Well, I’ve been through the routine enough now to know that I don’t really like it.
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Author: Gerry
Well, for now anyway.
I left it out yesterday and one of the kids must have dropped it or stepped on it. I went to power it up last night and the screen has a big spider crack through it. I can see enough to tell that it boots properly but, alas, it is completely unusable beyond that.
I can’t really blame anyone but myself for this one. I should have known better than to leave it where I did. I’ll be ordering a replacement screen today and attempting to fix it.
Add this to the sourdough starter that can’t start and the gardens that the dogs tore up and I’m sincerely hoping we’re done with this sort of disappointment…
UPDATE: Add 1 trackball to the steadily growing list.
I’m in the schedule for a new batch of whole log firewood. At least I’ll having something to do in my spare time…
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The REAL First Day of School
When school started for the Lass last week, things went so smoothly that the moment barely registered on the event scale. Enter the long holiday weekend and now it’s “School- The Return!” Upon arrival today, I counted no less than 5 puffy faced urchins pining for the days of old when they didn’t have to deal with the whole “school” thing. One poor boy was dead set in not letting Mom leave without him. Also, the air of “smooth-running-machine” was gone. Instead, you basically had teachers flailing around looking to pull wrenches out of the works. Suffice to say, a rough morning.
Thankfully, the Lass was a sea of tranquility amongst the chaos. She even remembered her little kaleidoscope for sharing this morning. She happily chirped a goodbye as she toddled off into the next room to see what she could get involved in.
At least this part of dealing with her has been easy. So far…
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A Day at the Beach
It’s funny how life throws curve balls.
We’ve been going to the same beach with the kids for the past couple of years. Once of the reasons for going to this particular beach is that the surf is pretty gentle. It’s not my cup of tea- I’d prefer stuff a little more substantial for body surfing and what not. But if getting the kids to enjoy the ocean is the goal, then smaller surf is the order of the day.
So naturally, on this day, probably our last visit to the beach this year, the surf is rough. Ironically, the Wife and I were having a conversation on the way down alluding to the possibility of exposing the kids to rougher surf next summer. At that point, the idea of larger waves intrigued the boy but he was glad he wouldn’t have to deal with them for awhile.
Like I said, life throws curve balls.
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Debian and Xserver
Well- I can only surmise that someone “discovered” a bug in the Xserver. I say this because after updating my desktop the other day, I could not launch my window manager(awesome) using “startx.” Since updates have crashed it(the WM, that is) before, I started there and after about an hour I concluded that the WM was not the problem. It seemed that my WM initialization scripts were not getting run and there was a path problem. Subsequent investigation revealed that an out-of-date script was being used.
Very puzzling, since I hadn’t changed anything. I continued to poke around and double and triple checked my ~/.xsession file. Then I discovered that my .xsession file was not being used at all! It turns out that, way back when I had started using my current WM, I had setup an ~/.xinitrc file which also launched my WM but used the stock init script. I recall migrating to the .xsession file shortly thereafter and have had no trouble since. Well, until last night.
Apparently, the Xserver now checks for a .xinitrc file and runs it if found and does not bother with the .xsession file. I came to this conclusion because after deleting the .xinitrc file from my home directory, awesome launched without issue.
Ah well- no harm, no foul.
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Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble
Possible captions:
- “I don’t know what happened doc. I was sitting there eating my oatmeal, then I sneezed…”
- “This is your brain on flour.”
The sourdough starter. Yum.
Well, not the starter itself- rather, what you can do with such a starter. This one is in its third day. They are usually ready after day 4 and this one looks to be right on schedule. Including the lovely smell of fermenting apples or fruit.
This one started life as 2 parts water, 1 part rye flour, 1 part white flour. No yeast. They just seem to invite themselves after a day or so. The rye flour is supposed to be good for developing yeast. After a day, I add 1 part white flour and 1 part water. Did the same thing tonight. I’ll do it again tomorrow. And the next day, I’ll bake.
But that will be another post.
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What are the Eagles Thinking?
Back in this post I made what seemed, to me anyway, the fairly obvious point that Michael Vick’s potential future success would not involve play at quarterback. Well, in checking in at ESPN periodically it appears that the Eagles are bound and determined to make me eat crow. Apparently, he is practicing as QB and looks to be McNabb’s backup. My immediate reaction to this was… are they mad?
