The Mandelbear's Musings

06:55 am - Observations before dawn

The half-moon shines through my kitchen window, wrapped in a gentle hazy glow. I imagine ragged clouds, a high haze of cirrus; it's only that I haven't put on my glasses. Outside, the moon and one bright planet disentangle themselves from the sharp fronds of the dragon-tree; the gray sky is lightening toward blue to Eastward, and a lone bird tentatively warms up its voice for the morning chorus.

Once again I set out to write about something specific and recent; older memories persisted in taking over. Are you trying to tell me something, Amy? Am I being stupid? Maybe. Yes.

The roses beside the driveway fence have started blooming, struggling free of a sea of grass and weeds to preen themselves for anyone who might be watching.

Everything I touch seems to fall apart these days.

I seem to be unable to start things. Work, home, wherever; I putter around the edges of my to-do lists without getting very much done. A house full of unfinished projects mocks me wherever I look. A year into my seventh decade, I've lived in this house half my life. The back yard desperately wants weeding.

There are worse things than growing old together. Thank you, Love.

The birds are quiet now, and sunlight brushes golden highlights onto the curtains.

05:40 pm - Puttering about

After a nice walk this morning (Rose Garden) and a short shopping trip with the Cat and Wolfling (BevMo, Barefoot Coffee Roasters, and the bank), I've spent most of the afternoon puttering around the house, mostly in the office. This is basically what I do when the list of things that ought to get done is totally overwhelming. I can either sit around admiring the problem, or nibble away at the edges. It's marginally more productive to nibble.

The main task for the weekend is getting all of last year's banking and investment records put away, along with tracking down a couple of missing pieces that Colleen will find useful. This will eventually result in substantially less clutter, and a nearly-full paper recycling bin.

There are system administration tasks in the queue, too, but those will mostly wait until tomorrow when the main WiFi users are out of the house, or at least otherwise occupied.

08:34 pm - Saturday wrap-up

It's been a fairly productive day. A short walk in the morning, followed by a trip to Gilroy to a jewelry store to get wedding rings. Looked for amethyst stud earings for the Y.D., who just got her ears pierced a few days ago. (The timing for that is a family tradition: my mom gives each of her granddaughters a pair of diamond stud earings on their 16^th birthday. Hers is later this month.)

Came home and installed a little key-holder to go next to the front door; this replaces the cup-hooks displaced by the new curtains. Basically just a 11" piece of pine 1x6 and a handful of assorted cup-hooks, but it matches the decor and gets the job done.

After a quick lunch (the flower_cat made chicken salad for sandwitches and to make some room in the fridge) I took off for Kohls, which is having a sale on dress shirts. Found one that exactly (to these old ursine eyes) matches the Wolfling's wedding dress. Score! No amethyst earings, though.

A couple of assorted stops, followed by a stop at the bank for cash. No other joy, though.

Came home to find the Cat about to order Chinese from a place we've been meaning to try for a while now: they're about 2 blocks from the house on W. San Carlos, and they deliver. Not my favorite, but acceptable.

Finally, I lowered the bed by 2" by removing the castors from the headboard end, and chopping off the bottoms of the foot posts to match. Nearly made a mess of it by assuming things when I should have measured, but it worked out in the end. Much improved, especially for the Cat.

Modulo the earings, which I never did find, it's been a pretty good day. I'll do some practicing next, and then probably go to bed a little early for once. Possibly quite early, depending on how the Cat is feeling.

11:10 pm - Towers of Hanoi: game over

I mentioned in an earlier post the little game of Towers of Hanoi required to clear off the cedar chest so it could be brought downstairs. Well, it's been done (by me, the chaoswolf, and a major assist from madtom_o_bedlam). The chest is downstairs and full of (some of) chaoswolf's wedding presents, and there's a tiny bit more space in the garage attic. Yay!

The bridesmaids' dresses are stunning. Their bouquets are done, too. Having a professional florist in the family helps.

Sleepy bear. We'll give it until 11:30; then I'm going to fall over.

Current Mood: sleepy

09:29 pm - Being productive

Just put up the next-to-last set of living room curtains. (The last set is the bay window; they're less critical because the window is already well-screened by the rose trellis, and because nobody is ever going to want to sleep in that section of the living room, so it doesn't have to be dark there.)

The general idea was to be able to curtain off the small section of the L-shaped living room that used to be the master bedroom, so that guests could sleep there if we had a huge crowd. As it turns out, we're unlikely to have that many people before Consonance, but we didn't know that when we planned it. It'll come in handy sometime, I've no doubt.

Going back in time again, I had a productive day at work: I was able to take a break from writing tech reports (I'm almost done) and do a little bit of actual coding on one of the two major projects I'm involved in. (They're not actually major from a programming point of view, but they'll be very high visibility in perhaps as little as a few months.)

Going still further back, I had a good practice session with Joyce last night. We worked out the chords (Rise Up Singing's chords didn't work for me) and arrangement for Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, which we'll sing at the wedding. Also sang her Ferret Went A-Courtin' and The River, which she liked.

There's still way too much to do.

09:23 am - More weekend, and a look ahead

The other major accomplishment this weekend was clearing the boxes of debris off Colleen's old cedar chest in the garage attic, and clearing enough of a path that Kat and I will be able to get it down. As older daughter, Kat will be inheriting it. I believe Colleen got it from her grandmother... It's been in the attic for well over a decade. Of course, it will still have to be passed down over the edge into the stairwell; the "footpath" between the boxes is too narrow, winding, and cluttered to be usable.

A number of things didn't get done, including data-entry for taxes and scratch tracks for the next album. Hopefully I'll get started on those this evening rather than letting them go until the weekend: that's likely to be busy. Not as insanely busy as the weekend after that, though.

09:08 am - Weekend wrap-up

It's been a moderately productive weekend, though not in the ways I'd originally had in mind. The bedroom computer workstation is up and running. I found an old but mostly-servicable office chair in the garage yesterday (it had been sitting under a box of old lighting fixtures and swing-arm lamps for a decade or two), and audio is up and running as well. Kat's kitchen-gadget box is done except for the latches. She put on the hinges yesterday

Our drive yesterday took us about halfway to Gilroy (some 40 miles south along US101), so Colleen decided to go the rest of the way and hit the outlet mall. Didn't find everything we needed, but got some additional Corelle bowls in the Corning store to replace the ones that have gotten broken over the years, plus a couple more of the medium and large serving bowls. We opted for plain white 20 years ago (when we remodeled the kitchen and discovered that our stoneware didn't fit the new cabinets) figuring that plain white would never go out of style. I'm glad we did. They're elegant enough for company, practically indestructable (though it can be done), and light enough that Colleen can easily handle them even when feeling arthritic.

