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Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008
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7:46 pm - Detour detoured?
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Some will remember my griping about the road repairs on my road being done in advance of its use as a heavy truck detour for five months this summer, and how stupid that was. (Not to mention the disgust I felt at the idea of huge trucks running by my bedroom 24 hours a day all summer when the windows are open.
Well, they did the rush repair job, and dumped cosmetic crushed lime along the shoulders (nothing that would help if someone went off the road, as it's only an inch or less in depth and is already dispersing. They repainted the stripes just in time for the detour to become active yesterday. I noticed the increase in traffic, but not the noise I expected. This morning I found out why.
Unlike past instances in which they used our road as an alternate route during flooding, this time they have designated multiple detour routes. The road that is closed for bridge repair is a Class II truck route. That's what bothered me the most, as those trucks have been routed past here before. Not this time. There is signage up pointing to two other possible detour routes and indicating that they are the "Class II truck detour." It appears that we are designated only for traffic that would normally be permitted on the county road, which is generally less heavy and definitely not as large in terms of vehicle dimensions, unless the end point of the vehicle's travel is on that road.
The routing choices don't make much sense, as they are sending truck traffic 30 to 40 miles out of its way. I hope they enforce it though. A glance at the state's list of designated Class II routes does indicate that the detours are the shortest possible traveling over all Class II roadways. This is actually good, and politically quite unexpected in a state where commercial graft usually wins out over law or common sense.
As for the repairs on our local road, I still don't think they were very good. Almost all cosmetic, and doomed to failure within a year, especially with the heavy traffic beating they will take this summer. Similar work done by the same contractor two years ago on township roads north of here blew out in huge potholes, some as large as twelve feet in diameter, the very next spring after the work was done. Most, but not all, of that damage has now been patched by rolling new asphalt over the gravel that was dumped to fill the holes. By next spring, I expect many of those to crumble again. Those roads are less passable now than they were when they were still just gravel over mud.
On a similarly wasteful and inefficient subject, my mailbox is being stuffed every day with pleas for money from hundreds of environmental action and animal welfare groups. Many of them, such as PETA, go in the trash without even being opened. Most that I open also end up in the recycling bin, because it's obvious that 90% of any money contributed will just be spent on more fund raising, or worse, because I think the group is doing its supposed cause more damage than good. Yes, I'm opposed to animal abuse, and even more seriously opposed to the Bush Administration's current policies that rape the national forest system and sell out parklands for destruction by abusive uses such as ATV's and snowmobiles. I'm opposed to wilderness destruction in the name of oil exploration (by which they really mean more money for big oil interests, and therefore more money for the GOP) and I favor taking strong measures to reduce carbon emissions and improve more efficient forms of transportation. But the truth is, after the last seven or eight years, I have no money to spare. What I could possibly scrape up I dare not entrust to most of these groups I've never heard of until today. And most positively, I'll not be giving any of it to any political campaigns, no matter what candidate or party.
current mood:  amused
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| Saturday, May 31st, 2008
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3:14 pm - Box Elder down
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This large box elder tree split down the middle in heavy winds yesterday, with the larger part falling to the east across our fence, and the smaller portion falling west onto the neighbors' fence. Not visible here, but the neighbors turned their horses out into the field either without noticing that their fence was down, or without thinking it mattered. All three were just beyond the shrubbery in the backdrop and could have crossed to our side easily.
If you click on the photo and follow the photostream to the right on the page that appears, you can follow four hours of progress as we got the tree off the fence .
When I went into Marengo for groceries this morning, I saw lots of heavy tree branches down all over town and on the roads leading in. Obviously there was some sort of very localized wind phenomenon yesterday, and it was quite intense.
Summer is here and so are the ^&*(%$ flies. I put Tess out while we were working on the tree, since her usual field is the next one over so we wouldn't interfere with each other. She was happy at first, but when I took the camera out to get the final photo of the liberated fence, she was in a frenzy to get to me. I went to the gate and saw that she was being tortured by little black flies. Not time for her to go in yet, but I ran back to the barn and got fly repellent and a fly mask for her. She seemed much relieved once that was taken care of. No more trips out without those necessities now.
current mood:  busy
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| Friday, May 30th, 2008
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8:58 pm - A quiet day at the library...
