Minutae

The lack of substantial posts does not represent a lack of goings on.  With 2 kids, 2 dogs, 2 birds, a cat and a wife there is plenty to keep me occupied.  Throw on top of this all the projects that are being juggled or are in the planning stages and there is plenty of potentially interesting topics to come.  For the moment, however, there are just a lot of little things that kind of add up to a decent mish-mash of stuff that I suppose is worthy of posting in one spot.  I’m still feeling this whole thing out and I’m trying to prevent myself from falling into the “I’ve got to post something” trap.  Then again, perhaps this post is evidence that I went in to the trap head first…

The screen for the EEE is on order.  Unfortunately, it won’t be here until Monday so there are not tales to tell there.  It continues to sit in it sorry state of half-disassembly, waiting for the king’s horses and king’s men to put it together again.  In other computer news, I’ve updated the filesystems on my desktop to ext4.  I had also done it on my EEE prior to the breakage.  The process is well documented out on the web.  I will offer one piece of insight related to this that was not available to me.  If, like me, you chose to give certain folders their own partition to mount to (like for instance /var. /usr, /usr/local and so forth) you may discover that they cannot be tweaked as easily as /home can be.  There will be processes running related to some of these partitions that will prevent the initial fsck.ext3 from executing on the partition.  If you’re confident there are no problems with the partition, then go ahead and perform the tune2fs command to enable the ext4 options (extents, directory indexing).  You’ll then need to reboot at which point the fsck performed during boot will fail.  At this point, you can enter maintenance mode.  From there, you’ll be able to complete the upgrade process by running the fsck.ext4 command, updating the /etc/fstab entries and rebooting.

In woodworking news I’m gearing up to start an armoire.  I have it pretty well thought out in my head.  I’m hoping to start some rough sketches soon.  I have a good portion of the wood I’ll need but, alas, not all of it.  I’ll be going back for the bulk of the rough cut stuff once I have some more answers regarding some of the details.  I just received a slick new marking gauge by Glen-Drake.  It looks to be a very versatile little tool capable of marking mortise and tenons as well as the more usual uses.  I’m looking forward to putting it through its paces.

The Boy still falls asleep on the bus.  Yesterday, it took me about a minute to get his eyes open.  Then, he just kind of gazed around with a look that obviously meant he was not fully awake.  It was several more seconds before he finally realized that he was in fact home and could get off the bus.

Both kids have their first swimming classes tonight.  I’m hoping to slip away to get some exercise in.  The Wife will be coming along so it shouldn’t be an impossible task.

The sourdough starter had to be thrown away.  It couldn’t raise bread making it pretty useless.  I’ve started a second batch, but it too is not starting properly.  I’m thinking there is too much acid being produced and that is preventing the formation of gluten.  The rye flour I’m using is pretty old at this point, so I’m thinking perhaps it has gone bad.  I’ll have to grab another batch to test the theory.

The rental is just about finished. I’m heading out there tomorrow to do the last of the projects.  With the cooler weather, that shouldn’t be too bad a place to work.

Finally, I’m thinking that Dog#1 may have to go back to the vet for her anal sacks again.  She’s not eating again, she’s been pacing and looking a little uncomfortable, and dog#2 has been walking behind her sniffing away as something- all thing I noticed prior to the diagnosis/ prognosis this last time around.  I’m hoping that a technician visit is all that’s required.

Like I said, minutae.  Bits here and there that help to make up the day, or the week.  Time to go read to the lass.