In addition, I've finally gotten around to fixing my daily mirroring script so that it works even if, as in the current setup, the mirror drive is on another machine from the fileserver. This requires calling it from a login session with ssh-agent running; since I usually stay permanently logged-in on one workstation or the other, that's rarely a problem. I'll add the upload to my hosting service later today, since it's easy now.

07:03 pm - Nice drive

Went out for a walk this morning around the Rose Garden. The garden itself is rather sad-looking at the moment: it was pruned a week or two ago, and although there are lots of leaf-buds and a couple of flowers that presumably were left on from before the pruning, there are no new blossoms yet. Or even buds. The Wolfling had been talking about wanting wedding pictures in the Rose Garden, but in addition to being logistically difficult it looks as though the season will be wrong as well. We'll see.

Came back and had bacon and eggs for a late breakfast, then went out at about noon for a long drive with the flower_cat. I love our drives. They're one of the few times we're by ourselves with no tempting distractions or annoying -- or even welcome -- interruptions. Usually we talk; sometimes we just sit and enjoy each other's company. This time, not surprisingly, we mostly talked about wedding and travel plans. The long drive is about 4:30 -- over to the coast via State Highway 9, up 1 from Santa Cruz to Half Moon Bay, then back via 92 and I280. The coast route takes us past a big produce stand (closed, alas!) and a fishmonger's. Tonight's dinner will be red snapper.

After dropping by the house for a pit stop and to get the snapper into the fridge, we went to Bed, Bath, and Beyond for curtain rods and curtains. At vast expense, but they're pretty and we've been needing them for a long time. The general idea is to be able to curtain off the portion of the living room that used to be the master bedroom, so we can give guests sleeping there a little privacy. As a practical matter, the sewing room (originally a kid's bedroom and small even for that) only handles one person, or a couple with very little luggage.

We decided to head home rather than going to Barnes and Noble to pick up some books that Colleen had ordered. It had been a longish day, and the Cat was getting tired.

07:38 pm - Happy geek on Babbage's Birthday

Spent most of the morning plugging my new recording rig together. This mainly involved clearing off the little tray table I'm using as a desk so as to have enough room for the Delta 1010's rackmounted DAC/ADC box, chasing down patch cables for the two preamps and the headphone amp, plugging all the wall warts into the squid, and routing cables back to the computer.

Work was interrupted by the need to go out to OSH (Orchard Supply Hardware) for a little plastic garden shed they had on sale. [That reminds me: now that there are people in the house I have to assemble an unloading detail. It's all assembled (a major factor in deciding which of the two possible sheds to buy), so the box is bulky but not too heavy.]

There was one nasty moment when I flipped the switch on the squid and the 1010's power light didn't come on. I searched all over for a power switch and finally decided to see if it was waiting for the computer to power up. It was. Dorsai booted up (there are still quite a few configuration tweaks that need doing -- I haven't done serious work in Ubuntu before -- but those can wait) and the meters on envy24control lit up when I snapped my fingers in front of the mics. So it'll all work.

And my Lenovo Thinkpad keyboard arrived this evening shortly before the pizza -- comes with a lovely black leather-looking carrying case, too.

And one of the Wednesday crowd (hellloooonurse) brought along his new radio-controlled dalek.

So I'm a happy geek.

Current Mood: content

08:07 pm - Giving up on the stockings

Somebody other than me put the Christmas stuff away last year. I think someone helping the flower_cat get ready for the January party. I have no fscking clue where the box with the stockings might have gone.

It sounds like the Cat and the Y.D. are setting up to label some dining-room chairs. The stockings may conceivably show up after the Wolfling moves out.

03:49 pm - OK then

The Big Pile of Luggage[tm] in the bedroom closet has been Dealt With. It's nearly as high, but doesn't stick out as far, so at least it's an improvement. More than that, it's been Organized.

• Briefcases, messenger bags, and daypacks are now in The Big Suitcase, which is back up in the garage attic. The Big Suitcase was originally purchased for a trip to Japan where I had to carry some extra gear for a demo; it was cheap, flimsy, and probably wouldn't stand up to many more trips.
• Totebags, zippered totebags, dufflebags, and small shoulder bags are now in separate containers. More random luggage, actually. They're back in the closet, but stacked up neatly.
• Shoulder straps are now hanging up with the coats, snapped to a coathanger.
• Pants that no longer fit are in a couple of plastic bags. Some of them are in decent enough shape to give to Goodwill; others are better suited for being cut up for rags. A couple of size 40's in good condition have been kept -- I currently take 42, and I'm trying to lose weight. (Of course, that's what I said about the 38's, too.)
• A few items in really bad condition have been thrown away.

In addition, I've done a little more magazine and box recycling.

Current Mood: productive

01:51 pm - Seems to be the day for house-cleaning

With both me and the chaoswolf in a mood for cleaning, the game of 3D house-tetris has gotten considerably more exciting. And since our recycling bin was emptied this morning, there's actually a place to put the old magazines, cardboard boxes, and packing material.

(Brief digression: one of the UPSs in the server closet is mourning for its dead battery. Sounds like a cricket in heat. It's been ordered, darnit! Shut up already.)

I've managed to clear enough space in the garage attic for three suitcases so far, which gets them out of the bedroom closet. I think I'll take down the old, oversized rolling suitcase and stuff it full of bags and backpacks from my closet before putting it back up.

Helped the Wolfling tetris bookshelves and boxes yesterday, and pick up recycling today -- there might even be room for her fiancé when he comes down on the 15th. Meanwhile, because the Wolfling has been doing her laundry, there's finally room in the front closet for all of my CD inventory and packing materials. So one can finally get to the cookbook shelves. Yay!

And I've been making room in the studio bedroom corner for the recording system. Soon.

08:49 am - Good morning!

Woke up to find that the flower_cat had been having a bad night of it, and had been awake for about an hour. Any excuse for some serious snuggling. Before she went back to sleep she suggested making muffins.

