Friday, 5 Jul 2002
Up around 6:30 or so. Did a bit of mail catchup, a bit of web-ish stuff, and a small bit of chat while I had my coffee. Showered, dressed, hit the road, and rolled into work at around 9:30 am.
It was a pretty lazy day; most people had elected to take leave, and so there weren't a lot of problems that came up. I took it fairly easy, catching up on little tidbits of work that I'd ordinarily be too busy to attend to. Had a long lunch at Rock Bottom (umm, club sandwich). The big project of the afternoon was helping a fellow admin get his dual-head set-up working with XFree.
I also took out a six month subscription to TransGaming's version of Wine, but I never did get around to installing the software. I guess I'd do that tomorrow.
I got home around 5:30 to find TheWife and TheCats settling down for a nap. I joined right in, of course. TheWife finally hauled me back out of bed around 8 pm or so, and we had a spot of dinner (chicken Caesar salad). During dinner, TheMom called. We didn't get to the phone quickly enough, so she ended up leaving a message. Based on the content of the message, I decided to finish dinner before calling back, as I could tell it was going to be a long conversation.
After dinner, I tried to return the call, but I got their answering machine. Since I had some time to kill, I set about implementing the plan that had been percolating in my little brain all afternoon: my own dual-head set up. I'd realized that I had a spare monitor, and a spare video card, and that there was no reason to not give it a go. I'd always thought it would be fairly hard, and world require matched video cards, or something, but helping my fellow admin today had demonstrated that that wasn't the case. I was able to get it working in very short order (like, 10 minutes, start to finish, and that was only because I tested all the intermediate steps; if I'd just gone for it, it would have worked and taken 5 minutes). The dual-head setup is very sweet; I can already tell I'm going to like it a lot.
So, of course, in order to get the two monitors side by side on my desk, a bit of re-arranging was called for. I was in the middle of that when TheParents called back. As I had anticipated, the news was about my maternal grandfather, and it wasn't good. Recently, various tumors have been discovered, and radiation therapy was started in an attempt to knock them out. Ten days later, the tumors have spread even further, suggesting that this is an extraordinarily aggressive cancer. TheGrandpa is back in the hospital, and pretty whacked up on OxyContin from the sound of it. From everything I heard, it doesn't sound like its going to be too much longer, so I think a trip back to the Mid-west may be in my future.
TheParents and I also talked for a while about other things, so I was on the phone with them for about an hour. Turns out they're reading the diary (hi TheParents! -- look, no burritos today!), which I'll try to keep in mind while writing it. 8^)= Eventually said my good-byes and went back to shifting furniture about. Got done with that, and realized that I was going to have to re-compile KDE (again!) to fully support the dual-head setup. Started doing that, and chatting a bit with the Usual Suspects, and then it was 1 am all of a sudden. I started about 10 compiles at the same time, watched them for a bit, and then it was 2 am all of a sudden. Staggered off to bed about that time.
Lazy day, with dual-head monitor goodness!