Author: Gerry

Misc

Concussion Blogging

It’s roughly 36 hours after I got my concussion. Yesterday morning was easily the worst day. I didn’t sleep well through the night and the combination of that plus the injury having occured only 18 hours previous resulted in a nasty headache. I wasn’t much good for anything save laying on the couch, trips to the sink for water and trips to the bathroom for taking a leak (pardon my bluntness).

Finally, about mid afternoon yesterday, I was managed to get some decent sleep. When I woke up I felt much improved- the headache being mostly gone. A minor feeling of dizziness cropped up if I moved my head to quickly, otherwise I felt OK.

My brother called to see how I was doing. I didn’t know who it was for the first several seconds. I saw hiw fiance’s name on caller ID, but didn’t recognize it, and then didn’t recognize his voice. It was a surreal feeling since this person on the other end of the phone KNEW what had happened and was asking me questions about it. He was talking to me like he’d known me his whole life as well. Weird. Then recognition finally struck. The world was set to right once again.

In addition, that morning I had forgotten the name of my nephew. I dismissed that as a brain fart when it happened, but after the experience with my brother it’s hard to dismiss the 800-pound gorilla in the room.

Today I’m feeling even better. The slight feeling of dizziness remains- but no headache. The back of my head does have a tender spot, but it’s minimal. I’m now convinced that, contrary to my original impressions, I was outcold for several minutes after the blow to my head. The fact that my head has no lump and minimal physical tenderness (lieing on ice would have been instant first aid), that my hands were chilled with snow on them when I woke up (but my hands were up in the air), and the fact the timeline doesn’t make complete sense to me without a period of unconsciousness lead me to the conclusion.

Hopefully the mild dizziness will be all but gone after tonight. More tomorrow.

Computers

Debian EEE Touchpad and udev

Post author By Gerry
Post date January 29, 2010
No Comments on Debian EEE Touchpad and udev

My touchpad stopped working the other day on the EEE. I had’t the faintest clue as to why. The kernel had updated to 2.6.32-trunk and I knew that wasn’t the cause. When that update happened, I specifically tested the touchpad to make sure the synaptics driver was recognized.

Luckily, there is the DebianEEEWiki.

I remembered that the Xserver had indeed been updated, but at the time I didn’t note any of the details. So I checked on the version that’s running and sure enough its 1.7. So apparently the new and improved way is to use udev.

Well, I entered the the example file, with my own modifications of course, and still didn’t get any love. So I shutdown X and restarted it. Still nothing. I restarted udev, even though I know it’s unnecessary, and still nothing. Finally I shut things down and went to bed. Trouble shooting while dealing with a concussion is not a good combination.

Tonight I fired it up and the touchpad is working fine. Don’t know what service or daemon needed to be restarted, but apparently the reboot got it. Back to normal EEE use. At least I don’t have to muck with it any further.

Tags synaptics

Family

A Mild Concussion

During the course of tackling my chores yesterday, I slipped on a patch of snow covered ice and fell. The fall wasn’t one of those pinwheeling-arms-try-to-regain-balance types of falls. It was one instant I’m walking, the next I’m looking straight up at the sky. I remember landing on my back and then my head snapping down onto the ice, bouncing and then coming down again.

One instant, I was looking at white flakes and grey skies, the next everything was black.

Family

A Long Night

The boy went to bed a little warm last night. I speculated that he may just be tired. He didn’t eat real well at dinner either- he forced himself to eat more than he wanted because he was worried that he would get the pasta again today. He isn’t a big fan of pasta. Unfortunately, he’s smart enough to know he can play the “I’m full” card if he doesn’t like something. Our only counter measure is, if we suspect he is still hungry but just doesn’t want to eat what’s in front of him, to serve the meal again the next day.

So about 1:30 he got sick. He dealt well with it. The Wife saw him back to bed after about 15 minutes.

About a half-hour later, the Wife disappeared into the bathroom. Shortly afterwards she got sick. She came to bed a little after that.

The boy got sick again around 3 or so. I stayed up with him until he was ready to go to bed. Again, he was a trooper- dealing with the unpleasantness as best he could. He was trying to understand why he kept getting sick. I just told him it happens to everyone and all he could do was get through it. He finally went back to bed about 3:30.

