opportunity for more without much thought.

Politics

Sen Ryan’s Budget

I don’t know if anyone is actually counting at this point, but I’ll just say that, in the absence of anything else to look at, I support his proposals. It sounds to me like he’s taken an honest shot at balancing the longterm Federal Budget. Frankly, I’m disappointed that more GOP politicians haven’t come out in support of it, or at least it’s aims. The GOP is supposed to show some fiscal common sense, meaning restraint. The fact that they aren’t getting behind this thing probably tells us where their motives truly lie.

Not that it was too difficult to discern before.

In a perfect world, the Democrats would give us something for comparisons sake. Since the GOP and Dems are all we have in Congress right now, I think it would be good to get a gauge for where these guys really want the country to go. My guess is the Democrats ideas are not anything I want to pursue. Regardless, I say put your cards on the table.

Until they’re willing to man-up, I think they’re criticisms are gutless bluster. For that matter, perhaps the fact that they haven’t come out with their own proposals means they don’t want to go there, for fear of what they perceive the electorate would think.

Misc

Got Milk?

Why is it that milk tastes best after fresh-out-of-the-oven chocolate chip cookies, warm brownies and ice cream?

I’m particularly curious about ice cream. I mean, a glass of water doesn’t satisfy. Plus, obviously, ice cream is made of milk.

Maybe it’s better not to know…

Computers

Building xpdf for Debian

For whatever reason, xpdf has disappeared from the Debian testing repository. It’s a nuisance since it seems to be the best combination of fast and usable among the various non-adobe pdf readers. It appears that a version has been reintroduced to sid, but it’s been awhile now and I wanted a working pdf reader.

So I opted to build it from source.

Tags amd64, debian, squeeze, testing, xpdf

Family

Somthing Happened There

I’m just not sure what.

We were driving up to the Y for the lass’s dance class and the boy was merrily trucking along with his counting. He got to around 240 or so and then he stopped. The lass had distracted him. He went to start counting again, but he forgot where he was at.

Then he started to cry.

Not big crocodile tears, but more of a distressed and whiney “I can’t remember where I was.” I checked in the rear view mirror and he was visibly distraught.

Yes, over numbers.

Now, my first instinct is to point out the ridiculousness of his reaction. It’s numbers… and counting. But some part of my brain checked my mouth and instead I just calmly counciled him to calm down. That getting so upset wasn’t going to help. The part of my brain that had checked my initial reaction further engaged and basically turned my mouth off. Instead, I just sat and observed.

For about another minute or so, he continued with his agony of trying to remember what number. Somewhere along the way, I started thinking “Just pick a number and count from there,” but I continued to stay silent.

Then, he did. In a tearful voice he said “Two-hundred-fifty” and he continued counting from there. By the time he reached 260, his agony was gone and he was back to counting as if nothing had happened. He stopped at 299 because he hadn’t figured out the pattern yet.

I filled in the blank: “300.”

He picked up from there and continued. As we neared the Y’s parking lot, he hit 399. He paused, and then said “Four-hundred” and continued counting until I pulled into a parking spot. As I turned off the car he exclaimed “Dad, I know what comes next. When I get to 419, then it will be 500.”

I chose not to quibble about the details, as I’m sure his excitement had addled his speech somewhat. Like I said, I’m convinced that he had some sort learning moment for himself; but beyond the events, I couldn’t really describe what it might have been. For that matter, I may have stumbled across some sort of wisdom related to child rearing. It’ll be interesting to see if I recognize the circumstances again sometime.

Football

‘Aints NO More!!

I just wanted dibs on the title. More thoughts in a few minutes…

OK. Postgame thoughts in no particular order:

Not the best Super Bowl ever (still the Giants-Bills), but an excellent game from the 2 best regular seasons teams. Well worth watching until the end.
I was happy to be wrong about this. Oddly, though, the game went like I thought it would, except reversed! The Colts started fast and petered out and the Saints just kept on keeping on. I was expecting that kind of game flow, but the roles to be reversed.
Best quarterbacking in a Super Bowl that I can remember. I know Manning threw the interception at the end, but until then it really seemed like both QB’s had command of the game.
The onside kick to open the 2nd half by the Saints has to be the best coaching call ever. Totally, completely unexpected. It pretty much ensures that no head coach will ever leave a Super Bowl locker room without reminding his team to watch for the onside kick.
I thought the 2-point conversion was a little early- missing it meant that Colts could win with 2 field goals and there were still 6 minutes or so to go. I think it’s one of those calls that was vindicated by subsequent events.
Another call vindicated (somewhat) by subsequent events was the 4th down call by the Saints at the end of the 1st half. I actually liked the call to go for it, but hated the play call. The tightend is always open down there. Always.
I’m glad that the Saints won a Super Bowl, but really, the whole “How important is this to the city of N’Ollins?” bit is tiring. A football team winning a Super Bowl isn’t going to change the world or a city. 3 years from now, know one will even remember it. I know, now I’m just being racist…
Not so much Super Bowl related- but my guess is that was Peyton’s swan song, so to speak. That team has a ton of games on their shoulders and after the season they had, this one is going to hurt. They’ll continue to be competitive, but I’ll be surprised if Manning makes it to another Super Bowl.