Krusteaz muffin mix is really trivial: just mix with water and bake. How much work can that be? The package fails to mention what happens when you pre-heat the oven to 400 after a major spill left over from the previous meal. Which the kids failed to mention. (To be fair, it may well have happened as they were taking the lasagna pan out of the oven, and they simply didn't notice.)

The billows of white smoke were certainly noticable, though; took me three go-rounds to get it reasonably clean. There will be oat-bran muffins, though. In about 4 minutes.

Meanwhile our new Caldera cooktop is working wonderfully; it provided an excuse for me to go out to the Container Store yesterday and buy new spice racks. We'd had an expanding plastic three-tier shelf, but the part of it closest to the cooktop had melted in an incident involving the back burner of the previous cooktop. Picked up a couple of last-minute gift items at the same time, and got in a little walking along Santana Row.

Current Mood: awake

09:45 pm - Cooking with gas

On the way home from Stanford we stopped off at our favorite local household-appliance pusher dealer and ordered a Caldera SSK365 36"gas cooktop. It'll be delivered and installed on Tuesday.

We've had our Kitchenaid cooktop for about 7 years now and it's given us a fair amount of trouble. Recently it's developed a gas leak somewhere -- not enough to be dangerous (yet), but enough for the flower_cat to notice. Out it goes. The Caldera looks easier to clean, too.

The irony of the name is not lost on me, but as long as they don't change it to SCO and start suing their customers I don't mind.

09:10 pm - Weekend wrap-up: Puttering along...

Modulo my walks, a drive with the flower_cat last night, and a outing with the Cat and the chaoswolf this afternoon that I'll get to later, my weekend has mostly been spent puttering around the house. That's what I do when I'm trying to avoid, you know, real work.

I've reluctantly come to the realization that, if I haven't read one of those stacked-up magazines in the decade or so they've been sitting there, I'm probably not going to get to them in the next decade, either. And the ones that I have read, that are sitting in piles in the garage attic? Recycle time.

Note to self: it's time to stop when the dust starts making you sneeze.

Today was very pleasant. At the Cat's suggestion I went out this morning and got bagels and lox for brunch. Yum. House of Bagels might not be a real New York bakery, but it's close enough. Along the way I stopped at the nearby Whole Paycheck Foods to get some nose-watering salt. I asked for "uniodized" and got a blank look, but then I noticed the three-pound boxes of kosher salt on the top shelf of the salt section. Score! Less than $3 for pure sea-salt with guaranteed, God-gets-mad-at-you-if-you-cheat no additives. )Tried it this evening: works just fine.)

After brunch the Cat and I took the Wolfling to Stanford -- it seems she's been curious about the place where her parents met and fell in love, not to mention other places on campus she's been hearing about. As it turns out, the coffeehouse appears to be either defunct or being renovated -- what used to be the main entrance is now a bike shop; the tables are there but there's no sign on the door and the place looks far too clean to be in actual use.

Then she spotted the bookstore, so we took a side-trip. It turns out that, regardless of its total absence on their web site, they do have a shelf for alumni, student, and faculty music. I'll go back during the week when there's a manager on site.

We also stopped at the museum to wander around the Rodin sculpture garden (always one of my favorites), and looked at the Quad and its centerpiece, the Memorial Church. It was locked -- I don't remember it ever being locked during my time on campus -- but the mosaics on the front are as gorgeous as ever, and you could get a glimpse of some of the stained glass through the window on the front doors.

Did I mention the Golden Bough concert last night? I thought not.

Computer geekery a post or two upwhen.

10:56 pm - The rest of the day

Not to be confused with the day of rest, which it wasn't particularly.

A pleasant walk drive, a pleasant talk, along the briny beach... Went for a long drive with the flower_cat; we spent almost all of it talking about furniture. The plan is to swap the positions of the couch (moving it from the living room to the "dining room" portion of our L-shaped living/dining room) and the dining table. This will free up a bit of space in both places; the dining table and its six chairs will eventually go to the chaoswolf.

The real advantage of this move is that we can install curtains to close off the "dining room" area when guests want to sleep on the couch (which turns into two single beds or one king-size, as needed). The Cat also wants to clean out the sewing room and put in a single-bed-size chaise lounge/futon. The sewing room is tiny -- we should have made it bigger, but it's too late now. It was fine for the kids when they were babies, so it seemed like a good idea at the time...

After coming back to a delicious lamb stew that the Cat had set to cooking (in a cast-iron pot in the oven, at 300 degrees) before we left, I spent a couple of hours printing up the final batch of About Bleeding Time inserts, and putting together another 15 two-disk sets. Because I foolishly ordered only 250 blanks, and have turned a few of those into coasters, I'm going to end up a bit short of the run of 256. But since I'm unlikely to sell out any time soon, I'm not going to worry about it much.

Public Service Announcement: Anyone who wants to place an order (for $20 sets, or a wholesale order) to be delivered at OVFF, just comment. Most of the range between C8 and FE is available; the interfilk set will be CO and DE. If you just want a disk or three, order from CD Baby -- it's much more convenient. They have 10 in stock, last time I checked. I've been very lazy about contacting dealers. Stupid bear.

09:27 am - Annoyances

Picked up a couple of chipset coolers yesterday hoping to silence the video card that I borrowed from work a week or two ago. Only to find that the heatsink is glued onto the chip, and the fan is non-standard. I am now looking for an AGP video card that's old enough to be fanless and new enough to have a DVI connector. That, or banish it to the bedroom recording studio with an old, quiet video card and the Delta-1010 sound card. Need to do that anyway, since it's time to start recording again. I'm going to go down to Micro Center this afternoon and rummage through their bargain bin, if they have one this week.

My left shin is grumping at me; I'll probably have to take it easy on my walk today. Rose garden, I think.

The office is a mess. So's our bedroom, which I told the kids I'd clean up (as part of a challenge which we all failed miserably at).

Current Mood: awake

09:52 pm - The weekend challenge

We were supposed to have Stanley Steamer in to clean the carpets upstairs in the kids' rooms, which were supposed to have been picked up. Ha! OK, my fault for not checking last night. And vacuumed -- I was pretty sure they needed vacuuming, but the flower_cat assured me that it wasn't necessary. I understand your memory is the second thing to go as you get older. I forget the first.

Meanwhile, the office is a mess, and it would be nice to get our bedroom carpet cleaned, too.

So...