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It was amazing. A whole day, a Friday no less, with a door count of under 350 and no temper tantrums or complaints? How did that happen? Several things came together. First, it's nearly the end of the school year. The hordes of elementary school classes that have been coming to the library on Fridays to get books to read for book reports or accelerated reading tests are done until fall. Second, the weather was iffy. It never rained hard but kept threatening to do so. Most significantly, though, a power outage in the early hours of the morning, before we were open, apparently trashed the hard disk on one server: the multiuser internet machine. Everything else in the building came through fine, but that one was down and out. Nothing seemed able to revive it. Enough things were scrambled that it just couldn't boot.
So, there was no public internet. People came to the door, read the sign, and turned away. ;D Only people who wanted to actually read, or at worst, check out videos, came into the library.
The hardware problem was resolved, of course, but not until just before closing. Since that machine is maintained by an outside agency under a contract (YAY!) I had to wait for instructions. They concluded, as I had, that the hard disk was scrambled and I should reinstall the software. I did that from a CD, and then reactivated the custom configurations I had on the machine by pointing to them on an external website and telling the new installation to use them. Then the vendor went on to apply software patches remotely. It should be up and running by opening time tomorrow. The whole setup is extremely slick, and doesn't even require me to make any backups of anything. The cost is far less than what we did before, which involved maintaining half a dozen Windows-based machines with layer upon layer of malware protection and security lockdowns. Best of all, I don't have to do it, meaning I have time to be a librarian instead of a computer technician.
The weather was freakish. At the farm we had heavy thunder and lightning between about 3 and 4:30 am this morning. That was about the time that the power went up and down repeatedly in Harvard. Gary was in Chicago, and the dogs climbed into bed with me to "hide" from the thunder. Needless to say, I didn't get much sleep after 3 am. There wasn't a lot of rain, just fireworks. It was still splattering, not what I'd call real rain, when I went in to work. Late in the morning Gary called me to ask how we had weathered the wind. "What wind?" He couldn't believe me, but it was true. In Harvard, 15 miles north of the farm, there was little more than a breeze and a lot of clouds.
Turns out that the southern part of the county had about an hour of high wind, with gusts up to 60 mph. Near hurricane force winds. He had to wrestle with that 20 foot steel sliding door (the same one that froze shut last winter, remember?) when the bottom edge came loose from its track and started flapping in greater than gale force winds. He managed to get one end back onto the track and the other edge secured to the doorpost with a chain, but only after closing all the other doors in the building to stop the wind from going through. After the sun came out in late afternoon, he also discovered that two more large trees had fallen. One split down the middle, half falling onto our pasture fence, and the other half onto the Brit neighbors' pasture fence, totally blocking the six foot aisle between them. The other was uprooted but its top is so entangled with two other nearby trees still standing that it couldn't fall over. Fortunately it's not a huge, heavy monster, but just a 25 foot aspen with a trunk about half a foot thick. Aspen wood is light, especiall after it dries out, and I think we can safely let it go until it breaks loose of its own volition and falls to the ground. It's outside the pasture fence, in a strip that buffers us from the new subdivisions to the north.
We'll have to get the other one partly cut up right away, before it does permanent damage to the fence. There goes the weekend.
current mood: surprised
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| Friday, May 23rd, 2008
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2:58 pm - Robert Lynn Asprin, 1946-2008
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Robert Lynn Asprin, author of the MythAdventures SF and fantasy series and a lot more, passed away yesterday.
For years I've wondered if the author was the same Bob Asprin I knew from Michigan back in 1970-71 as "Yang the Nauseating" in the Society for Creative Anachronism. I always meant to check but never got around to it. When I saw his photo in the obit on the web, I knew. It was he.
A remarkably smart and witty person, he was nearly ostracized by some SCA members for his choice to portray a Mongolian barbarian. Those folks criticized everything he did, to his face and behind his back, for "not being authentic" and being "well, nauseating." I offered practical advice on historic costuming for a Mongol, and received many thanks. In fact, I still have somewhere an embroidered ribbon given to me by his lady in thanks for my assistance.
