• Status Update: Zero’s Transformation

    As of this writing, Zero is now a Linux From Scratch rig. All she can do at the moment is run XFree86 4.2.0, watch TV on her spanking new Radeon All-in-Wonder (but no sound as yet, need a mixer) and accept email directed to my username at zero.kgon.com.

    Next up: Install GNOME from sources, install Evolution from sources, get SSH, SNMP and Apache+PHP working, install some truetype fonts, get cd ripping and burning to work, and perform various other small install processes that need doing along the way. Hell, I might even put KDE3 onto this thing. All of this not necessarily done in the order stated here.

  • Another Not-really-worthless Page

    Discarding the simple elegance of her previous design, Celina (a.k.a. Mononoke of #KNRK fame) has put up a new page, and this time there are words and pictures! Oh, and she makes lots of nice comments about yours truly. How can I not link to her after reading her page, hmm?

    (Update: Thanks to peach-pit for pointing out that I’m a dork. All that typing and no link to the page in question. Duh.)
    Celina’s Page

  • Three day weekend, of sorts

    I took Friday off from work to visit OMSI with my son Alexander’s 4th grade class. We got to see the “Brain” exhibit, which was only mildly interesting; we watched a live broadcast from the KOIN 6 meteorology studio; we played in the turbine room a lot. Note to self: family membership at OMSI.

    Saturday was spent at home with the kids. Sunday was spent at home with the wife and kids. Great quantities of Heroes IV was played by all. Considerable quantities of 4×4 Evolution was played by some.

    We had pizza for dinner on Saturday night, while I prepared my infamous shells-and-cheese dish for dinner last night. Wendi insisted on doing the cheese layering, however. Since she wanted to so badly, I let her use the food processor to grate the cheese as well. That thing’s noisy, but effective.

    And now you have the weekend update. I’m sorry it’s not as funny as that seen on Saturday Night Live, but them’s the breaks.

  • Features on hiatus

    While I’m in the process of turning Zero into a full-fledged Linux From Scratch rig, I’ve disabled any features here that rely on that machine. The random-email and current-music widgets both lived there, and will return just as soon as Zero is back to a fully operational state.

  • My day in a nutshell

    Today was: hooking up video for a laptop in the training room, re-rebuilding the West Conference room PC (damned Intel motherboards and their damned built-in NICs), preparing and beginning a Linux From Scratch install on Zero, removing all OpenAFS code on account of it being damned obnoxious, suffering through two more short failures of Northwest Link’s network, installing and configuring and skinning Trillian on Ryoko because Zero isn’t really a good machine to chat from right now.

    Yeah, that’s about it. I’m sure there’s more, but none of it bears mention.

  • All kinds of trouble

    I would like to state for the record that running Groupwise is preferable to running Outlook. Along the same lines, death by beheading is preferable to death by starvation.

    Corporate email is having all kinds of trouble this week. I’m certain that it’s a problem I’ve had with Groupwise in the past, namely that one corrupt message in the processing queue can bring down the entire server. As of this writing, incoming mail is sporadic, outgoing mail doesn’t seem to be working (although Corporate claims that it should be) and there’s no way to know when things will be back to normal.

    In addition to that bit of jolly good fun, the T1 that carries the streaming audio as well as data to and from the kgon.com machines here in the building had another spate of strangeness this morning. The problem seems to have solved itself, but I have the phone number of someone at Northwest Link if it goes bad again. Once again, if the T1 goes down then this website is useless.

    My ongoing task for the day is to rebuild the computer for the west conference room. Its hard drive failed in the classic click-of-death fashion. This sucks pretty hard, since it had all of the Panja programming software installed as well as the Smartboard drivers and various other nifty software and data. Grr. I hate relying on spinning metal disks for data storage almost as much as I hate relying on flimsy plastic strips wrapped around spindles for data backup.