OK kids -- super_star_girl, chaoswolf -- this means you. $20 each if you can pick up and vacuum your rooms by Sunday night. Dinner out at Kobe if you can do it by dinnertime. And an extra $10 each if I don't have our bedroom in the same state. (The office will take longer, but almost everything on the floor is in boxes now.) "Pick up", by the way, means all loose stuff in boxes. Not piled on top of the bed or shoved under the desk. You can put the boxes on top of the bed, or whatever, on the day the cleaners come.

08:43 pm - 15 minutes?

All it takes to stay ahead of clutter is 15 minutes/day. According to my handy LJ tag search, the last time I spent that time was April 13th. I have just spent roughly the last two hours decluttering the office, and the results are barely noticable.

(Of course, that's partly because one of the two boxes I took up to the attic came out of the filing cabinet -- all of the tax returns and raw data for the 1990's. That was so I would have room for the 2006 file, so that I'd have someplace to put the rapidly-accumulating 2007 data. But I haven't started filing that, yet.)

In order to finish off the box of 2006 everything-but-the-taxes, I had to add the banking and investment statements. Which were in a pile under the 2007 statements. Which were being overtowered by the pile of charity requests for the last four months or so. Which are now in a box that is sitting where the 2006 box used to be. Which is on top of the previous batch of charity requests. (We save up most charity requests and sort through them in December when we're feeling generous and have a better idea of how much money we're ending up with. We may have to distribute the load better, or at least do more triage on the fly.)

The result is that several piles are shorter, and there's more room in the filing cabinet, but the total number of boxes of largely-unsorted stuff has remained roughly constant. Discouraging.

Elsewhen today, I spent a couple of hours uncluttering the file server. Next post upwhen, to make it more easily skipped by those not interested in the details of which directory ends up where.

I'm estimating that we'll be in this house for roughly another decade (after which we will most likely be forced to sell it to pay for our retirement). It will probably take us approximately that long to clean out the garage attic.

09:20 pm - Not getting a whole lot done

OK, I got in a three-mile walk (dead flat -- around the rose garden), went out shopping for kitchen gadgets with the flower_cat, and did a little cleanup in the office. But other than that about all I've done today is play whack-a-mole with computers.

I still haven't done a backup for today. On the other hand, I'm kind of glad they're not done automatically, since otherwise there's grave danger of making a bad one or propagating filesystem corruption onto the backup drive. Not fun.

At some point I'll have to do a re-install on trantor and get it back into operation. Because it's a workstation I'm willing to trust the disk some more, now that I've rebuilt the filesystems and let mke2fs do its destructive (write/verify with four patterns) test on them. Meanwhile I've been using harmony, the former recording box. It's required a few configuration changes, since it wasn't originally meant as a general-purpose workstation. Most recently that meant fixing the email configuration so that I could actually, you know, send email from it.

Things are complicated by the fact that I've been planning to upgrade the office workstation (partly to take advantage of the DDR2-800 RAM stick I originally bought for trantor under the mistaken impression that it would work in a board designed for -400) and use trantor's CPU and possibly case as the new bedroom studio recording box, because it's practically dead silent.

So that raises the question of whether I should just skip a step, install the new soundcard, and configure it as the recording machine from the start. Probably not: that would need a larger and more trustworthy disk. Last thing I need is to have a disk go out just before -- or during -- a recording session with out-of-town artists. I've already been through that once. No thanks. But I'm not ready to buy another disk right now; I could set it up now and copy the disk later.

Decisions! (Grump.)

09:15 am - Off to a bad start

You know it's not likely to be a good day when it starts off with:

1. A failed backup due to I/O errors.
2. Unreadable blocks on the root partition.
3. A clogged toilet in the front bathroom.
4. A flaky KVM switch.

The KVM switch is working now, the toilet is unclogged (it still leaks, but that's a separate problem), and I'm not too concerned about the disk: it's one of the old 200GB Maxtor IDE drives and, being on a workstation, it's eminently replaceable (though I'm not looking forward to reconstructing the package list). The backup drive seems to be OK; it's a new-ish Seagate 400GB SATA and spends most of its time mounted read-only.

It was time to do some computer work anyway, but that doesn't mean I'm not annoyed. And did I mention that I have to clean my desk?

07:46 am - Pinging the Younger Daughter

Hey, super_star_girl! I understand you're trying to clear all of the Barbie dolls out of your room.

(From this post by wcg.)

09:30 pm - Going...

At this point I've packaged up all but about a dozen of the pre-orders -- mostly the international ones, plus a handful that came in too late to get into the database. Hand-delivered two yesterday, and sold a couple more. I have a few out with the chaoswolf in hopes that she might sell a couple at the BASFA meeting. (9:42 she sold 2 sets and a single.)

But there's light at the end of the tunnel -- I'll have the rest shipped by the end of the week. I've built sets numbered through BF plus a scattering of requested or special ones past that, and have started burning my last spindle of 50 blank ABT's. (I only ordered 250, which was probably a mistake, since it's supposed to be an edition of 256 and a couple ended up as coasters. I'll have to label a few blanks myself if I ever sell that many.)

Not that I've done much else today, apart from a 4-mile walk and a shopping expedition to Sears, which netted a pair of folding plastic sawhorses, a power sander, and a canister vacuum cleaner. The latter was the main reason for the expedition: it was top-rated in Consumer Reports, and it was on sale this weekend. (Actually I got the next model up for the same price I would have paid for the one CR tested.)

Current Mood: productive

06:56 pm - Did I mention that the Starport is open?

Yeah, well... Grand Central Starport is open today and tomorrow for anyone in the area who wants to borrow some coolth and a fast net connection.

After a nice 5-mile walk (yay! finally!) and a light lunch, I set out to the dangerously seductive Southern Lumber for shelving and a couple of tools. We'd gotten Elfa shelf standards and brackets yesterday, but not the necessary 4-ft 1x8's. And I know there's a level in the house, but I couldn't find it, and the level in my ancient and cheap combination square was rattling loose in its housing and effectively worthless. Picked up a couple of paintbrushes, too, after determining that I did have Varathane Diamond Finish.

... And some sandpaper for the ancient Black&Decker electric sander, which died after about three shelves. Out of ten. Turned up a hand sander, and carried on: I knocked off the corners with a block plane, and chaoswolf finished off with the sander. Power tools are useful, but hand tools are more satisfying.

