Well, we didn’t end up going to see March of the Penguins, Michael got stuck doing work. It sucked, much moreso for him than me, of course. We’re thinking that we might go down to the city sometime this week after work, shouldn’t be difficult to make it to a 7:20 showing and get home at a reasonable time.
So instead of seeing penguins I grabbed R2Q5 (450mhz test machine), brought him downstairs (Michael was working upstairs) and reinstalled Ubuntu on it. The CD-ROM died halfway through the install, AGAIN. It just does that sometimes, and until now I thought it was the drive. Usually I just turn off the computer and in a couple hours it magically works again. But this time I didn’t want to just sit around for 2 hours, so I unplugged the cables from the drive, and took the drive out. Then put it back in. Still not working. Then I unplugged it from the motherboard and plugged it back in. It worked! Now, since I’ve had similar issues with other drives in the past, I think it might be a motherboard problem. Not surpising, since the motherboard sucks, but it’s annoying. Silly old machine. *pats R2Q5*
So I watched 101 Dalmatians and eventually got Ubuntu installed from the new Hoary disks that I got in the mail. The install went well enough, apt got a little funky, but I think I managed to solve that just by doing what the error messages told me to do. It all seems to be working now. And now I’ll be able to better help those people new to linux who I keep telling to use Ubuntu %)
In the late evening Michael decided to take a break from working and we went out grocery shopping. Spent a couple hours doing it, as we needed to go to the normal grocery store and the Whole Foods market to get everything we wanted/needed for having Michael’s family over today.
We didn’t get home until after 9pm, neither of us were very hungry for dinner so we just steamed some clams that we bought and had them with bread and some melted butter and oil. Yummie!
After dinner we cleaned. Serious cleaning. The kitchen from top to bottom, Michael tackled the bathroom and laundry room. It was almost 1am when I finally crashed into bed. But the house looks great %) Now just need to clean up the TV room, where I’m sitting now with R2Q5, it looks pretty messy.
This morning I finally took the time to review Carla’s Linux Cookbook. Which, if I haven’t mentioned before, is a great book. You can see my review here. And now hopefully the folks at O’Reilly will be happy for another couple of months, I’ve been so bad lately about writing reviews %\ I also post my reviews to my Blogger book review site, so when I was browsing old reviews this morning I noticed that the author of Learning Perl had commented on one review, thanking me for recommending it (the review wasn’t even for his book, it was for Perl DBIbut I mentioned Learning Perl as a good book to use when learning perl). Cool.
This afternoon Michael’s parents, his brother, his brother’s wife, and their two young kids are coming over. Only Michael’s mother and brother have seen the house, so we’re looking forward to showing it off to the rest of the family. And it’s beautiful out today, so we’re doing the BBQ thing, with snacks that I thought the kids would like too (something Michael kept forgetting “we need soda? we need chips? we have cheese and beer!” “kids don’t eat cheese and beer” “Gah! Kids!”)
Now I should probably stop playing around and finish up cleaning, and put R2Q5 back upstairs where he belongs.