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!<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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!<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> 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 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!<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> (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<\/a>. Good times.<\/p>\n 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 :)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. 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\nList 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!<\/p>\n