I set up five plastic lawn chairs in lieu of sawhorses. Varathane Diamond is a fast-drying, water-based finish; in 95-degree weather it was dry to the touch on the first board by the time I finished with the fifth. Two coats on both sides of five shelves by the time the Wolfling was finishing up the sanding on the last one. We'll do the rest tomorrow; I was wiped.

Had some of the flower_cat's yummy sangria and finished installing the Wolfling's shelf standards.

Went over to lisa_marli's party for a couple of hours, and to deliver pre-order disks to her and capplor, who I knew would be there because she'd (they'd?) stopped by to ask for directions while I was outside finishing. I still owe Robin a disk -- I didn't pack enough to cover her freebies. Sold one numbered set (can't rightly call them per-order sets anymore).

Now I'm back home, munching salami-and-cheese and finishing up another glass of sangria. Happy Bear.

10:08 pm - It's very quiet around the house

Our house-guest is gone for a couple of days, our older daughter is off on an extended visit to her fiance, and for the first time in months I don't have mixing or editing to do. I'm done, too, with the seemingly endless succession of test disks to listen to. There are still tasks left: I have to burn bonus disks, pull together the customer list, and let's not forget practice, all before ConChord, less than three weeks away.

But it's the quiet that strikes me. I'm not used to it anymore.

08:35 am - Waiting for...

... Godot proofs. The artwork has been received and is being scrutinized. Hopefully all is in order; I'll be getting proofs (as links to PDFs) tomorrow if all goes well.

... proofs a dishwasher. When I got home from OSCon I was immediately greeted by a sink and dishwasher full of dirty dishes. This isn't too unusual. But after running the dishwasher, the situation was essentially unchanged. This is unusual; fortunately we've been expecting it, and the flower_cat has been closely following the Western Appliance ads in the paper. Our Bosch dishwasher is due to arrive this morning. The only color they had in stock was black, so it'll match our oven but not the cabinets or the fridge. But it'll make our Goth-girl daughters happy.

09:25 the dishwasher is here. The old one has been leaking; some cleanup will be required. Work will have to wait.

12:00 pm - OK, that explains a lot

Just after Baycon cflute and I listened to the album on my livingroom stereo and Callie noticed that the bass was exceptionally boomy. The effect largely went away on my high-quality headphones or my studio monitors (which, admittedly, don't have a whole lot of bass).

Giving it another listen in the livingroom, I finally realized why: It's not that my speakers are particularly bass-heavy, it's all the junk piled in front of them. In particular, piled right in front of the tweeters. It's not that they have a lot of bass, it's that the treble is being attenuated. A lot.

I feel much better now that I understand it.

09:34 pm - Westercon so far

I've already mentioned the concesrt, which I think (after listening to the recording this morning) nwent fairly well -- only two or three major flubs. Moving on to the panels.

I misremembered on Saturday -- I only had three panels. They originally had me down for moderating all of them, but I insisted on no more than one per day. Next tine I'll also remember to make sure I don't have anything that starts after 4pm. It's hard enough squeezing in dinner.

Saturday's panels were, in order, "Open Source" [unremarkable], "Are You Secure?" [which I moderated -- tips on securing your PC; also unremarkable], and "Blogging" [Yeah, I do that. The latest LJ kerfuffle got a mention].

The really fun one was yesterday's panel on DRM [which I moderated]. I also proved to be the panel's resident expert on DRM technology, which I guess isn't too surprising considering what I've been working on recently. [No, not DRM, but secure docunent transmission.] The discussion quickly shifted into the economics of free media distribution, since everybody in the room agreed that the proponents of DRM are fighting a rearguard action against the inevitable. Some interesting input from Scott Sigler, a panelist who's making a living off Creative Commons licensed books, and AJA in the audience.

The most interesting thing to me was the fact that many people who download free copies of a book or song go on to order everything by that artist/author. Shouldn't have been surprising -- I've done it myself. AJA is now thinking about selling boxed sets of Heather Alexander's CDs. I think my idea about selling unmixed Audacity projects as "super singles" interested him as well. That one panel was worth the whole con for me.

The other panel yesterday was the one on History of Filk. Unremarkable, and rather thinly attended.

I wasn't on any panels today, but enjoyed the one on songwriting. And I've been enjoying the concerts, of course. Kat and Kendra's was particularly impressive -- these are kids I've known since they were little; they've become young women with excellent voices. I'm looking forward to hearing more from them.

I missed the final concert yesterday, and will probably miss the last one tonight -- I have to take the Y.D. home at 10:30 so I can get her out of bed in time for summer school. Grumf. And then there's that little matter of our new garbage collection service, which requires us to have the bins out on the curb by 6am in the goddamn morning on Monday! What corrupt political appointee had that brilliant idea?

Current Mood: happy

05:34 pm - Mostly not what I'd planned on doing

Got up ungodly early, for some reason -- 4:30 or so and I couldn't get back to sleep, so I got up around 5am. Grah. Figured I'd get some work done on the network setup while nobody but me was using it. Hah!

Went out for a walk (4 miles, same route by Los Gatos Creek as yesterday), came back a little after noon, had some leftover ribs, and got back to hacking the gateway. Almost made it. There are still some serious oddities on selkit's machine, but I think that any machine that gets its IP address from DHCP should get the fast connection now. Still need to finish making the switch for the static IPs. And at least the laptop isn't pretending to be a router anymore.

About the time I was finished stabilizing the network, the chaoswolf was in serious need of some attention. Since her fiancé was busy, I went up and mounted the shelf standards and tabletop for her hobby center. There was a certain amount of stupidity involved -- it didn't look level, so I remounted one of the standards only to find the screws going in the same holes they'd been in before. But that's done.

So, at this point in the writing of this post, is the front yard rose-pruning I've been meaning to get to all week. Part of the problem is that I only think about it when I'm actually looking at them, which means going in or out of my car, and the pair of pruning shears that's normally on or near the front porch has disappeared. So has the pair that lives in the shed under the back stairs. Fortunately, I keep a pair hidden in my toolbox in the office. The good pair.

The net result is that I haven't gotten a darned thing done on the album, but what I have done definitely needed doing. I probably still have time to work on the bonus album, which is very close to done. But I need to get printed blanks ordered and figure out exactly what I'm going to burn on them, if I'm to have them in hand by Baycon.

If anyone out there has any experience making dual-session (CD-Extra) disks, and especially doing it in session-at-once mode on Linux, let me know. I'll be burning them at home: the short-run duplicators I've found will take uploaded audio files or ISO files, but won't let you mix 'em. Foo.

