Thursday, 4 Jul 2002
Holidays during the middle of the week are sort of odd. You end up with something like a Reader's Digest version of a weekend -- the morning and afternoon are sort of like Saturday, then sometime around 5 or 6 pm, you go straight into Sunday evening.
Rolled out of bed around 9 am or so, did the email/web/chat boggie (no need for coffee at that point!), and settled in to get some work done. During morning web rounds, I saw that KDE 3.0.2 had come out, so the first thing I did was drop back to console mode, blow away the old KDE, and start recompiling. That would continue for most of the day.
I then started tackling the closet. The biggest hurdle in there were three boxes of miscellaneous computer cruft, each comprising one large ball of tangled wires. I went through each one, seperated out all the bits, made piles of common sorts of bits (power cords, ribbon cables, etc), then used cable ties to wrap everything up nice and neat. After a short break for lunch (tuna fish sandwiches), it was more of the same, with intermitent breaks to kick off the compile of the next KDE package. During this process, I found a special little something, which I set aside for later use.
Around 2 pm, TheWife and I hopped in the car and set out to do a bit of shopping. First stop was CompUSA, where we got some Cat5 (can't ever have too much Cat5) and a new switch. I went in thinking I'd buy a hub, but all the hubs cost as much (if not more) than the smallest LinkSys switch, so shrug a switch it was. Next stop was Target, where we got a load of misc house crap (TP, etc), as well as a large number of stackable plastic storage bins. Got home, lugged crap up the stairs, and before starting work, peeked at the running chat client -- then ran to turn on CNN. Watched news about the shooting/stabbing at LAX and the small plane crash in San Dimas for around an hour or so -- about 15 minutes past the point where it became painfully apparent that there was no real information coming out of the LAPD/FBI.
Went back to work, and set about putting all the neatly tied and piled cables into bins. With labels, and everything. Took a brief break to shift things around in the living room and replace the hub behind the couch with the new switch. Now we'll have full duplex connectivity to the couch and up to the loft, which might make TheWife's net experience ever-so-slightly faster. The hub will be moving back into my office. It's a bit frightening that it's gotten to the point where the single four-port router is insufficient for me to have all the computers hooked up to the network at the same time. Anyway, after I put the new switch in place, I confirmed that the bits were still flowing as needed, then shifted everything back into place and went back to binning, labeling, and compiling.
Broke for dinner somewhere in there (after the couch, before all the binning was done); we had brats and pasta salad for our Fourth of July meal, like all good Mid-westerners should.
After dinner, I helped Laura with the on-going re-arrangement of her office (which was sort of caused by the re-arrangement of my office). She had gotten to the furniture moving part, so I moved furniture for a while.
About 10:30 pm, I finally got to the place that I'd been trying to get to all along: I started installing SuSE on the old PowerMac 7500. You see, in order to do that, I'd needed this little monitor converter dingus, which is required in order to hook a PC monitor up to that particular Apple. That dingus (the "special little something") had been buried in one of the boxes of computer crap, which I'd started working on about 13 hours prior.
The install went okay; SuSE appears to have a pretty smooth product. I got to the point where it had a minimal system installed, then started it downloading upgrades, and went to bed. That was around 1:00 am, give or take.
All in all, an incredibly productive day...