Yesterday it was hot and humid, apparently we’re in the middle of the worst heatwave of the summer. You wouldn’t know it by looking at the cats though:
Snuggled on the couch when it’s over 90F out and humid? Crazies. Speaking of cats, Caligula appears to be almost all better, hooray! The tail injury must have just been a bad bruising.
Michael is away this weekend. A couple weeks back he decided to head up to Maine to meet up with a friend of ours (whose wife is in Sweden for the summer) to do some hiking around Mount Washington. Unfortunately the plans fell through when our friend dropped him a line to say he’d been ill with a stomach flu for a few days and wasn’t sure he was up for hiking. Not wanting to impose, Michael cancelled his plans and decided to head out to Four Quarters for an event they’re holding this weekend. He left Friday morning and should be coming home sometime tomorrow.
So I made my own plans for the weekend. Last night I met up with a few women I used to work with at my Accounts Payable job for a low-key evening in at Jane’s house. It was a nice evening, and Jane was even thoughtful enough to pick up some belgian style microbrew for me! It’s nice to be keeping in touch with them, hopefully has the summer winds down and all our schedules stop being so hectic we’ll be able to plan more such get-togethers.
Today I’m planning on hanging out with Nita. I was waiting to see what the weather would bring, and it’s another day of oppressive heat so it looks like we’ll be doing something in an air conditioned place. Wandering around the KoP mall? Catching a movie? We’ll see.
I need to learn PostgreSQL. It’s been on The List of Things to Learn for a while now. I keep finding myself bumping into it, most recently at work when I faced installing Nagios with PostgreSQL. After beating my head against the wall for about a half hour I was lucky enough to snag devdasb in IRC and he reviewed the error messages I was getting and directed me to the proper config files to edit to allow the connections I needed. It was all quite involved and I’m not sure I would have figured it all out on my own, even with other systems on the network at work as a reference. Everyone keeps telling me that it’s easier than MySQL once you get over the initial hurdles of sorting out how it works and learning placement of config files, so I should tackle this sometime soon. But not this weekend…
…because this weekend I’m doing stage two of my computer overhaul. A couple weeks back I got my disk usage under control (from 33G down to 16G, without deleting anything important, it was a mess). This next stage of overhaul? Getting services under control. A few months back I installed Kubuntu and regular Ubuntu on top of my Xubuntu install so I could learn all three and be more helpful with our Kubuntu clients at work, and with users of both systems with my LoCo team work. This never really worked out, I don’t have time to learn everything about Gnome and KDE, so I uninstalled them. Unfortunately this left a bunch of silly services I don’t need lurking around. Yesterday I was doing some work and my computer was really acting up, I checked my RAM usage and it was at 1.2G – egads!!! Restarting X (which was using 16% of my 2G of ram) and shutting down a few services brought it down to 300M. I also shut off Composite in XFCE (as pretty as it was, with 75 xterms it gets a bit sluggish). A quick review of my process list showed things like python, NetworkManager and xscreensaver running, none of which I ever use. Sheesh.
And now I will leave you with another picture. I was in the kitchen this morning getting some breakfast when I looked out to the back yard and saw a deer. This was an everyday occurance where I grew up in Maine, but in spite of the obvious deer population in this area (I see them while driving often) I’ve never seen one in our yard. We live in a steep hill with several other houses, and while you’d call our lot a “wooded lot” it’s not like there is a forest here. Very unusual for deer to make the trek here, so I took a picture that turned out to be unfortunately big-footesque, since I didn’t want to scare him.
