In Family, Food, Geek, Home, Vacation on 11/29/2009 by adam
Here are the highlights for how we spent our all-too-brief holiday break:
- Cleared and set our dining room table with new centerpieces and a holiday theme
- Baked pie
- Brined and cooked two turkeys, one at our house, one elsewhere, as well as prepared associated trimmings
- Had delicious Thanksgiving dinner
- Went on three separate shopping outings, including an early one on Black Friday, another to buy a suit for an upcoming wedding, and yet another to Philadelphia Premium Outlets to hang out with family
- Gave Bram his first through fifth rides on bouncy cars and airplanes (totally worth $2.50)
- Cleared bookshelves and dressers in the master bedroom of various clutter
- Steam mopped the main level of our house
- Finally replaced X10 wired receiver for dining room fixture (killed many months ago by lightning)
- Sorted DVDs into binder, disposed of about 100 cases (100 more to go and our collection will be neatly organized and out of sight)
- Began planning holiday party
- Collected 3 batches of stuff we no longer wanted and left free items on curb (all taken)
- Sorted old baby clothes into lots – 0-6 months, 6-12 months, 12-18 months, 18 months-2T
- Sorted Tupperware, tossed dozens of old plastic containers kept “just in case,” prepped much unused stuff for sale
- Packed old China and other dishes for sale
- Made 5 postings to Craigslist (see clothes, Tupperware, China above; one transaction complete so far)
- Trimmed Christmas tree
- Hung up 10 pictures from various vacations and life events
- Sorted dozens of other pictures as candidates for placing in newly purchased frames
- Cleared space for Department 56 Christmas village display
- Hauled an embarrassing amount of trash to the curb
- Ran the dishwasher pretty much continuously
- Washed laundry
- Paid bills
- … and many other mundane things
I think it’s fair to say we’re not very good at relaxing, but we’re coming out of a few days off feeling good about some of the things we accomplished.
In Geek on 6/19/2009 by adam
For some time now, we’ve been using an old PowerMac G5 for some general purpose family computing. It’s located centrally in our house. Proximity to and an excellent view of the television is purely coincidental. We can also get a few tasks done while keeping an eye on unnamed bipedal and quadrupedal troublemakers. You know, fun like:
- paying bills
- reading email
- keeping up with all those time-sucking social networks
- shopping
- maintaining our photo library
- maintaining our catalog of books (via Delicious Library)
- editing video (and rendering slowly)
It was working out pretty well until … well, until it wasn’t. Random crashes. Laggy operation. General computer crabbiness.
I’m not terribly satisfied with the built-in troubleshooting tools in Mac OS X, but at least Disk Utility told me there were some filesystem problems. Fine, fine. I clicked the button that says “Verify.” I got a response back that says, basically, “You should repair this, Charlie. Try clicking the button that says “Repair.”" What would I do without such simple instructions? I clicked “Repair,” waited, then got a response back that says, basically, “Your problem is irreparable. Poor fellow.”
Reboot from CD. Rinse and repeat. Equally unhelpful. Consistent, though.
Luckily, the OS does turn out to have the tools I need, and it took more work to actually search for the right commands than it did to run them for 1) booting into single-user mode (command-s) and 2) a filesystem check with the right options (/sbin/fsck -fy). If this had been a machine without a flashy GUI, I would have thought of that first.
That worked. As an interesting side effect, it spun up the drive something fierce during the check, which is to be expected. What I didn’t expect was for all nine of the G5’s internal fans to spin up simultaneously and stay running even after the check was done. It must get pretty hot inside that chassis. If you could put your head inside a hair dryer, it would have sounded something like that.
Reboot. Problem solved. Disaster averted. Now, onto better backups.
In Geek on 3/31/2008 by adam
I don’t have the attention span for longer posts at the moment, so go to Twitter. I’m following some tech blogger/journalist types and a friend or two.
In Geek on 10/29/2007 by adam
There’s a lot of excitement around this new Mac OS X Leopard upgrade. If some of my work projects hadn’t made me swing around to the PC side, I’d be just as keyed up about it, probably. There some really good things to try out there, like Time Machine for backups or Spaces for virtual desktops. The latter is something I really miss from the days when I primarily ran Linux as my desktop OS.
Alas, now I’m mostly using Microsoft Windows Vista. It does remind me a bit of the good old days when I was using much less popular operating systems out of a certain kind of perversity. There was a bit of tweaking to do then, and there still is now. 
(I’m testing Windows Live Writer now with WordPress to see if I can do offline composition with that tool to this blog. Let’s see if it works!)
In Geek on 10/3/2007 by adam
There’s a social network for Ask A Ninja fans — http://fans.askaninja.com/ – and I can’t tell you whether I’ve joined it or not.