He was only 61, and though he achieved a great deal in his life, I'm sure he wanted to do more.
current mood:  sad
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| Thursday, May 22nd, 2008
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9:30 pm - Narnia revisited
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Why is it so hard to tell what is already a masterful story without trying to turn it into something else? Apparently, if you're Hollywood or Disney, it's just impossible. We sat through Prince Caspian this afternoon. It's not bad as movies go, it's just not the story that Lewis wrote. It's a few ideas and characters from the book, rolled into something with vaguely similar beginning and ending. The whole middle part came from outer space. Points that are critical to understanding the story are omitted. Points that are going to be needed to make sense of the episodes to follow are also omitted or even altered.
I suspect that some of this deficiency is due to scenes that were actually scripted and filmed, but ended up being cut. Why were they cut when the book was so short to begin with? To make room for a whole lot of spurious violence and battle scenes that had no place in the original. Worse, the most important character, and the one that they have done a superb job on in the first film, Aslan himself, has almost all of his good lines and best scenes completely cut. This is downright outrageous, in my opinion.
Production values are high. The work done on Reepicheep and Trufflehunter is of excellent quality. But why, oh why spend so much to make a film, and then make a travesty of an award winning book in the process? Sure, see the film if you wish. But read the book too, it makes a hell of a lot more sense than the film does.
In other irritating news, the four rip-off gas stations in Harvard raised their prices by 30 cents a gallon this morning. They are now asking $4.29 for unleaded. When I passed them on the way home from work at noon, I noticed that even though it was the lunch time rush, all their pumps were vacant. I hope people really are boycotting them. It's only five miles or less to Chemung, where the price is significantly lower. This is an annual ritual. They slam the price up as high as they dare right before Memorial Day weekend. Probably by Monday it will be back down to $3.99 again, where they started this morning.
current mood:  confused
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| Tuesday, May 20th, 2008
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9:03 pm - Indigo Buntings
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We have indigo buntings. That completes our usual summer bird list, since we saw a red headed woodpecker several times on Sunday. I saw one bunting a week ago, but now we have several males making themselves visible around the feeders. Click photo at right for more information about these tiny, intensely blue birds. They are tiny, the size of a nuthatch or a small sparrow, but what they lack in size they make up in brilliant color and loud little bursts of song.
They probably won't stay around for long. Usually we see them in May and that's the end of it here, though other people in the county say they have them all summer. I suspect that our yard area is too shady for them and they prefer a more open place with sun. After all, in the shade their blue feathers don't look quite as brilliant. The females are plain brown, though I haven't yet seen one.
In past years I'd have been expecting to see bluebirds out in the pasture, but for the last couple of years they've been absent. Dunno why, there were lots of them before that. Hopefully they'll be back. Barn swallows are nesting in the horse barn. Orioles are singing and visiting feeders here regularly. We've seen a hummingbird two or three times. Now where's the tufted titmouse? Too shy, I expect, though it should be here. I've only seen one in our yard ever. I saw a yellow bellied sapsucker back in March, but just once. We'd like to see more of them too. Likewise the Eastern Towhee, who I'm assured is here, but we have yet to see.
Good thing the coming weekend is a long one, as I'm feeling worn out and it's not even Wednesday yet.
current mood: chipper
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| Thursday, May 15th, 2008
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7:40 pm - Numinous sky
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I couldn't resist running out at dusk to see if I could get any nice photos. It was gloomy earlier but started to clear up just before sunset. Here's the best one I got, I think. Looking west over the vegetable garden, about 8:20 pm on 15 May 2008. This one was tilted up to maximize the sky, and therefore received a shorter exposure that reduced the vegetation to silhouette. I played with the gamma a bit to reduce the sky's glare, which also emphasizes the colors. With a little help, even a cheap camera makes a nice photo.
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| Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
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2:56 pm - Postal addendum
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I was joking yesterday about the connection between Homeland Security and Pitney-Bowes (makers of postage metering equipment, for those who don't know) but it's no joke.
Today I happened to be the one who answered the door when the letter carrier came. He explained it to me and gave me a little printed notice that they are pasting onto packages and returning them to the sender.
