Done last week (20160612Su - 18Sa)
Moderately productive week. Lots of computer configuration and upgrading work, which is always an easy way for me to feel like I've done something, even if it isn't all that useful. I have a new desktop computer, in a nice little Shuttle box, but haven't fully switched over to it yet. Because browser tabs, mostly. (I also got the raspberry pi booting, finally. Which mostly required looking at the installed card and noticing that, not only did it not have an OS installed, but it wasn't flagged as bootable. The Pi is one of the original 512Mb ones -- it's dog slow. Still, it has a lot of potential as either a media center or a special-purpose controller. I'm guessing that used, older pi's are dirt cheap on eBay.
My new monitors arrived at work; I took advantage of the opportunity to re-arrange my workspace (see notes for 0615We) -- and to get back into writing, with xmonad as my first topic. Xmonad really wins for this, because the physical arrangement of the monitors becomes almost irrelevant. By moving the laptop in front of me (because it has a usable keyboard for once) with the dock under the monitor, I not only freed up a sizeable amount of desk space but freed up my second thinkpad keyboard to come home with me. Win.
Last weekend also included a lot of cleanup work in the garage and the back yard -- the huge piles of junk and lumber have been hauled away. I really hated to lose the lumber, but it had been out in the rain for too long. I was, however, able to save most of the hardwood.
As indicated, I have been writing (see notes for 0614Tu). My goal is to write 500 words most days. (I missed yesterday because I was hacking on my journaling makefiles, which sort of counts in terms of time if not bytes.) This post is intended to hit today's word count, and, no, I'm not going to count the notes.
So that raises a question for you, my loyal readers. The article I'm writing on xmonad isn't done yet, but I do have two days worth of work on it. Should I post "episodes" as I go along? Maybe I should phrase that differently -- would anyone object if I did post what amount to partial rough drafts? Feedback would be useful. Because otherwise, that's what I'm going to do.
Some other ongoing projects will also be included in the word count, notably "Songs for Saturday" (or occasionally Sunday, if I'm being lazy) and the "River" posts. I will find or create a tag for the Linux-related stuff, like the aforementioned xmonad article, and probably "adventures in home computing" as well. Fiction is somewhat unlikely; I'm pretty bad at it, especially plotting. Metafiction and prose poems are a distinct possibility, though.
There. 500 words. Approximately, since wc doesn't distinguish between actual content and markup. At some point I need to do something about that, but I'm not going to worry about it right now.
Notes & links:
0612Su * up 7; W=197.4; laundry, dishes % I seem to be *really* close to the edge today. Colleen asked to go out, and asked for a BOAT sandwitch (which we didn't have bacon for), and I just felt put-upon. The fact that I'd just done dishes for the second day in a row, and found yet another item that hadn't been thoroughly washed before being put away, and... yeah. Something like that. % No matter how much I get done, all it makes me feel is that I'm not doing enough. % I am not highly social right now. Highly *anti*-social, more like it. I should get out and go to the Farmer's Market with Colleen and Chaos. It would be good for me. I don't think I would be good company, though. Yes, I know that's the depression talking. & Went out anyway. Apparently I don't think I deserve to do anything that might make me feel better. Yes, I know it doesn't make sense, and I know it's not unusual. Apparently knowing that isn't one of the things that might make me feel better. -> met Colleen and Kat coming back, passing by QFC. Walked home with them; we stopped at TJ. @ ysabetwordsmith | Poem: "Patience with the Limitations" Therapy cat Bombay Cats Bombay cat Wikipedia dive into cats. @ Apparently bears can Purr @ Bastet - Goddess of cats, protection, joy, dance, music, family, and love % Eating is probably an effective coping mechanism only because I know it's bad for me. * 15min: Elfa shelves up in the corner to the right of the garage door. split ends trimmed off the long oak board. Tired. Have to go out soon to get dinner fixings, and can't have a drink until I get back. Grump. * Shopping: Cat litter, cat food, salmon and rockfish, and a loaf of multigrain bake-at-home bread for dinner, ginger, potatoes, cheese, bacon. -> now I can have my gin. And a glass of ice water. -> I win at dinner. @ How GM Beat Tesla to the First True Mass-Market Electric Car | WIRED * Re-imaging the system in the white tower case as Ubuntu 16.04. Disk was stargate; wiped it and renamed it snowflake. : The system in the black case won't boot (disk, presumably) and has only 2G of RAM. 0611-2Sa-Su . junk from Kat's room and the balcony outside it. 0613Mo * up 6:30; W=199.6; laundry : Apparently mate is incompatible with kde -- both try to install a file. The fix is: dpkg -i --force-overwrite [path-to-pkg-file]; apt-get -f install : another family blow-up. Communication breakdown. Again. And me having to handle the resulting emergency over the phone from work. Again. -> hashed it out. As we always do; N is really good at helping people get to the root of the problem. And it was an excuse for Colleen to visit downstairs for the first time. We need a better ramp, but otherwise ok. 0614Tu * Up 5:30; W=198.2; : The lenovo netbook (blackbird) is just too flaky to use in the bedroom. : phone charger was partly unplugged, so no clock in the morning. :P : work laptop refuses to suspend after kernel upgrade :P @ The Man Who Planted Trees (1987) HQ- English - YouTube planting hope. Nearly in tears at the end. Extraordinary. : ok, so it suspends *if it isn't docked* :P This is probably because it wakes up if there's power on nthe USB connector. I saw that with a powered hub and another (work) machine. :P anyway. * 11:15 Colleen - UNW for plumbing maint. * Home Depot for 8 40Wequiv LED bulbl - two 4-packs for $8 each. See below * 3pm Anita Brown -> goals: -> walk - once a week at work; farmer's