Abby and I were seated together at dinner, and she pulls 2 pebbles out of her pocket, showing them to me.
“Paul, look!”
“What’re those? Poop?”
“No, they’re not poop. They’re rocks.”
“Where from?”
“The playground at school.”
“Oh, neat!”
I got back to eating, enjoyed the rest of my evening there, and when I got home, I emptied my pockets to this:
I’m dumbfounded as to how she got it in there. Is she being trained at school to be a pickpocket?
I got to use the Dewalt 4 1/2″ angle grinder I received last year for my birthday with a braided wire wheel for some pretty nice results on our rusting patio railing. Holly was a bit too scared to use it, but did help spraying on the primer.
It’s called Triple Chocolate Ice Cream Cake. My mother-in-law made it, and I got to take home the leftovers, which now reside in my freezer. Nothing beats it, it’s not even worth trying. It’s also a good lesson in Geometric Progression, since that’s how the cake is diminishing from its original size.
Since I had to deboard the train about 4 weeks ago for breathing/coughing/wheezing trouble, my doc had me scheduled to go to LUMC today to get a “Methacholine Challenge Test“, which means I had to inhale some methacholine-type medication through a nebulizer and forcibly breathe into a machine that graphed the flow of air in and out of my lungs. I got up to a 16mg dose of the MCT medication, and only lost 7% of my peak volume/pressure/whatever, where >20% was an indicator of asthma. Then I got a nice big dose of Albuterol which left me more jittery than my old friend Mountain Dew. I snapped some pics of the machine I used while I was in the room:
So I guess I don’t have asthma, even though my doc hasn’t said so yet. I got a lipid profile (cholesterol test) and some `metabolic panel’ too.
On a recommendation from Joe, I purchased and downloaded The Ship, which I guess used to be a mod of Half-Life 1 since turned to a full-fledged release of its own. He described it quite aptly as “The Sims” as an FPS; the `mad hatter’-type character wants you to kill the person he partnered you with on this cruise gone awry. Nonetheless, the game is outstanding; so much so that I’ve been stabbing, hacking, and robbing my quarries steadily since I figured out where the food, beverages, washrooms, and showers are. (You have to keep yourself fed, quaffed, entertained, rested, and relieved of your waste while you’re not hunting your next victim.)
To be honest, I wouldn’t have given the game a chance just based on its looks, since I was even offered by Steam a `free weekend’ of The Ship some time ago. But it’s definitely worth a try.
Today’s my birthday; so far it’s been a good one. I got some sweet clothes from Holly, and we’re going out to dinner tonight at Fresh Starts. Keith and Kim might come out too, but I’m not so sure yet. Exciting!
My Kill-a-Watt came in the mail a few days ago, but I just got a chance to try it out. It’s becoming a the new “geek toy” that has a readout for the power consumption in Volt Amps or Watts, measures kWh, voltage, and some other electrical units. Here’s a couple of the readings I got for Wattage:
It’s probably a good idea I put in those CFL’s last month.
Since we’re going on vacation sometime soon and wanted to use a given hotel’s or nearby cafe’s wireless Internet access, I thought it might be a good time to revisit an old Dell C400 laptop to this end. Trouble was, the PCMCIA card socket was broken, so using a Cardbus wifi adapter was out of the question. So I did a little investigation into whether the socket could be repaired. About 2 hours and many tiny screws removed from it later, the consensus was “no”. But I did discover an internal miniPCI slot that could house an internal wifi network adapter, and $20 later on eBay, it was working!
Excited, I thought it might be a good time to try out Ubuntu Linux on it, but this laptop didn’t have an internal or external CD-ROM drive available to me. Normally, I’d pull out the hard drive, setup a partition with install files on it, and make it boot from that. Trouble is, once you setup that partition, it’s not easy to reliably resize the partition you install into back to 100% of the disk (after the swap space, of course).
But then I ran into this article on a Google search, and found a different way to get Linux installed. It didn’t work on the first try (I was tired and skipped some instructions), but once I got the base install in, the installer did the rest of the work of downloading and setting up the OS. It was about the coolest thing I’ve done with PC’s in a while; so far I am seriously impressed. (Particularly at the fact that my obscure wifi adapter was detected correctly right off the bat.)
As if that wasn’t enough, since the installer grabbed the old 6.06 version (I was tired, remember?), I had to run a distro upgrade to get to the current 7.04. Unlike any Fedora Core distro I’ve tried, the Update Manager tool actually worked. In fact, I have yet to have this thing crash. But most of all, the system is actually responsive despite its modest (PIII 866MHz/256MB) hardware.
So we’re on a roll, right? Pretty much. About the only initial trouble I ran into was resolved by figuring out what the name of the (open, free) software is that does what I want:
I guess it wasn’t all good, though:
As with Windows, there’s ups and downs, but I think this is overall a very stable operating system despite a modest machine it’s running on.
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