The actual weight limit is 14 ounces. Anything 14 ounces or under can be mailed in a mailbox or handed to the carrier with stamps on it for the postage. Anything over 14 ounces must be taken to the post office in person in order to mail it... [Why 14 ounces instead of a pound? Who knows?]
UNLESS...
You use a postage meter to put the postage on. If the postage consists of a meter label instead of stamps, then the old rules apply and you can put it into the mailbox or give it to the carrier. So terrorists can't use postage meters? Or steal them? Or use them illicitly at their cover job? What a crock of you-know-what.
(Yes, I know, postage meters have registered serial numbers on them. I also know it isn't hard to obscure or damage the serial number impression, and that postage meters can be stolen and at least used until the cash recorded in them runs out. I'm still not impressed with the "effectiveness" of this measure.)
current mood:  annoyed
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| Saturday, May 10th, 2008
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9:10 pm - Fox news, Field trip, and more MUSH
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First the field trip. Spinning guild went on a visit to a local wool processor this morning in lieu of our regular monthly meeting. It was fascinating and the machines are wonderfully Rube Goldberg and work very well. Wool still gets washed by hand in stainless steel laundry tubs, but after that hand-controlled machines do the picking, carding, drafting, spinning, and plying. All of the machinery except the pin drafter was new, made to order for the cottage operation by small manufacturers. The pin drafter is 50 years old and was rebuilt for this installation. Like so many things, most of this is no longer done in the US at all. Some equipment comes from Canada, but the pin drafter was US made at a time when the US still had woolen mills. The spinning frame, which can spin up to eight strands of yarn simultaneously, was made by a US maker, but he is a small cottage industry himself and manufactures the machines only on order. So you can't just buy one from stock. It was fascinating, and the Shetland lambs she had on the premises were adorable. Watching snowy white wool travel into the carder on a slow conveyor belt and squirt out the other end as ready to spin roving that looked just like soft serve ice cream extruding from a machine was actually amusing.
Saw a baby fox twice this afternoon. He or she was hanging around our parked horse wagon, playing with a rope that is dangling from it. Each time I cam within view, the kit would dash down the old burrow under the corner of the arena. They are big enough now and have their adult coloration so that they are recognizable as foxen, not puppies. When I first saw them they were sort of batlleship grey in color with darker tails and ears. Now they are definitely fox red, with white and black in all the right places. Kyooot! Just like in Disney's film The Fox and the Hound.
Oh, and for those who haven't heard yet, the Transmontania MUSH now has working guest logins so you can check out the scenery if you like. Only a tiny bit is viewable right now, but you're welcome to pop in.
current mood: busy
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| Friday, May 9th, 2008
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4:00 pm - Gah!
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We wondered on Wednesday why the heating and cooling in the building seemed to be goofy. Well, it turns out that yesterday afternoon, entirely by chance, a coworker discovered that the large condensers for the cooling system had been vandalized. Probably on Tuesday night, someone with a large heavy cutter like a bolt cutter attacked them and cut away several large chunks of copper pipe.
Presumably this was with the intention of selling the copper for money. But I estimate that what they took probably didn't get them even $10. Of course they won't be caught, and the repairs will very likely run a couple of thousand. I swear our society is deteriorating so fast that we're all going to be sleeping on the ground and picking fleas off one another inside my own lifetime.
current mood: aggravated
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| Thursday, May 8th, 2008
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9:42 pm - I must be crazy
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Introducing Transmontania MUSH, a North American wildlife simulation role play.
I have one hoof poised over the precipice. MUSH site established and running. Rudimentary web page describing it was thrown together this evening.
Now there's a contact address, and a login screen (and logins for the god Manitou and his wizard assistants Loon, Coyote, and Equus have been established.) Guest logins that will let you view the first scenery will follow in a day or two, I hope.
I don't foresee this giving any competition to FurryMUCK, because it's much more limited and controlled. But let's see if there's enough interest to make it fly for a while...
current mood:  dorky
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| Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
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10:09 pm - Well I guess I asked for that...
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Wednesday! After this many years, I should really know better than to take six days off and agree to be back on a Wednesday. Especially when half the rest of the staff is off too. (End of the year, gotta use up excess vacation.) Considering that just having Wednesday off makes me feel like I had a whole week vacation...
