Posted On Friday, June 3rd, 2011 By David Veatch
The wife and I have been very busy lately. It’s not yet over, but this past weekend was perhaps the busiest, not to mention heaviest, part of the process. That process is moving. The whole thing started last spring, when we put our two houses on the market. This past spring, a year later almost to the day, her house finally sold and we had the wherewithal to purchase a new house. We packed her house into two POD units and moved them into storage until we had a place to put them. At the same time, we took mine off the market because it hadn’t sold yet, and we didn’t want to take the chance of it selling and us having no place to go. Turns out it wasn’t a concern, because we found the house we wanted to buy within days. We made an offer, they countered, we met in the middle, and two long months later, we took possession. When that day finally arrived, we couldn’t move in immediately because we had too many other family obligations (Jami’s sister graduated with her doctorate! We couldn’t miss that graduation day…). So, exactly one week after we took possession, more »
Posted On Saturday, February 12th, 2011 By David Veatch
We’re not completely beat, but we’re certainly tired. Moving our rec room furniture out of one friend’s basement, and into two others will do that I suppose. I hired out the pool table itself, preferring to have someone experienced in dismantling pool tables do that job. It was taken to one friend’s basement, along with two barstools and the light this morning. This afternoon, I, my wife, and the couple from whom we bought the whole set, moved the rest of it into the garage in our Southern Home. That includes the captain’s chair, the player chair, four rolling chairs, a high top table, and a flip-top poker/game table, and a 60″ standing bar. Thankfully, we had a family truck to use, which meant we had to make a couple trips, and put stuff in cars as well, and make two trips to boot, but we didn’t have to pay anything for it. One step closer to having a usable pool table!
Posted On Sunday, December 26th, 2010 By David Veatch
Christmas break this year was a lot of fun. The week before Christmas was spent mostly in Wichita with my brother back in town from the Northwest. Both Mom and Dad were overjoyed to have the whole family together again for the holidays, even if it wasn’t on Christmas Day Proper. It’s not the date that matters, but the time spent, no matter the date. There was lots of eating, lots of relaxing down time, some pool, some shopping, and generally enjoying family time. Christmas Day Proper was spent, just my wife and I. We carried on what is becoming a wonderful tradition of opening one present per hour. We did that first on Valentine’s Day, and she had the fantastic idea of applying it to Christmas too. So, with homemade IHOP style pancakes and mimosas, we opened our gifts to each other, watched Milo & Otis, and I introduced her to Firefly. She’s not totally hooked yet, but I can see the roots sprouting. ;) The day after Christmas was spent at her parent’s house. Her younger sister and bro-in-law were there with her parents, and her older sister joined us via Skype for the opening of yet more more »
Posted On Friday, December 10th, 2010 By David Veatch
Wherein it is described how one would replace a toilet paper roll, being empty, with a toilet paper roll, being full.
Posted On Monday, November 22nd, 2010 By David Veatch
We’ve finally made the foray into the land of Windows 7. The old XP laptop that my wife was using started showing signs of age a couple weeks ago when the NIC decided it wasn’t going to work anymore. Right in the middle of a browsing session, it just quit. I honestly didn’t do much in the way of troubleshooting, other than disabling/enabling it, and uninstalling/reinstalling the drivers. I just declared it dead. We’ve been talking about getting her a new laptop for a few months now, so this was as good a reason as any. We hit a couple stores, but settled on a Dell 17R from running Windows Home Pro, with the i5-460M, 8GB system memory, and a 5,400rpm 500GB drive from Best Buy. We had an interesting time obtaining it, which I’ll relate here for your edification. Sunday, Nov. 14th, 2010, the price was $749.99 in the store, and online. Sunday, Nov. 21st, 2010, the price was $799.99 in the store, and $749.99 online. We called, and they confirmed that they would honor the online price, thus saving the ~$50 that another, less observant or stand-upish individual would have spent. Arriving at the store, the sales associate more »
Posted On Thursday, November 11th, 2010 By David Veatch
Wherein my birthday is discussed, and my friends and family are thanked, yo.