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How to Fix a Rear Car Window
I had forgotten that the lass had managed to break the rear window of our Highlander this past Friday. Now by break I don’t mean threw-a-rock-into-the-window-causing-daddy’s-head-to-explode kind of break. I mean more in the hey-I’m-pushing-the-button-for-the-window-and-it-nothing-is-happening-BANG!
Ahem- sorry ’bout that.
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Bruce Lee Whole Wheat Bread
My intention was to make this bread recipe. I had everything more or less ready to go and then I realized something crucial- I’d used whole wheat flour instead of white whole wheat flour. A fairly serious problem for white whole wheat bread. So, I did the logical thing- I improvised.
Here is the resulting recipe:
- 6 cups whole wheat flour
- 3 cups water
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 1/2 stick (1/4 cup) unsalted butter
- 1 tbsp salt
- 1 tbsp yeast
You should be able to cut the recipe in half across the board for a smaller loaf.
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The Lass’s First Day
She was so excited, we had to wake her up in order to get her going this morning.
She came down and after the Wife had gotten her dressed I asked her why she was all dressed up. She replied “‘Cause I’m going to school! Silly Dad.” Yep, that’s about the size of it.
We all left- the boy accounted well for himself. No pushing or shoving or trying to grab the limelight. As for the Lass, it went about as I figured. You see- she’s been watching big brother do this for 2 years so she’s got it down COLD. We brought her up to the classroom where she let Mom take a picture of her next to a little classroom mural thing. Then she went and deposited her backpack where it was supposed to be. Finally, she sat down at a table, pulled a piece of paper her way and started coloring. And that was it. No worries.
We watched her for a few minutes, during which she invited other kids to come and color with her. Most of them were not nearly as sure of the whole situation as she was. We left before circle time because clearly, we didn’t need to be there any longer. A quick kiss “GoodBye!” and we were off- myself to the Y with the Boy for a little racquetball practice and the Wife back to the house for work.
When I picked her up just prior to lunch her teacher told me that she did just fine. She was happy and easy to deal with. I told her that I figure in about 3 weeks she’ll be bored with the whole thing and the teacher nodded in agreement. That’s the usual. As for the Lass, she liked her time there but was disappointed she didn’t get to go play on the playground outside.
I told her not to worry, she had plenty more days to get outside and play.
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Dad vs the Boy
Saturday was a long day. We went to the mall to take care of eyeglasses for the Wife and then I had a trip to my alma mater for a retirement party for my former track coach. The mall was sort of on the way, so we took separate cars to get there and out first stop was LensCrafters.
The kids were barely controllable. The boy in particular was difficult. Climbing under tables, competing for the same empty chair (when there were other empty chairs to steps away), running through the store dipping and dodging other patrons- these were the order of the moment. Tensions began building quickly as a number of countermeasures were employed attempting to arrest the obnoxiousness. Multiple trips into the main mall area and to the bathroom, as well as distraction techniques and threats of punishment provided only temporary respites. The problem is that getting new eye glasses takes a long time and the kids patience level is not that long. Not even close.
When things get busy around here, clearly something has to give and writing to the blog is one of them. The irony is that when things are busy- there’s lots of potential material for blogging topics. So now that I have a little time, I get to play catch-up from memory. The flipside is perhaps the delay is a good thing. It acts as a sort of filter where the impulse to write about every little thing gets dulled so that every little thing doesn’t end up enshrined on a webpage.
Friday was a busy day, it was the lad’s 3rd day of school, and the lass had an ice cream social at her soon to be school that night. Personally, I had the excitement of a pending reunion of sorts along with a guaranteed Whale siting. More on that in another post.
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Testing 1..2
There’s a bunch of things that have happened over the last couple of days. The first of which I’ll mention is that I’ve gone “live” with this thing. I’ve been writing to it for the past month or so at home, just to see if it was something I’d even keep up with. I’ve not only kept up with it- I’ve actually found that I enjoy it. Coupled with the fact that I’ve had some interest in creating a web domain to tinker with and learn from, it was pretty much a cinch to take that step.
This site is hosted by hostmonster. I signed up on Friday and I was able to transfer all my current posts and settings to the site on Saturday. So I now have a duplicate site here at home. For the time being, I’ll continue to post to both my local site and the online site for further testing and backup. The blog itself is generated using the WordPress publishing platform.