07:31 pm - Lights! Action! or something like that

As it turns out, the problem I was having with the light in the office appears to have been, not the fixture, not the switch, not the wiring, but the bulb. But... that was the first thing I checked. At least I think it was. I distinctly remember throwing a bulb away. Possibly the fixture, which was heavily insulated, contributed to the second bulb's untimely demise. Perhaps they both came from a bad batch. More likely I threw the wrong one away.

I'm definitely getting a lot more light without the stupid fixture, though. Looks like heck, but I think I can fix that, and if I can't I can get another fixture that works better and takes 25W compact fluorescent bulbs.

09:38 pm - Three steps forward...

...two and a half steps back. The new vocals on "TEOTW" are iffy at best. Probably could use another go. The others came out mostly OK, though I'm not entirely satisfied with the tambourine track on "I Wanna Be a Webmaster", either.

Meanwhile I jury-rigged a replacement light fixture in the office -- the light started blinking about a month ago, and I didn't have time to deal with it then. It's still blinking, which means that the problem is in the switch (manageable) or the wiring (total pain in the arse to fix). The fixture needed replacing anyway -- it wouldn't take a big enough bulb.

08:26 pm - Friday the Thirteenth, part 2

Went to work around 11:15, which meant that I got there in time to have yummy shrimp won-ton soup at our little deli. I try not to eat there more than once or twice a week.

Went out for a 2-mile walk, feeling at a rather low energy level. I'm wondering: I had a Flexeril last night -- it's a muscle relaxant, and my back's been hurting for the last couple of days. But it's also a CNS depressant, and I have a history of reacting, um, inconsistently to depressants. Could that have had something to do with my depression this morning?

Work on my car was done around 3:30, so about 4:30 I headed out to pick it up. Ended up costing over a grand -- about twice what I had been expecting -- even with help from the extended warranty. Good thing I got paid today.

Picked up gin at BevMo, and rat-sized glue traps at Home Depot. The gin is now in the fridge, and the traps upstairs in the garage attic.

Got home and found catsittingstill's homebrew CD, I Promised Eli, waiting for me. Combined with quadrivium's CD, Courting My Muse, which arrived Wednesday, there's been a certain amount of fanboy squeeing in the house. (Cat's CD is being published by samizdat, by the way -- I got my copy on the condition that I'd burn more copies as needed. The track list, btw., is here. If you're not local to me, Cat can probably point you at somebody closer.)

Now I'm going to try to ignore the siren song of my new DSL line and its makeshift gateway, and try to get some editing done.

11:00 am - Friday the thirteenth, part 1

I seem to be depressed these days -- it's not helping me get stuff done. The blasted rat traps have completely defeated me, and the flower_cat finds me hard to be around. Which feeds back, of course.

On the other hand, I put down guitar tracks for "Wannabe" and "TEOTW", so that's good. Maybe they'll even be useable -- I probably need to get in one more round, but instead I'm heading off to work. We'll see.

12:17 am - And cabbages, and kings

Which is to say that a great many chores and to-do list tasks got done this afternoon and evening, but very little actual work. No more recording, for example.

But I did, finally, go through the Pile of Stuff to the Left of the Keyboard. tPoSttLotK is where I tend to toss paperwork and such that doesn't have to be handled immediately, but looks as though it's going to need attention in the next month or so. What this often means is that stuff gets ignored until it's no longer relevant, but in this case I found a couple of health-related receipts that I'd been looking for for a couple of weeks. And a great deal of clutter has been eliminated, though there's still a small pile of things that will need attention soon.

Going back in time to the start of the afternoon, I found out that my car is waiting for some parts -- it'll be ready tomorrow. The front struts and bushings will get fixed under warranty; flushing and replacing the transmission fluid, power-steering fluid, and coolant will cost me.

Tried to set rat traps in the garage attic, and failed miserably, nearly getting a finger broken for my trouble. I'll go get glue traps on the way home tomorrow.

Went out for dinner with the flower_cat. We wanted to try someplace new, so of course the kids wanted to stay home and have something familiar. OK with us -- we went to Los Gatos to try Transilvania, a Romanian place we'd been eyeing for months. It is to yum!

We split an appetizer of grilled portabello mushrooms with marinara sauce and melted blue cheese, and a glass of a heavy, dark red wine whose name I unfortunately failed to catch. Then I had the sarmale (ground beef, pork, and rice rolled in pickled cabbage leaves, served with polenta, pickled cabbage, and sour cream on the side), and Colleen had the bulsz (polenta layered and baked with romano and mozarella cheese and served with a dollop of sour cream on top). Finished off splitting a serving of savarina -- sponge cake soaked with syrup and rum, with whipped cream and cherry preserve.

After dinner I got DNS going on the interim gateway (took all of 10 minutes), followed by the aforementioned clutter reduction.

And now it's time for bed. Past time.

01:34 pm - Waiting for Godot...

... or whatever the AT&T installer's name is. My window was 8am-5pm, so I can't formally gripe yet, but if he's not here by the time I post this I'll call Sonic and see if they know anything I don't. I have the DSL modem plugged in, with no sign of a signal.

09:34 pm - Network

( Wherein the Mandelbear goes into geeky detail about networking hardware, network topology, and SATA drives. )

Next on today's schedule is organizing the credit-card receipts for tax data-entry. (The checkbook is easier, but I did that Tuesday.)( done)

Current Mood: geeky

05:29 pm - That's better...

After a couple of meetings, one of which started at noon and dovetailed neatly into a very productive two-hour conversation which will almost certainly end up with an invention disclosure, I came home to put the Y.D.'s desk together. First thing I noticed was a piece of crumpled-up paper on the floor by the diningroom table that turned out, on closer inspection, to be the missing Ikea receipt for the damaged desk. Yay! Fell out of somebody's pocket, from the look of it.

Put the desk together, which took about 2 hours. The super_star_girl said, "It's just as pretty as it was in the showroom!" So she's happy, which means I'm happy. I don't think I was in any shape to assemble the thing last night -- daylight and rest were essential. Just installed her computer. Her sister's old Canon printer is missing somewhere in the garage attic, but everything else is up and running.

The DSL install is scheduled for Friday, and the modem is on its way via UPS. Still need to run cat5 to the demarc.

Still need to do taxes. I'll start data-entry tonight. Still have three or four parts to record, and a half-dozen or so songs to mix. Probably Friday, since I have to be here for the DSL install.