That’ll do. Congrats to the Saints. Once again, I’m not sure how I’ll make it through the next few months worth of sports seasons. They just suck when compared to the football season.

6 months to go for next season…

Family

A Halftime Covnersation

Wife: Who’s doing the halftime show?

Me: Who’s doing the halftime show.

Wife: Right, who’s doing the halftime show?

Me: That’s what I said, Who’s doing the halftime show.

Wife: (Finally glances at TV and hears “Teenage Wasteland” playing.) OHhhh… (Makes a move to whack me.)

Me: (Wagging finger, then point to head) Concussion.

Wife: Yeah, not enough.

Maybe we should take it on the road…

Football

Super Prediction

I’m sure y’all have been waiting anxiously for my annual Super Bowl predictions(disregard the fact that this is my first Super Bowl since I started blogging- all my previous Super Bowl predictions have been dead on accurate. Honest…)

Ahem, basically, after all the hoopla over who’s playing, who isn’t, who has the better coaching, who has the better experience, blah, blah, blah, this game comes down to one simple fact: the Colts haven’t lost when Manning has been on the field in the 4th quarter this year. I think the Saints can win if they play from in front. I think they have to be leading in the 4th quarter to have a shot. But even then, the Colts can still win. Additionally, the Colts ca (and will, if they do) win playing in front the whole game. That’s two paths to victory against one. Sorry Saints.

I’ll be rooting for a Saints win, but my head says they can’t.

Final score, 27-17 and Manning wins MVP.

Computers

apt-mirror Update

The download took all night. It ended a little after 7 this morning, which pegs it at about 14 hours to download 65GB. My internet connection is a 10Mbit cable line, so there’s a bench mark of sorts.

When I embarked on this little project, my goal was to come up with a way to force apt-cacher-ng to update all of its cache on a schedule. For the native machine/architecture all that is required is to schedule an apt-get update which can be done by enabling it in the apt config files. But I couldn’t figure out how to force the same thing for a foreign architecture (ie- for another computer running i386 based stuff) so the files would already exist on the network.

The more I thought about it, I realized there wasn’t any bandwidth savings to be had because, though both machines run debian/testing, they both required different sets of package files because of the different architectures. Therefore, anything I was doing was going to be for creating a more convenient update process by having the files already present on the local network. The apt-mirror package isn’t ideal since it downloads an entire repository for a debian branch rather than caching and updating just the packages I need. However, it’s better than a full-blown mirror and, once it’s initially setup, the downloading is merely a matter of updating the local repository. In the end, it seemed like the best compromise.

Tags apt, debian

Computers

apt-mirror

Prior to the server mobo dieing I had been using apt-cacher-ng to minimize internet traffic. The setup worked well since both my EEE and my server were running i386 packages from the testing distribution.

With the new mobo in the server, all the packages are amd64 based packages. Thus, I’m not really gaining any advantages with apt-cacher since different packages are going to the two computers. So I’m trying out the apt-mirror package since it can be configured to download packages for different architectures.

Since it’s a mirror as opposed to a caching application, it’s downloading all of the packages related to testing for both i386 and amd64. I started it about 5:15PM. The download size is ~65GB. It’s still downloading.

More later… once this step is complete.

Tags apt, debian

arm Embedded

ARM Cross-Compiler

With the new server, I had to rebuild my cross compiler for arm projects. Luckily, such a thing is documented reasonably well over at gnuarm.com so I was able to get things moving along without too much fuss. Although it took a little doing to find the right combination of versions to compile properly. I’m not sure why the most up-to-date stuff doesn’t work as expected, but there it is.

Tags arm-elf-gcc, toolchain

Computers

EEE Framebuffer

The other day I was debugging my awesome configuration and I zooted it. I had missed a comma in a table and the Lua stuff puked on me and awesome stopped working. So I went and dropped into a tty console to fix the problem.