They had two power failures while I was in Ohio. In spite of repeated instructions, verbal and in writing, of what to do if the power has been out, they didn't get all the machines restarted appropriately. (The sequence in which things are done is significant.) And no one remembered to change the backup tape for a whole week. Sigh. Oh, and the cat apparently had a furball attack on my desk.
Got through it anyway, and tomorrow is just a half day with no one else there, so should be much better. Also got a paycheck (payday came while I was in OH) and a formal notice of my annual pay increase. Still doesn't keep up with inflation but it's better than last year. On the other hoof, The price of fuel just went up by another 23 cents a gallon overnight. Then they backed it down by 3 cents between noon and eight in the evening, so the screaming must have been pretty loud.
Playing around with the Alpha at home I realized I can run a MUSH on it. After working out how to make it available most days even though we have dialup (it involves using no-ip.org and doing naughty things to the firewall here) it dawned on me that I could be running a MUSH on the Alpha at work instead. I don't think the bandwidth would be significant overall, and it would tend to peak at night when the library is closed. I've been using the Alpha DS10 there as a private test platform, but it isn't going to be put back into actual work service, and apparently everyone considers it to be my personal property now. As long as I keep using it for testing library stuff, I can justify keeping it active there which in turn would let me create a roleplaying system on it. Does the internet really need another MUSH? Probably not. On the other hand, since the demise of Wild Spirits back in 2003 or so, there hasn't been anything else like it as far as I'm aware. No point in making yet another anthropomorphic system, since Tapestries and FurryMUCK have that arena well covered. But the unique character of Wild Spirits was that there were no humans, elves, or other magical beings. The animals were natural species in their natural forms, but had the ability to talk and reason. They also engaged in a lot of pointless yiffery and drama, but I blame some of that on the administrative structure. This seems worthy of a little more thought at least. Server code is available on the Alpha platform for PennMUSH, MUX, or LambdaMOO. I've got PennMUSH up and running with little effort (well, the software that is; actually setting up the environment would take weeks I think.)
At the moment access is restricted, but if there should be expressions of interest, I'll give out connection details later.
current mood:  exanimate
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| Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
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8:23 pm - Back to work and a meme
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Workshop completed, head stuffed with new concepts and ideas. A much better appreciation of what double weave techniques can do, and, even more useful, at last an understanding of the usefulness of pick-up methods. Because I generally do texture weaves rather than color effects, I've never had to do much pick-up. However, a puffy quilted effect that lends itself to elaborate designs has grabbed my attention. Photos will follow in a few days, once I finish the sample warp.
And here's an utterly geekish meme, lifted from ![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) porsupah. If you have to ask, you don't wnat to know:
history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
140 ssh
126 exit
27 su
22 ls
21 cd
12 sftp
12 man
11 less
10 ps
9 mount
OK, OK, it's a list of the ten most frequently used commands in my Linux shell history, with frequency counts.
current mood: tired
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| Monday, May 5th, 2008
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7:13 pm - That fallen tree
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Here's a photo of the fallen tree that narrowly missed our indoor arena building last Friday. Estimated height of unbroken tree was 50 feet or more. It seems to have hit the oak at left of photo and folded in the middle, thus sparing the building from serious damage. My mare's stall is right inside that building and just to the left of where the branches are touching the wall. Fortunately she wasn't in her stall when it happened anyway.
In other news, today was the first half of the weaving workshop I'm attending. We saw explanations and demonstrations of weaving in two layers at once, and then started on a sampler on our own loom. I'll post a photo of the final result when it is complete. More of the same tomorrow.
current mood: tired
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| Thursday, May 1st, 2008
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10:17 pm - Almost ready
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Had today off to prepare for the trip to OH and the weaving class next Mon-Tues. Of course there were other distractions. We had to take the dogs and cats to the vet for their annual checkup, shots, etc. Ouch. It was more than we can afford, but they deserve their care. Our farrier friend was here yesterday to trim the horses' feet, too. Fortunately he's not as expensive as the vets are. He gave all the feet a good grade, too. Tess is finally back in shape after her near miss with founder two years ago. Now he (and the vet) say I need to start riding her again.