10:46 pm - Busy day, but not the way I wanted it

Spent most of the morning at Ikea with the chaoswolf shopping for shelving and a desk chair for her room. Meanwhile, Stanley Steamer came in and steam-cleaned the carpets in her room, super_star_girl's room, the upstairs hallway, and the stairs. I then spent the entire blasted afternoon with the Wolfling putting her bed together. Made some absolutely stupid mistakes putting the shelf together: I was pretty punchy at that point and shouldn't have been allowed near a screwdriver. One screw -- fortunately not a perticularly critical one -- is missing; I think it's the one I dropped when handed the wrong one at a critical moment. Another of the same sort fell into a crack from which it will take a magnet to retrieve it. The desk will have to wait until morning.

There are some things about Ikea's design that are very clever, and others that are absolutely infuriating.

Of course, come 4:00pm the flower_cat was absolutely furious at me for not having gone shopping with the Y.D., who needed a new mattress for her bed. Sorry, Love, there's only one of me, and two peoples' worth of work to be done. Luckily the Cat was able to get the mattress after I assured her there was enough headroom left on her credit card, and that I had allowed for the weekend's expenses in the budget. Yummy chili for dinner, which means leftover chili for breakfast tomorrow. Yay!

Nothing done on the album, obviously, but I did manage to download all the preorder details from PayPal, which is something I've been putting off for some reason. 39 web preorders total. Add the 23 paper preorders already entered, and 10 more since Consonance, and we get a grand total of 72 (not allowing for a couple of 2-set orders, a couple of contributor and promotional copies, and the two Interfilk auction packages). There are plenty of pre-order packages left, folks!

Tomorrow I get to take the Y.D. desk shopping, finish helping the Wolfling put her bed together, and hopefully have enough time and energy left over for some tracks. And start the taxes. Did I mention that I still haven't started the taxes? At least things are organized. I could do it in a weekend at this point, if I had a weekend free.

07:08 pm - I love it when a plan comes together!

After looking unsuccessfully for an isolation transformer at Guitar Showcase over the weekend, I ordered a Rolls "Buzz Off" from Musician's Friend on Monday. Since the box was $60 and they have free shipping on orders over $99, I threw in a couple of other items including a mic stand bag, low profile mic stand base, and a couple of Swirlygig SwirlyBigger drink holders, which fit larger-diameter stands like guitar stands and music stands. (Added: and they even threw in a couple of free microphone cables.) They arrived today.

The Buzz Off was everything I had hoped for: with an isolation transformer on each end of the line, 100ft of Cat5 sounds, at least to my ageing ears, just like nothing at all. That means that I can leave my fast, quiet recording box in the bedroom and, thanks to X11 over gigabit ethernet, edit in comfort on the 17" monitor in the office.

In other news, much of the flinging of trash into the dumpster seems to have been done already by my hard-working, helpful (??!) kids. Or their hard-working, helpful clones. I'm not complaining either way.

Current Mood: happy

10:35 pm - Down in the dumps(ter)

As of this morning there's an enormous green dumpster looming in our driveway. The name "$99 Dumpster" is somewhat misleading -- delivery and pickup is $99, but that doesn't cover roughly $200 in dump fees. Doesn't matter -- we still need it. The amount of junk in the kids' rooms was simply amazing, and we can use the opportunity to clean out the back yard and garage as well.

I'm going to have to get some work gloves, aren't I?

I'm also pretty sleepy (though a lot less so than an hour ago before I got up and put away the dishes). I don't think I slept very well last night.

And for some reason a couple of health care receipts have gone missing. Probably at work.

(Aside to the chaoswolf, who finally figured out that a company going rapidly down the tubes, with a pair of bosses arguing with one another in front of the employees, is causing a large part of her stress at the moment: congratulations and good luck. This will let you get your AA at least a quarter earlier, so the next job should be a lot better.)

I think tomorrow I can get get started on the taxes, and hopefully finish recording over the weekend. Along with everything else. That means I have to go through the piles of paper that have accumulated on my desk. Again. Had to get done anyway.

Current Mood: sleepy

02:28 pm - That's better...

After my walk I went back to Guitar Showcase in search of a second isolation transformer, but realized on the way over that I might not need one. Just as well, since they didn't have any on hand. All I really had to do was move the transformer from the office end of the cable to the bedroom studio end, which put a balanced signal on the entire cable run by decoupling it from ground. The result is still noticeable, but not nearly as bad. It's essentially inaudible (at least to these ageing ears) at my usual listening level.

I could do even better if the monitors had balanced inputs, but a quick look at the manual shows that they don't. I'll have to look for another isolation transformer eventually, but it's good enough now.

11:12 pm - Cheops' Law of cable building

Everything takes longer and costs more.

Today it was mostly "takes longer". It took much longer than I expected to put the mic stands back where they belong, clear a space for the computer, shut down and disconnect the computer in the office, and bring it back up in the bedroom studio.

Then it took a lot longer than I would have liked to get the Cat6 cable run back in operation. It didn't work when I installed it -- I figured (correctly, as it turned out) that the problem was screwed-up plugs. I ended up cutting off both ends' plugs and connecting them to a patch panel on the office end, and a modular jack in the garage attic. Naturally this required several tests, each of which meant a round trip up and down the garage stairs. Par for the course.

This freed up the the old Cat5 run I'd been using, leaving me free to use it as I'd originally intended: to run audio for editing, so I don't have to waste two hours moving the box the next time. It took longer than I expected. Surprise. And I wasn't expecting the sound quality to be particularly good, but I wasn't expecting nearly as much 60Hz hum as I ended up getting, either. Not nice

(A few minutes later) An isolation transformer (Furman ISOpatch) helps a lot. And I'll be the rest of the problem is caused by the fact that there are two independent paths for what is really the same ground. (A few minutes later) Maybe not: shorting the two grounds at this end doesn't seem to help, and I know they're shorted at the other end. I may just be stuck with it for now.

If I had real differential signals this probably wouldn't be a problem. At least now it's down to the point where it's not really noticable when I'm actually editng. So I could edit now, except that I'll need to go to bed soon.

06:24 pm - Cat toy (2)

The smoker/grill has been assembled. Took 3-4 hours altogether. I'm not sure whether it really counts as exercise, but it feels like exercise -- I'm exhausted, and my back hurts (though not a whole lot) from bending over too much. And my runny nose is back, bringing a headache along for the ride. But the smoker -- our anniversary present from Mom -- is assembled, and the flower_cat is happy, so I'm happy.