Except my tty console was blank!

I tried all 6 of them and they were all blank. I was able to fix the configuration problem using other means, but I resolved to investigate where my tty consoles had gone.

Tags debian, gfxpayload, grub2

Misc

Slip Update

My ears have been ringing for the past few days. Still hurts my head to sneeze and cough. It also hurts if I do something like “popping” my ears; pain is in the front above the eyes. Still have the mild dizziness.

I saw my chiropractor and basically all the progress that had been made on correcting my neck is gone. My C5 is pushed back and is almost touching C6. He’s kind of a funny guy- he gets excited when he gets to see something new and different from a patient. He’s all revved up to fix my neck… again.

Family

Tooth #5

The boy lost his fifth tooth tonight. It’s the other top front one. Yes, he looks hilarious when he smiles; no, he can’t pronounce words like “thistle” properly.

He said another one of his teeth is loose as well. At this rate, we’ll need to put him on a liquid diet. The Tooth Fairy is racking up huge frequent flyer miles.

The lass is a little tired of the spectacle. She wants to start losing her teeth NOW. I’d rather not think about how far she’s willing to go to get there…

Misc

Bourne Ultimatum

One of the cable channels has been showing “The Bourne Ultimatum” all weekend. I’d already seen it, but I watched it again because it’s so well done. In particular, the fight scene between Bourne and Desh has to be in the top 10 of movie fight scenes.

Unlike Jet Li type stuff, which is spectacular but ultimately unbelievable because of obvious wire work, or Dark Knight type stuff, which is more believable but the camera work is so phrenetic that it’s impossible to see what’s happening, the Bourne fight scenes have an authentic feel to them. The blows are quick and precise and done in full view of the audience. Further, the ebb and flow of the fight as each combatant alternates between defense and attack fluidly is breathtaking.

I’m hard pressed to think of a better movie fight scene.

Family Misc

Random Notes

I haven’t mentioned it for awhile now, but the blog client I’d written about is actually functional code now. I’ve been blogging with it for about a month and it works consistently. For me anyway. I’ve been meaning to do a write up on it and make the code available, but I held off because there are still a few thing bothering me about it. I’ve actually rectified one of those things as of today, but there are still a couple of other items I’d like to chew on a little longer before I do anything further with it.

I’ve assembled the last drawer and fit it to the cabinet. I haven’t had a chance to install the drawerslide clips on it yet. The dovetailing on this last one is by far the best of the three. Perhaps a little later this week I’ll be able to get some picture up. All that’s left now is to put a top-surface together, then finish it and the bottom half will be completed. Work on the top half will start quickly thereafter.

My server is basically back up and running now. Interestingly, to me anyway, I have fewer packages installed on it now than I did before. The only things I have left to install are apache and wordpress for local blogging. Performance is noticably better than the old system and the 64-bit flavor of Linux seems to perform just fine, thank you very much.

Also on the computer front, I installed a 1.5 TB drive on the Wife’s PC. NTFS snarfed up over 100G of it though. That seemed a little egregious to me, but the computer recognizes it and it’s for backup, so I’m not going to try and go any further with it.

Last, and far from least, a belated Happy Birthday to the lass. She turned 4 this past week. Her favorite gift is the camera her grandparent’s got her. It takes 1.3 megapixel pictures and had some fun effects she can enable with the push of a button. No removable media for it- everything has to be pulled off via USB. She also likes the dollhouse. Finally she has a place to use her princess dolls. She also likes the special book from her other grandparents. She was delighted to find out she was the main character in a book.

With that, so ends January. 11 more to go…

Misc

Concussion Blogging- 36 hours later

Post author By Gerry
Post date January 31, 2010
2 Comments on Concussion Blogging- 36 hours later

I muffed the name of one of the boys friends at his learn-to-skate session today. It’s hard not to conclude that my memory was affected in a minor way by the blow. It’s possible that I’m being overly sensitive to the situation, but I don’t normally makes these kind of mistakes with such frequency.

I still have the mild sense of disorientation. Painwise, there is a dull ache where my head and neck meet when I lift my head to look up. I’m guessing that my head shifted forward from the force of the blow. I found out it hurts to sneeze- mainly behind my eyes. I suspect coughing would be similarly uncomfortable.

I drove today for the first time since without any ill-effects. There will be a better test tomorrow when I take the lass to here dance class at the Y. I’ll take the opportunity to swing a racquet while I’m there, see if there’s any surprises for me in that regard.

From this point, I’ll only post on this topic as I notice improvements or other possibly related symptoms. More normal topics to follow shortly…