I’ve finally had some downtime from all these exciting weekend trips, it’s been quite nice and I’ve had lots of time to catch up on local stuff!
Last week I finally saw a doctor again about my never-ending cough. It started a few years ago, this lingering cough that lasted through the winter, usually went away in the spring, sounding like a horrible deep smokers cough (I’ve probably smoked 5 cigarettes in my entire life). It’s been constant since September now and I’ve just been reluctant to see a doctor about it because they always prescribe allergy medicine that doesn’t help and makes me dehydrated. Well, this time I got a stronger dose of allergy medication – and it’s not working great. It was suggested to me by Stephen’s wife that it might be a acid reflux related issue – which is something I’ll look into. In any event, I’ll give it a few more days on this allergy medicine until I call the doctor again, but I am determined to get to the bottom of it this time.
Blinker failed state inspection last week. This was not the news I was hoping for, and I was particularly disturbed to find out why my mechanic failed me – the windshield. It has a couple dings in it, which had been patched by the previous owner 3+ years ago, it passed inspection in NJ, passed in PA last year, but this year? He wouldn’t pass me, and claims that it shouldn’t have passed last year, sigh. $225 for the replacement windshield, which I got done Wednesday. When I left the shop I wished my mechanic a happy summer, and happy fall. I really hope I don’t need to bring my car in again for anything but oil changes for the rest of the year, it’s been an expensive car year!
This past weekend was pretty mellow. Saturday, after taking care of an on-site tech support request for a friend I ended up having the afternoon to myself to catch up on some project work. Sunday I had plans but they changed at last minute which gave me a rare free afternoon – which I took advantage to the fullest, got a lot of Ubuntu work done, got the ball rolling on some local events. Monday was a busy day at work, and at the end of it I decided to go offline for the evening. Shock. Horror! …but actually a wildly productive evening as I ignored IRC and email and got some much needed hacking done on my Xen server and some studying done that I’d been neglecting.
Following Monday’s productivity burst I decided that I really needed to make time to finish reading Tom Limoncelli’s Time Management for System Administrators which I downloaded from Safari a couple months ago. I have far too much going on to keep track of everything properly, the “The Scattered Notes System and The Ever-Growing To Do
List of Doom” were wearing me down! So far I’m totally sold on calendaring (I even use my calendar to remember what I did in the past!), but getting my to-do lists in order is going to take some serious work. What else was I going to blog about in this post? I forget!
Oh! My Disney movie collection. Before I was a Star Wars fan, before I was a Linux geek, I was nutty about Disney’s Full-Length Animated movies. My VHS collection is pretty extensive. VHS? Yes. I’ve kept a VCR around to watch them, but it’s getting more absurd every year (and so does the teasing!). At first I considered a technical solution of ripping them, but I encountered a few issues: 1. Expense: VCR to digital is either expensive in hardware or time, there are cheap solutions that require more knowledge than I have with hooking up a VCR through things and doing the ripping, and there are VHS to digital converters out there, but they are pricey. 2. Quality: I’ve watched these tapes a lot, not all of them are in the best condition. 3. Legal? I would like to argue that while I’m within fair use when I make digital copies for myself, but I don’t know. So last year I decided to take the plunge and start buying DVD versions of my Disney VHSs. It’s been a slow process, Disney DVDs are expensive new (most $20-30, but some are more!) and even used they’re rarely less than $15/each, and I paid $25 for a used copy of The Lion King. My collection is coming along though, about 66% complete! Hurrah!
What else… Gnome. I am not a fan of XFCE 4.6.0 that shipped with Jaunty. It’s got a couple annoying bugs (being a .0 release, this isn’t a surprise, I hear .2 is better). I was also terribly upset about the restructuring of the menu system without backwards compatibility or a replacement menu editor. There are some time-consuming ways to manually add items, but I don’t want to do it for the number of custom items I had for work. So for about 2 months I switched to Gnome on my desktop. I was quite used to and liked using Gnome on my mini9, and it has served me very well! I used it on my desktop for about 2 months before switching back to XFCE. The trouble? Memory usage mostly. Gnome still isn’t as bad as something like Windows Vista, but I am pretty abusive on my desktop, and the 2G of registered RAM on my system is expensive to upgrade, in Gnome I found myself frequently using all my ram and tapping into swap when engaged in large projects, no fun. Coming back to XFCE was refreshing, oh how I missed thee, and the entire exercise was quite interesting.
Last night I had a couple friends over for “movie night” – which means we geeked out over internet absurdities, drank some Dogfish Head 60 Minute Ale (I still have over a half a case in my fridge, what will I do with this all?), chowed down on pizza and watched Metalocalypse. Good times.
Finally, I’ve been running around for a lot this week doing geek-things. Wednesday was a visit to a hackerspace in Philly to discuss a PLUG collaboration, today was a visit to a computer non-profit in Ephrata to talk about how the Ubuntu Pennsylvania team can work with them, tonight is a meeting to plan a potential foss conference next summer, and am planning a virtualization rountable for PLUG… But I’ll blog about all that later :)
Sunday, Jul 26th, 2009 at 3:56
I have asthma and every winter you can bet that it flares up, I get a irritating cough, lasts for weeks and is hard to shift. I’m not saying you have it, but if your cough sounds like a bark, you may have a bronchial infection/bronchial asthma thing going on.
Tuesday, Aug 11th, 2009 at 17:02
One solution to your VHS problem could be a video capture card. I recently purchased this Hauppauge card from newegg. It lets me convert VHS to MPEG-2 with the cat(1) command and a coax cable. So much fun! And if I ever get around to buying a
digital TV antenna, I’ll be able to watch broadcast TV again. For now,
I’m happy with Internet video plus old VHS tapes for my “entertainment” (in my case, it is probably better to call it an “educational”) system.
Wednesday, Apr 28th, 2010 at 10:54
i have been suffering from Asthma ever since i was little kid. i can only manage it by taking medicines and some food supplements. :