market on Sunday write - 500 words 2/week minimum; easiest to make it a morning habit. >=3 things I like about myself., * Move metal workbench drawers into garage (under workbench, preferably). * LED bulbs in upstairs bathroom above the vanity - it currently has 4 CFLs each side : Van stalled on Ballanger Rd a little before Third Place; engine check light came on briefly, and again solidly when I went to move it back for Colleen. : The Royal Amethyst is _not_ dead, but it's seriously in need of staking. Possibly a new hole -- it was planted too shallowly -- but maybe just having the mound built higher as being less of a disturbance to the roots. : 5:11 - I have a glass of gin and a box of tortie on my desk, and appointment for the van in the morning. Things are not as bad as they could be, but it doesn't keep me from feeling rather incompetent. : The little shuttle box boots! Needed to have the RAM re-seated. May not be able to boot from a USB drive, unless that's a "usb-cdrom", but it got into grub from Barnard's old SSD, so that's a good sign. 4G of RAM. Now I can't find my Ubuntu install drive. I blame the cats. -> but unjustly -- it was in my pocket. -> won't even start to boot with the USB drive plugged in. -> Ha! Booted with Algol's old 750G Debian drive. "I practice cybernetic necromancy, and I can raise your system from the dead." Gods! how I miss Cyndi. For reference, today's entry is 405 words to the end of the preceeding sentence. Ah. Apparently a USB drive is supposed to show up on the HD menu. Doesn't. 0615 Humira * up 5:30; W=198.2; dishes @ Robot Hugs - Forty Nine of note : When I came downstairs and tried it, the shuttle box was frozen. Thermal problems, maybe? I don't really remember why I retired it. And there's something about the partitioning on the newest Ubuntu installer that makes it completely fail to boot. Proved by booting with the same thumb drive before and after copying the iso to it. * Van to Elliot's so they can look at the engine check light. -> sensor -- comes to 400-something. & My new 27" monitors arrived at work; I took advantage of the change to rearrange my work space. Before, it was the set-up I've had for years -- monitor in front on a stand, second monitor on the right, and my laptop on the left. The new laptop, however, has a decent keyboard (with trackpoint and three buttons), and the monitors between them occupy about 2/3 of the desk. The new arrangement has the laptop dock under the "middle" monitor. It's still the middle monitor as far as the window manager is concerned. The advantage of using xmonad is that, instead of the monitors combining to form a single huge workspace, each monitor plus the laptop displays one of my ten workspaces. It's a single keystroke to move a window, switch workspaces, or -- and here's the really brilliant one -- warp the mouse from one screen to another. Undock, and the two workspaces that were on the monitors go back into hyperspace, where they're still only a keystroke away. And because it's a tiling window manager, the layout doesn't change when you move a workspace from one 16x9 screen to another. It does mean that I'm using the keyboard more, because it just takes too damned long to move the pointer from one end of the screen to the other. This is a *good* thing. : The little shuttle box turns out to be unusable. The reason I abandoned it in the first place, apparently, is that it has developed a habit of freezing after a few minutes of operation. Possibly just the CPU, but... between that and the fact that it won't boot from USB it's kind of hard to justify putting any money into it. The black tower case also has an Intel chip, but it appears to be much slower. However, they are both Core 2, so it might work. * Humira 0616Th * Up 5:30; W=197.6; laundry, dishes * 595 words in xmonad.html - just getting to the good part. * pick up van at Elliot's * Thankful Thursday post * Swapped CPUs between the black tower and the shuttle box. So far the shuttle seems to be working; we'll see whether that continues. Apport is reporting a problem of some sort, but it's always been flaky. 10:40 still up. I win. 0617Fr * up 5:15; =199.8; laundry -> noticed that I had skipped yesterday morning's pills, including the lisinopril; that probably explains the water weight gain. * write G''s paycheck * 537 words in the xmonad write-up. : The shuttle box is still up and running; the key was "load optimized defaults". That might have worked with the old CPU, but I'm probably not going to spend the effort to find out. Now I have to decide whether to keep the disk that's in it, or swap with Trantor which is already pretty well set up. Probably the former, since it will give me a chance to expand my Config with the music and typesetting stuff. * Humira delivery expected @ Melissa Etheridge "Pulse" at Infinity Hall Live f() : still some oddities on the shuttle box -- it froze in the BIOS a couple of times -- but basically working. Stuck a CD-ROM drive in it and closed it up. If it works on the desk I can replace Trantor and get back some legroom. 0618Sa * up 7am; W=200.2; laundry * worked on the make targets in Journals/Music, but didn't do any actual journaling * 11:20 Colleen - Dr. Chopra * kibble at petco (since Tish doesn't think the current batch smells like food), lunch at Flo-Ana's, Colleen's prescription, loperamide, D3, and B12 at Walgreen's * Shuttle box on desk. Perfect height for the monitor, but leaves little room for the KVM switch. * Spent the late afternoon helping N assemble a cabinet for the bathroom; this gets the huge box out of the hallway. It's a pain in the tail. : Spent some time benchmarking. Algol is about twice as fast as Trantor, so that's a win. OTOH, Snowflake is fully twice as fast as Algol, with 4 cores. So I can't help wondering whether I can Algol working with its original CPU. Meanwhile, I can certainly decommission Trantor. OTOH, it might be better to simply switch to Snowflake, since G wants that up for ssh. Could, for that matter, give him Algol. * more assembly. All done but the drawers and door. % damaged my right wrist turning screws. Can't lift with it, either.
[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has
comments. Comment wherever you prefer; anonymous comments are allowed on DW only]