The Wife then got sick a couple more times shortly after that. I was up with her until she was steady enough to make it back to bed.

So the lass and I escaped the night unscathed. The lass in particular, since she slept through everything.

The Wife is still sleeping. The boy came down around 8 this morning- very late for him. He’s hanging in there, but his stomach still isn’t quite right and his head hurts a little too. The lass is at school- she was nice a chipper. Just the sort of remedy for a long night.

On to the long day.

Computers

Almost There

The process of completing the upgrade of the computer is mostly tedious. I’ll note here that I whiffed a little in my archiving the configuration from the old server. I should have just grabbed all of /var since that’s where the user crontab files are kept, among other useful things. That’s not a huge loss, but it fits in with the general theme of tedium.

Football

Vikings-Saints

This is ridiculous. Why don’t these guys just do rock-papers-scissors or something to determine possession? It seems like every 3rd play someone puts the ball on the ground.

Oh- and that’s a touchdown. Clearly crossed the goalline. 28-21 Saints when we come back from commercial.

UPDATE: HOLY CRAP!!! What the hell was THAT?!?!

A little of that “Favre Magic” I guess.

A “huge mistake” says Troy Aikman. Yeah, I’ll nominate that for understatement of the decade. OT here we come.

UPDATE II: The ~~‘Aints~~ Saints are going to the Super Bowl, 31-28. Wow.

No complaining about Favre not getting it in OT. The game shouldn’t even have gone to OT. No way Favre retires now. Not with that as his last throw.

The two best teams from the regular season make it. I like the potential for this Super Bowl already. We’ll see what happens in two weeks.

Family

Late Breaking News

The boy has lost his first front tooth. The left one.

I told him that now he looked like a hockey player. He promptly pursed his lips and whistled and triumphantly exclaimed he could still do it.

Hopefully the Tooth Fairy can still arrive on such short notice…

Football

Jets-Colts

Well, at least we don’t have to worry about a Jets Super Bowl. I wasn’t so sure early on, but the Colts really came through in the 2nd half here.

If Caldwell is smart, he’ll tell everyone it was his plan all along to unleash the Jets on the AFC Playoff landscape and them beat them in the Championship. It’s never to early to start building the “smarter-than-the-rest-of-the-world” mystique, a la Bill Belichik. Plus, Manning only has so many years left- might as well take advanage of it while he can.

Now if the Saints can handle the Vikings, we’ll really have something to look forward to.

Computers

That was FUN

The new computer mobo is an M4A785-M from Asus. It got lots of good reviews. I outfitted it with 4G RAM and an AMD Phenom X4 9750. My upgrade procedure ended up being theorietically straightforward- preserve as much of my config as possible in the my home folder and then just do a net install from a USB drive. I used rsync to archive all of root, etc, usr/local, and var/lib.

Misc

Animal Games

We have 2 African Grey parrots in addition to the 2 dogs and cat. Our second dog is a 2 year old German Shepherd with tons of energy. He is fascinated by the parrots.

Well, as of this morning the parrots have figured out how to leverage that fascination into entertainment for themselves. They will go to the bottom of the cage and taunt the dog by hopping around and flapping there wings a little. The dog then charges the cage, which results in me barking at the dog to stop charging cage.

The Greys did this 3 times in quick succession this morning. The Wife and I both realized the Grey’s manipulations after the second time.

Until I can get the dog to stop responding to their taunts, the Greys will continue to get their entertainment.

Politics

Healthcare

In the wake of the Brown victory, I’ve been reading as much progressive commentary as I can trying to get a sense of their interpetations. Interestingly, most of them seem to have taken the stance of not caring to divine voter thinking. The almost unanimous opinion is pass the bill and voter opinion will sort itself out. They believe that this is what leaders do and that Republicans have set precedents for this behavior that establish that the costs of action will not be as great as current perceptions appear.

Family

Heh, um…oops

So the kids’ jackets and backpacks are lying in heaps on the floor by the coat rack. I asked them to clean them up:

“Come one guys, how often do I have to ask you to clean this stuff up?”