So, to whoever the first visitors might be, welcome. I won’t be posting about politics, at least not to any kind of note worthy degree. I will be posting about things in my life- kids (see the blog title), woodworking, electronics, football, and anything else that I think I have an interesting perspective on.
And with that, time to move on to more interesting topics.
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Debian Grub2
Awhile back I upgraded to grub2 on my EEE. It looks to be a pretty drastic rewrite from the original, based on all the config files in the boot directory. Anyway, I had the bootup sequence running in 800×600 mode with the original grub because it was a little easier to monitor the screen with the smaller font- the screen doesn’t scroll as quickly. The upgrade to grub2 changed how to configure the terminal mode.
For now, add “set gfxpayload=800×600” to the grub.cfg file in the boot directory. This is the simplest way to do it. Unfortunately, anytime update-grub is run, this setting is lost. Ultimately the config files in /etc/default and /etc/grub.d will need to be modified so the gfxpayload setting will get sucked into grub.cfg when update-grub is run.
Incidentally, the old “vga=788” setting still works but it generates a warning during the boot because its been deprecated. I hate that. Thus I had to go and figure out how to get rid of it with the gfxpayload setting. For those interested, put the vga setting in the /etc/default/grub file as part of the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT.
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Synaptics Touchpad Driver
It turns out that once the synaptics driver is working, there are many configurable options available. See the synaptics man page. I did a little tweaking and I’ll be test driving the edge-scrolling capabilities. I also tweaked the pointer motion- that would be MaxSpeed, MinSpeed and AccelFactor. The motion is a little easier to deal with now. Use synclient (man synclient) to tinker with settings live.
Still keeping an eye out for lost tap detection as noted earlier. No problems so far.
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EEE 900 Touchpad
As I’ve remarked here previously, I have Debian installed on my EEE. I keep it uptodate with the testing releases, which means I currently have Squeeze running here. One of the minor annoyances I’ve had with it is the accidental taps on the touchpad while typing- which causes the cursor to unexpectedly jump to a new point and creates a hassle when typing.
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Kindergarten- Day 1
The bus showed up at about 10 to 12 to pick him up. No tearful goodbyes, no running away. He just got up on the bus and he was off to school. No muss, no fuss. I spent the rest of the afternoon with the lass. We played Candyland, ran the dogs a little, played with dinosaurs, then went to the park. When we came home, the Wife was already waiting for the bus.
When the bus finally did go by, the Wife laughed and said “I think he was sleeping!” Sure enough, the bus pulled up, and the driver informed us that someone would have to wake him up- he was out like a light. The Wife took care of it and to his credit, he got up and walked off the bus himself. He wasn’t too happy about falling asleep but by the end of the day I think we’d convinced him it wasn’t something to be ashamed of.
After he unwound for a little we went into the pool and played there for awhile. After dinner, he talked to both sets of Grandparents to tell them about his first day and the bus trip. And that was the day. Just 180 or so more to go…
And now the countdown starts for the lass, whom will start her pre-K next week.
Well, Dog#1 has infected anal sacks. The treatment consists of pills and borderline humiliation for dog- an Elizabethan Collar to keep her from cleaning the area. Also, I have to put a warm compress on her rear twice a day- always nice with the morning coffee.
The collar is miserable for the dog less for looks than because she can’t maneuver anywhere without getting it caught on something- like each step as she tries to climb them, or a chair, or your leg, or well you get the picture. For a normally lithe and graceful animal, it just doesn’t work. We didn’t sleep much because she was up constantly during the night trying to get comfortable. 9 days to go…
Ted Kennedy passed away last night. I mention this not because I’m an admirer of the man but because it is the end of an era and noteworthy.
The Boy has his first day of afternoon Kindergarten today. Not sure how we’ll pass the time ’til the bus comes but I’m sure we’ll manage. More on this later.
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Summer Vacation's Last Day
This is it- the last day before school starts for the boy. It’ll be punctuated tonight with a little teacher-to-be sponsored ice cream party at the school. Not sure how we’ll spend it but the weather is nice right now. It’s almost like a taunt- “Ha ha- this is what summer weather is really like, too bad your summer is over.”
The countdown starts…