Weekend-ish Update
Pretty decent weekend. The first in a while where I wasn't either injured or on-the-run somewhere or other. And that was nice.
Friday
Taking full advantage of some free evenings, I managed to get to dinner at Royal India with Tom, Bethany and ambermae. Quite delicious and far too long since I'd been to Indian. ambermae had an eggplant based dish that looked good. Tom and Bethany both had magic vegetarian platters of rice, five mini entrees and a sort of potato dumpling. I ended up having what was essentially tandoori red snapper, followed by mango ice cream. Very, very good.
Afterward, it was over to the NC Museum of Art for the first movie I've caught on the lawn this year, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Despite running a little later than anticipated from dinner, good parking karma was in effect. I didn't enjoy the movie as much as seeing it at Exploris on the IMAX screen, but still a good film and an enjoyable evening out of doors.
The good parking karma allowed for a rapid departure, roughly three minutes after the credits started to roll, we were on Blue Ridge headed for Lake Boone Trail.
Saturday
Slack early, then out to the Nasher for lunch. A bit warm for the patio, but why not? I ended up with what they were calling a Ploughman's Lunch. This ended up as sopprasetta, a round of goat cheese, a small brick of bleu cheese and three wedges of something softer but not brie. Add a few thick slices of crusty wheat bread, a meat spread, camelized onions, roasted garlic and coarse-ground mustard and I was quite a delighted diner.
I photographed in the Nasher lobby [1] for a bit then took a quick spin of two open galleries (the third is currently awaiting the installation of The Rape of the Sabine Women [2]. Then, it was off to the Festival for the Eno.
Ordinarily, I'd like to spend more time at such a festival, but two and half hours seemed pretty good on a warm afternoon. Found the friend I was looking for and joined her and another on a wide expanse of grass, listing to music from Dromendary and an earlier group. I talked about the ride, pursued strawberry shortcake and participated in some nifty cloud gazing.
As the festival drew to a close for the day, plans were made to adjourn to elsewhere in Durham, meet with gorski and ambermae and engage in viewing of The Razor's Edge after the arrival of pizza and a very brief snippet of Office Space for the unnamed party in the group who'd not seen it [3].
I enjoyed Bill Murray in Razor's Edge but the film seemed to take large leaps of time and attitude that didn't necessarily carry the audience with it. Now, ordinarily, I enjoy subtle transitions and a director presuming his audience is paying attention. This is a case where I wish there was more explanation to understand how the movie got to different places.
Sunday
OK, I'm generally not that funny when I drink, but unfiltered sake was quite good for arriannaid's birthday gathering at Shabashabu. Two notable ideas:
- "Personalized" Cthulhu, um, "toys."
- A John the Baptist Pez Dispenser.
Otherwise, a nice, chill day.
Monday
Work occupied itself with me starting to retrofit code to fix some longstanding shortcomings. Without getting into specifics, words at the forefront of my mind while looking at Other People's Code were "consistency" and "polymorphism."
The boss sent us home early, so I took advantage of the early departure to hit the Pullen Park pool. Quite busy and not set-up for long lanes as I thought they'd be for this time of year. However, the big plus was getting some exercise and having it feel good without having anything feel like it was going to be a limiting factor.
Once home, I started on a few small projects computer wise. The first was attempting to update my Linux box to Fedora Core 5. I was going to attempt this by simply updating the yum configurations. That didn't turn out to work out so well [4], so I backed off and set it aside for a bit.
Instead, after assisting with a page from work concerning a sw slice that went out early that required me to make some config changes to some installed products, I installed Synergy [5] and working between the Powerbook and my Linux box. Pretty slick. Saves me the need to get a KVM switch and also means the Linux box will likely be of more use to me as a result.
Once that was done, I started a network install of FC 5. Tip of the cap to katzj for pointing me at the tiny boot.iso I needed. I figure it'll run overnight, which is fine.
- Likely a while in being posted as it's behind the ongoing ALC photos and the as yet unedited wedding photos from Reno.
- Disclosure
- In fairness, the person who's not seen the movie is not in the IT industry or in a typical office environment.
- Dependencies that reached pretty quickly to the version of glibc I had installed. I figured that was a sign I should seek another, less cumbersome method than wranling those RPMs individually.
- Something my friend Marc pointed out to me.