The light in the office is out -- it appears to be a problem with the wiring, not the bulb. I'm making do with a clamp light from the bedroom. Grumble.

There's a glass of gin in my future hand.

06:10 pm - Cat toy

With an anniversary present of $250 from my Mom burning a hole in our figurative pockets, and the flower_cat having done a huge amount of research beforehand, we set out this morning to buy a smoker. No, not a cigarette smoker -- what would we want with one of those? This kind of smoker. Actually, it's both a smoker and a grill -- you can burn charcoal in either the firebox or the smoker chamber. Pretty cool. Or hot, as the case may be.

Since the place where we bought it wanted $85 for delivery, and since we'd cleverly driven in my car, the Cat came back (there's a song in there somewhere) on the way home from Pantheacon and had them load it into her van. Better them than me. The chaoswolf and I unloaded it (two huge boxes, and heavy as heck; I was glad to have bought a folding hand-truck last year); it is now sitting in boxes on our driveway/patio waiting to be assembled, which will probably take me much of tomorrow afternoon.

10:20 pm - Wheee!

Thanks to a Fry's loss-leader -- a 5-port GigE switch for $7/port -- last weekend's cable-stringing, and a new hole in the garage-to-bedroom wall, I now have Gigabit Ethernet all the way back to my recording machine. This makes me happy, and will make slinging audio files back and forth a lot faster. With a little more work, I'll be able to run the line out from the onboard soundcard back to the office over some of the extra Cat5 pairs I've freed up.

Apart from a bit of easily-corrected stupidity with my edits to the boot menu, a bit of strangeness with the display configuration, and the inability of the machines to see the built-in WiFi card, the tablet computers at work are actually working. They'll be good enough for a demo, anyway.

07:55 pm - Sunday update

Verified that I can now burn copies of About Bleeding Time using an up-to-date Debian Etch system. I can. Took one into the car to listen to on my way to and from my walk. Oddly, it was silent during the first track; this probably has to do with its being a mixed-mode disk. Needs to be further investigated.

After my walk, I came home and got my main desktop system, harmony, ready to move into the bedroom studio for some recording. This took a bit longer than I anticipated thanks to not all the old configuration (from the last time it was the recording machine) having been properly moved off the old disk. But it's there now, and it works; I tested it by recording The Toolmakers [ogg] [mp3], which a couple of people have inquired about.

After that I got involved in one of those trivial projects that somehow ends up taking a great deal more time and effort than one expects. For some time, I've been planning to upgrade the ethernet going to the back of the house to Cat6 and Gigabit. The plan was simple: attach one end of the 100-foot Cat6 patch cord I bought at Fry's a few weeks ago to the end of the old 50-ohm coax cable that I'm no longer using, attach some nylon twine so I could repeat the process eventually, and pull it all through from the office.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. As it turned out, the coax was badly snagged in the attic. It took several trips back and forth between the garage attic, the side yard where the conduit runs (and is, fortunately, accessible through a couple of L-couplings with removable covers), and the house attic (which is only accessible through a hatch in the Younger Daughter's room), and about an hour and a half.

04:06 pm - Annoying Beeps, part 3

About a week ago I was plagued by an intermittent, loud beep at intervals of about 10 minutes. It seemed to be coming from somewhere near the kitchen, which ruled out one of the UPS boxes complaining about a dead battery. Besides, they all looked happy. So did the old portable phone, which runs down its battery rather quickly if left off its charger.

It stopped after a couple of days without my having had the patience to track it down.

Today I rediscovered the third source of beeps: the fire alarm down the hall from the kitchen, complaining about having been silenced. Guess how I discovered that.

10:39 pm - Switchplates

When I posted about the Dickens Fair I forgot to mention the pewter switchplates we bought for the living room and kitchen. A dragon on the kitchen one, and a pair of fairies on the one for the living room by the door. The castle might have been even more appropriate, come to think of it.

These were both double switchplates; there are spots for singles in the LR, kitchen (another dragon, I think), and bedroom (fairies).

Current Mood: tired

09:48 pm - Sunday night update

Got up 8ish, thankful for the time change. There was enough time to grab some coffee and leftovers for breakfast and start a load of dishes before heading off to the wilds of Benicia for semy_of_pearls and shadowwalkyr's wedding. Lots of old SCA and old fandom at the wedding; when you've been around the Bay Area as long as we have, ...

It was a nice Pagan ceremony, short and sweet. What people were wearing ran the gamut from punk teens in T-shirts and jeans, to formal garb of all centuries from the 12th to the 21st. The buffet lunch was superb; I went very easy on the desert and ended up nicely filled but not overstuffed. We left earlyish, after the toasts (which were fun), but before the cake and the dancing. Colleen doesn't do too well in folding chairs, and we needed to get home to feed the monsters kids.

The flower_cat had originally planned to make scalloped potatoes (to use up some leftover cheese sauce), but neither of us were hungry so in the end she just went out and got Burger Thing for the kids.

Worked a little on tracks; got "Cicero" put away, but decided that "Mushrooms" needs to be redone -- there was an unfixable editing glitch. It was done before I learned to make a clean copy before doing anything irreversible. It would help a lot if Audacity had multi-level undo, but it doesn't.

Managed to get the dishes put away and the roasting pan (from last night's ham) emptied of ham fat and put in the sink to soak. I don't think I'll be able to stay up much past 10pm, even though I know I'll pay for it by waking up at four. The flower_cat's already asleep. I'd take a bath, but the front tub's still full of cans and bottles.

All-in-all, a very pleasant but very tiring weekend.

10:49 pm - Assorted

Months after spraining something in my foot, I still can't go more than two days wearing ordinary shoes (as opposed to hiking boots) without being in pain by the end of the day. At least it's up to two days; two weeks ago it was one. Progress is being made, but slowly.

I need to go out and get screwed some screws -- specifically 1.5" wood screws with 1/4" heads. I don't seem to have any in the house. I need them for mounting a power squid on a drywall-covered stud. That, or use something other than the squid. But it wouldn't be as cool-looking.

Short (half-hour or so) walks the last couple of days. Grump.

The house is amazingly clean. No telling how long the kids' bedrooms will stay that way; we'll be getting regular visits from the cleaning folks for the kitchen and living room. It makes a difference.