First oriole arrived yesterday. Today we heard and saw another (they are easy to distinguish because the pattern of black markings varies so much between individuals) and then just at dusk, we saw a hummingbird. That's a marker of the shift from spring to summer, I think. After all, it *is* May. Only two birds who are here briefly most years, have yet to put in an appearance: the red headed woodpecker, and the indigo bunting.
The loom is threaded, still needs to be sleyed, but that shouldn't take long. There are 288 warp threads but they get sleyed four to a dent in an 8 dent reed, so it will only take 72 pulls. I should be able to get that done Sunday evening. I found working with such a densely packed warp rather frustrating, because the threads tend to tangle and cling to one another. But it's done anyway.
Just have to pack up in the morning. Fortunately not a lot, one little bag and a few tools and things, in the morning. Now, to bed.
current mood: tired
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| Sunday, April 27th, 2008
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8:40 pm - Fox again
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Well, it hasn't snowed yet. It was in the 50s today, but they're still saying it may snow tomorrow or tomorrow night.
We saw several rose breasted grosbeaks today, and I spotted a white throated sparrow on the feeder (I've been hearing them for weeks, but hadn't seen one.)
At dusk, Gary went out to close the cover on the hot frame and saw the vixen and one of her kits in our lane near the old woodpile. That's full of tunnels and hiding places, so no surprise, and in fact I've smelled her there a couple of times this week. It's good to know she's still around. Hopefully, the other kit is still there somewhere as well.
Chained to the loom, gotta finish what's on there tonight or tomorrow at the latest, so... back to work.
current mood: pleased
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| Saturday, April 26th, 2008
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9:20 pm - Roaring winds and little birds
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How do they do it anyway? I mean, those little tiny birds flitting around out there when the wind is gusting to 45 mph and holding on at a steady 30 or 35? That's how it's been for much of today. At least it was sunny, but nowhere near as warm and pleasant as Wednesday, or even yesterday when it was rainy.
Spring birds are here. Finches gold and red, chipping sparrows, white throated sparrows, song sparrows, robins. Today I saw the first rose breasted grosbeak, but no orioles or hummers yet. All of them seem completely unconcerned by the winds that ought, by rights, to blow them into the next county or crash them into trees and buildings.
One bird didn't make it through the day, though. We haven't actually seen the fox since about Tuesday, but this afternoon I found a pile of chicken feathers in the middle of Tess' pasture. By color, they were from one of the Brits' chickens, but by location I'd say the chicken didn't get there under its own power. The fact that there were still a couple dozen feathers lying there in the grass that hadn't yet been blown away by these persistent winds says to me that the feathers were quite recently deposited. Like maybe in the last hour or two. So the fox is still hunting right around here, even if she and her kits have moved to a different location.
Tess was eager to get out, after being trapped inside by rain the last couple of days. Once we got into the woodlot, though, she wasn't exactly happy with the roaring wind. I had to work to keep her focused and under control, but we're getting so we understand each other better I think. She was very snorty by the time we got through the pasture gate, but she waited for me to take the lead off and step back before she took off kicking up her heels for a gallop. (Thank goodness.)
Glad I wasn't on her back just then. I've stuck on horses before who just ran like that, but it's not my cup of tea. I prefer a much more sedate pace. ;p
current mood: curious
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| Friday, April 25th, 2008
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9:41 pm - Weather day
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This was one of those days when the weather alarm goes off every hour or so with another warning or watch. Tornado watches, severe thunderstorm warnings, flash flood warnings, and so forth. We actually shut everything down at one point because the lightning was so heavy, though we never got much rain beyond a spattering. Now they say it will snow on Sunday. I'd scoff, except that there are actual blizzard warnings out in the Dakotas and Minnesota.