Posted On Saturday, October 2nd, 2010 By David Veatch
All in all, not a bad weekend. I’d fixed our printing issues with Samba/Cups/HPLIP before 11, and I’d slept in until 9:30 (yes, I clearly needed sleep). It was, I think, a permissions issue, but it was a confusing issue. Brokey: lrw-rw—- 1 root cups 9 Sep 24 17:04 ugen0.2 -> usb/0.2.0 crw-rw-rw- 1 root cups 0, 128 Sep 24 17:01 0.2.0 Workey: lrw-rw—- 1 root cups 9 Sep 24 17:04 ugen0.2 -> usb/0.2.0 crw-rw-rw- 1 root cups 0, 128 Sep 24 17:01 0.2.0 Yeah. I don’t see a difference either. Still, I was getting the following errors: prnt/backend/hp.c 745: ERROR: open device failed stat=12: hp:/usb/photosmart_7350?serial=XXXXXXXXXXXXX and printer-state=5(stopped) printer-state-message=”/usr/local/libexec/cups/backend/hp failed” printer-state-reasons=paused whenever I tried to print (not the real serial number). Then I chown root:lp both ugen0.2 and usb/0.2.0, and printing was magically working again. And yet, they still show as being root:cups. Go figure. Please. Go figure, because aside from some weird corruption in some place I don’t yet know exists, I can’t figure it out myself. So, that done, I moved myself downtown to the KC Public Library for the first of two League of American Cyclists Smart Cycling KC: Traffic Skills 101 classes. Though there wasn’t anything more »
Posted On Thursday, August 26th, 2010 By David Veatch
Lots to choose from! Everything must go! Get them while they last!
Posted On Monday, August 23rd, 2010 By David Veatch
Jami saw my PuTTY screen a couple of weeks ago while I was preparing a major home server upgrade. Upon noticing the frantic scrolling green text of a compile in progress (I have my term colors set to mimic the old Apple //e I grew up with), she belted out “What’s that?! What are you doing?! Is that some sort of crazy ‘Logo Rhythm’ thing?!” She’s prone to sudden and unexpected outbursts. It’s her way. One such outburst involved the History Channel. While on the couch together I was watching the History Channel (and it wasn’t about Hitler!) while she and a friend of ours who was sitting on the other couch, were talking about flowers, or butterflies, or ribbons, or some such thing. Upon noticing what I was watching, Jami immediately belted out “Boring!! What is that?!” I couldn’t help but start laughing. As did our friend. As did, or course, Jami. The passion with which she evoked the single word “Boring!” was admirable. Thus, it immediately joined ranks with the many inside jokes we’ve developed over the last two(ish) years. I did not, however, change the channel. This time, having asked with equal passion (and a touch of more »
Posted On Tuesday, August 17th, 2010 By David Veatch
For the last two nights, Elliott the Cat has been quiet the whole night through. Over the course of the last few weeks, he woke us in the middle of the night with incessant, insistent crying. He was fairly consistent from night to night, making minor adjustments in his timing. First, he cried at 2:30. Then at 3:30. Then 4:30. 5:30 followed. A slight relapse back to 4:30. Then back to 5:30. His best nights had him sounding 8 to 12 meows, followed by a head butt into the door. His worst night was 73 meows. SEVENTY THREE meows in quick succession, and in a variety of tones and volume. That night was about a week ago. Seventy Three. Three score and thirteen. I don’t know… maybe that’s not that many. But I’ve only rarely cohabitated with a cat, and not for very long. That seems a lot to me. But for the last two nights, he’s been quiet. Nary a single “mrrow” has awoken us, and he has apparently determined that the door will not yield to the ministrations of his noggin. In fact, this morning, Jami found him laying next to the door in the hallway, seemingly with more »