In Geek on 6/9/2006 by adam
Farewell Klatha, hello Dreamhost. Lots of interesting new tools are available with much less work on my part, so I’m happy. We’re hosting Hanulec.net there also. Friends, please remember to input adam -at- adamandtiffy.com in the referral field if you sign up with Dreamhost so I can get some loot!
In Geek on 6/5/2005 by adam
Our friend Tom had come across a working computer that was being tossed out by his office, and I volunteered to take it off his hands for fun. I’ve been trying to relax a little more on the weekends, so I saved up the fun of installing an operating system — yeah, I’m a geek — on my new toy for this Saturday.
Our friend Dave was staying with us since this is Swarthmore’s alumni weekend and we live within shouting distance of the College. He was watching me drag the little purple box upstairs and asked, “So, just how many computers do you have?” I rattled off a short list to him and left it at that, but it occured to me later that it might be interesting for the people who know us to know just what kind of techie stuff we have sitting around the house. And, yes, we do actually use just about all of it. Here’s a general list that includes more than just computers.
- 1 SunBlade 100 running Solaris 10
- 2 Gateway 1.5 Ghz P4 towers running Windows XP (for games!)
- 1 Gateway 266 Mhz P2 tower running Debian Linux
- 1 Powerbook G4 running MacOS X 10.4
- 1 Powerbook G3 (Pismo) running MacOS X 10.4
- 1 Gen1 iPod
- 1 iPod mini
- 1 iPod Shuffle
- 1 Dell Axim X30 PDA
- 1 Nintendo Gamecube
- 1 Playstation 2
- 2 TiVo Series 2 DVRs with wireless adapters
- 1 Linksys 4-port wired/wireless router (802.11b only, sorry)
- 1 Nikon CoolPix 3200 digital camera
- 1 Canon Multipass MP730 photo printer/fax/scanner
I also have a Dell D800 laptop running Windows XP and Solaris 10 x86 that I cart back and forth to work. I probably shouldn’t bother to count that. You get the picture, right? The funny thing is, just yesterday, Tiffy said to me, “You know, Sims 2 is running kind of slow. Think we should buy new computers?”
Of course I do.
In Friends, Geek on 1/14/2005 by adam
We were recently invited to Tiffy’s sister Tina’s house for a fancy PartyLite candle party. Been to a Tupperware party before? It’s just like that, only with candles. Now, I am not immune to the fine effect that a nice candle or six has on a gathering’s ambience. It adds a certain sense of elegance and ceremony. The idea of sitting through a product demonstration and flipping through catalogs did not, however, light my fire. (Har!) This was just as well since the event itself seemed geared toward the ladies in attendance. But what were the men to do?
Luckily, I found ways to pass the time amiably. Brother-in-law Keith had set out quite a spread of fine knoshables. Since the candle demonstration was going on in the parlor and the men were ensconced in the kitchen, he dragged out a couple excellent Cabernets and we had a nice tasting. I remember one was a 2001 Clos du Val, which I thought quite excellent. Matt, Tina’s neighbor and husband of party attendee Suzanne, showed up shortly after we began drinking. That was a good thing, as it helped cut short my potential overindulgence.
You see, Matt and I had hatched a cunning plan. We both have a mild interest in video games, and, being relatively young men, our reflexes are still in good order. Well, good enough as long as we’re not matched against 13-year-olds. Anyway, to cut to the chase: Matt has a wireless network in his house, our wives were otherwise occupied, and he was willing to show me the ropes in Unreal Tournament 2004!
It’s amazing how quickly the evening slips away when one is engaged in missions of Deathmatch and Assault. I’m sure we didn’t have as good a time as the PartyLite catalog browsers, but I think we did all right.
In Entertainment, Geek on 3/29/2004 by adam
Let me start out by saying that Tiffy is the best! For no reason in particular, she bought me an iPod mini, which is possibly the best gift I’ve ever gotten. It’s little and green, and I’ve named it Kermie. I’ve updated and reorganized my MP3 library so that everything will be easy to find with a quick dial and click. It’s made my commute a whole lot more fun. It’s also made our trips to the gym seem to go much faster, and let me tell you, anything that speeds up my time on the elliptical treadmill is a blessing!
In Entertainment, Geek on 8/7/2003 by adam
Quite sorry to have taken such a long break from the weblogging folks. In addition to the regular pieces that go into living a life — you know: jobs, meals, house, pets, and so on — we’ve found a new way to melt time as if it were ice in the desert.
If you haven’t played Star Wars Galaxies yet, maybe it’s best avoided. Really. Because … human beings should not be allowed to have this much fun! Woo! As Tiffy says, “Star Wars Galaxies got everything right that Sims Online got wrong.” It’s adventurous, dangerous, fun, and you get to make new friends and see your old friends in a new light, all while engaging in some fantastic wish fulfillment.
We’re in the Radiant galaxy on Corellia at the moment. If you know us, send e-mail and we’ll tell you who and where we are. If none of this makes sense to you, I wouldn’t worry about it.