As I finished my question I walked around the corner and there, on the floor, is my racquetball bag. Its been there since Monday.

The kids are kind of looking at me. So I reached down, picked up the bag and told them:

“Even I’m guilty of it sometimes. But I’m the Dad and I’m allowed to be guilty.”

I’m sure they noted the distinction.

Bread

Sourdough Bread

I finally managed to develop a non-rye starter. I didn’t put any rye flour in it. The only thing I can figure is that current house conditions disproportionally favored the rye yeast. With my starter in hand, I was finally able to make my favorite sourdough recipe.

Politics

Today’s Election

Alright, this really isn’t my cup of tea, or joe, but I figured I’d offer some thoughts about today’s election. First, yes, I am hoping for a Scott Brown victory. No, I won’t believe it until the last vote is counted, and the last legal proceeding is dropped.

Family

A Weekend On Ice

The lass finally got her long standing Winter wish. She went ice skating. Twice, in fact. The second time on her own skates. Don’t think she doesn’t know what THAT means.

The weather here broke a little this weekend and it was actually pleasant to be outside in less that full blown Arctic gear. So, in a bid to give the kids a little something different to think about, we took them ice skating outdoors at the Kennedy Plaza in Providence.

They offer rental skates there and the thought of sticking her feet in a pair of skates that some other toddler had stuck their sweaty peds into didn’t phase her one bit. She was going to skate. On ice. With Mom and her brother. Sweaty kid’s feet be damned.

Football

Cowboys-Vikings Thoughts

I won’t say I’m totally surprised here. With the way the ‘Boys had been playing, they were due for a let down. Be that as it may, I still held out more hope than not they’d win so count me as disappointed.

Here’s a predicted theme for the postgame coverage (coming from someone who only caught a few minutes of the game in the 2nd quarter and then just checked the score in the 4th, 27-3 Vikings- so I’ve heard none of the game commentary): the Viking’s defense will talk about how they felt disrespected because nobody talked about them and how good they are for the past week. All the focus was on the Cowboy’s defense and how good they’d been. Blah blah blah.

Just wait, you’ll see.

UPDATE: Ah, there it is. Right from the Coach’s mouth. That was just the first article I read as well.

Bread

Sweet Bread

Portugese sweet bread is one of my favorite breads. It has a signature combination of flavor, crust and texture that all work just right together. I’ve made it a number of times so I know the basics. Normally, the key ingredients are 1 cup of sugar, 5 (or so) eggs, and scalded milk. I wanted to try and create my own version of sweet bread using honey. What follows is my first attempt and a critique of the results.

Computers

Memory Problem

I started getting things together for the big upgrade last night. Put the heatsink on the CPU, unpacked the power supply, copied configuration files to the my home directory. I’ve put together a Debian network install image on a USB stick as well. I even tried doing a test, with seemingly mixed results.

Family

One Step Forward…

… one step back. First, the step forward.

One thing that we’ve are trying to instill into the boy (and the lass) is that while mistakes should be avoided if possible, they are still going to happen and when they do what matters is how he deals with the mistake. One simple, and fairly insignificant, example is spills.

When he spills something, he tends to freeze up and get REALLY mad. To the point where he won’t respond to polite suggestions that all he has to do is clean up the mess. I don’t know if this response is typical of children his age or if it’s a trait that’s his and he’ll have to work on his whole life. Regardless the mechanism, we’re working to teach him a preferrable way.

Football

On Pete Carroll

The football world has been abuzz for the past several days about Pete Carroll leaving USC to go to the Seattle Seahawks. Most of the opinions have a bewildered tone to them and they all seem to be, at best, skeptical that he’ll be successful there.

Someone I know who has a somewhat unique perspective of the football landscape made a statement about stuff like this awhile back. I guess we’ll get a chance to see how accurate those thoughts are. The gist is that we should expect USC to get some sanctions and or penalties for recruiting violations and Carroll left in order to avoid having to deal with said sanctions and an almost certain decline in talent.

Given the unexpected nature of Carroll’s resignation, I’d say it certainly seems plausible. Stay tuned.