Finally got a good stable graphical display on the Alpha this morning, no thanks to the software. This is the first occasion in many years that I've had to say bad things about Linux. Well, not Linux itself, which runs fine on the Alpha, but the X.org graphical interface, which serves not only Linux, but several flavors of BSD and some other operating environments. When it was XFree86 it was constantly improving. Now that it's X.org, the bugs are multiplying faster than the code. I couldn't get a decent windowing interface on the S3 Trio 64, my original choice for the Alpha because it also works with OpenVMS. There seem to be multiple introduced bugs in the S3 driver (which used to work just fine back on XFree86.) I went on EBay and got an ELSA Gloria L for about $20. That doesn't work with OpenVMS, but should work with Linux. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work with the X.org version of the drivers. Same problems as the S3 Trio, even though it's a totally different driver. So I bought another cheap video card off EBay, this time a Matrox Millennium. I knew that one would work because I have one running in the other Alpha at the library. And it does work.
Unfortunately, while trying to debug the S3 driver, I installed beta versions of several system elements at the request of the software support team. They didn't fix the S3 problems, and it seemed like too much trouble to remove them, so I left them in place. That was a bad mistake. Something in the X.org system turned around and crashed today, hard. It trashed some undetermined number of files on the hard disk on its way down. I'll probably end up having to reinstall everything to get a stable system back out of it. That wouldn't be too big an issue, since there's next to no actual data on there right now, except running a network install over a dialup line takes many hours. Like about 24 to 30 of them.
Maybe it's time to try Gentoo...
current mood: grumpy
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| Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
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8:57 pm - Tuesday
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Fox news: No new photos today, sorry. But... Gary saw the fox chasing the neighbor's terrier again. Or rather, he was retreating and she was just sort of following him to make sure he left. Then she went up between the arena and the creek toward the den where we have seen the kits. He went around the other side of the building to spy on her. Rather than finding kits, he got there just in time to see her pull a dead chicken out of one of the tunnels. She carried it across the creek and reburied it in the wooded area over there, where the dogs rarely go (and if I catch them in there I chase them anyway, reinforcing that.) So, we know she is still stealing chickens when she can. We also know she is finding plenty of food, which is why she has time for relaxation as we've seen in the photos. According to the experts, foxes cache food by burying it when they have an excess, and they do dig it back up to eat later. Mmmm, rotten chicken. Sounds lovely. But... they also eat almost anything, like coyotes and bears. Somewhat spoiled meat may in fact be quite a delicacy to the canine palate, as we all know.
Today was Gary's mom's birthday, so I rode into the city with him and we took her out for lunch. Then we stopped at a local market that has lots of produce, like decent apples (in April!!) for only 98 cents a pound, and various imported things, like teas from eastern Europe and salt cod from (I think it was) Iceland. I was amused by, but did not buy, the "Finest American Cookies" (chocolate chip, made in Poland.) What's a Polish idea of an American style cookie? Well, I'd bet they get it right. Leave out all the butter. Triple the sugar. Fill it up with cheap chocolate bits, no need for good stuff because Americans will eat anything that looks like chocolate...
Speaking of which, Gary has nearly finished moving the pile of sheep poop. All that's left is a flat-topped island about three feet square. It's really funny to see all the sheep trying to squeeze on top of that and stand there (they can't all fit at once.)
current mood: busy
current music: Chris Norman - Man of Constant Sorrow
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| Monday, April 21st, 2008
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10:41 am - Fox Snooze
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(No, not the notoriously biased news team.) Snapped just a couple of hours ago. We returned from taking my car for 15000 mile service and shortly after getting into the house the dogs erupted into barking on both sides and ours joined in. Our two have access to a dog door and both rushed outside, but out there they are restrained by a fence unless we deliberately open the gate to let them out. The neighbors' dogs on both sides, by contrast, run completely loose all the time, invading our buildings and chasing wildlife on our land as well as on theirs. Gary spotted the fox running between our barns, pursued by several terriers. She wasn't working very hard, though they certainly were: barking their lungs out and racing as fast as their stubby legs could go. The entire hunt receded to the north, after crossing the creek to the Brits' side.
A few minutes later, the fox was back, without the dogs, and curled up to rest in the shade of a treetrunk in full view. She watched me with some curiosity as I fiddled with the camera, trying different zoom settings, but didn't move. A squirrel came down the tree to about eight feet above her before realizing his mistake and turning back with a warning chatter. Still no dogs. Finally she got up in a leisurely manner and ambled off toward the henhouse... Practicing her nonchalant look, no doubt. "Who me? Why I'm just out for a walk. Chickens? Why no, I haven't seen any today."
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