My daughter is leaving for her summer job in less than 7 hours, and she will be away until the end of August. She will be one of the staff people at the United Church of Canada camp in Naramata. I know she is leaving, but it is still hard getting used to the idea that she will not be around for the next 2 months.

I cannot really put my finger on why but the last week at work was unsatisfying and not really fun at all. A part of it I am sure has to do with the fact that I have been getting less than my usual amount of sleep every night. I think there was only one night over the last week where I got more than 6 hours of sleep. Although I must also say that I was not the only one who was easily irritated; my co-worker also was not in the best of moods.

Good night!

I was not feeling very good this morning, even after my morning shower, so I decided that I would actually work from home. I think this was mostly due to the insufficient amount of sleep I have been getting these last few days. I have no one to blame but myself as I have been the one coming up with stuff to do every night and then the next thing I know it is almost 1am! Of course it is not anything important so I cannot even justify it.

I am going to try to curb this staying up way too late thing and I am starting now - which is why I am actually writing this from bed just after 11pm. And to make things even easier on me, my laptop probably has at the most another 30 minutes of power before it will shut itself off. Hopefully I will get at least 7 hours of sleep; I have been getting 6 or less these last few days. I will let you know how I do in tomorrow's entry.

Good night!

Ever since our offer was accepted on the house, we had been hoping that it would be possible to take possession of the house earlier than the date that was stipulated in the contract. We thought that the hold up were the tenants in the in-law suite. Well it turns out that the people from whom we are buying the house have bought another house, and the people in that house have also bought a house and they cannot leave that house before late August. So it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that, the domino effect being what it is, it means that we will not be able to move into our new house until the end of August either.

It does mean a little more time to get ready, but it also means that things will have to move quickly once we take possession as we want to be out of our current place by the end of August. So a longer buildup, but a faster resolution.

Good night!

What would a house be without some furniture? Although it could be a couple of months before we take possession of our new house, there are a couple of pieces of furniture that really need to be replaced. And the first thing is replacing our waterbed that is now going on 25 years old. We are getting a very comfortable king mattress and a new headboard (pictured at right).


And the living (or is it family) room will be needing an entertainment centre to hold the television. We also got a new sofa - we also have a picture of it, but since it was taken while I was sitting in it I will not be putting it up here (there are too many pictures of me floating around already anyway).

All of this furniture will be delivered to our new house when we take possession.

Good night!

Well I had not wanted to put anything in here about our new house before it was officially marked as "Sold", but since that happened yesterday I can now show everyone what our new house looks like:


Of course, we have only put a down payment on the house while we have the lawyer work on the transfer papers. The contract calls for a possession date of August 26th, but it could be earlier if the current tenants vacate the in-law suite before that time. The in-law suite will be used by my daughters so it is a requirement for us to have the in-law suite available.

In other news, my daughters have a new car:


Good day!

There had been one thing that had been giving me fits with my new Mac computers: the fact that I had not been able to set up the printing to our HP printer attached to our Windows computer. I had a great amount of trouble getting my Mac to even see the printer: that was a hit and miss proposition - actually mostly miss. And when I was able to see the printer, the printer driver I needed was nowhere to be found, even though it is supposed to be included with the version of Mac OS X I am running.

After much searching of the web, I finally found help at LinuxPrinting.org, specifically on the "HPIJS for Mac OS X" page. After installing the two packages on that page, I was able to select the right printer driver. I still had to use the Advanced settings to define the printer (Option click on the "More Printers" icon) but this last problem has now been solved to my satisfaction.

Good night!

I have not been posting very often lately. This is basically due to the fact that I have gotten a new computer, an iMac, and have been playing with it to get comfortable with its interface as I have not had an Apple computer before.

As a matter of fact, I am writing this entry in a widget on the Dashboard of my iMac. I am having a great time discovering all the neat stuff that can be done on my new computer.

Okay, so I basically wrote the same thing in two entries. I guess I should read my own posts before writing new ones. I was very lucky in that I also received a MacBook (a black one) for Father's Day so I have had two different computers to get familiar with.

I am having a great time!

Good night!

How quickly time flies. I cannot believe it has been almost 5 days since I last made an entry. Of course a lot has happened since then so I could have an excuse. As I mentioned in my previous entry, we are in the process of buying a house. Our offer has been accepted and we are now doing all the paperwork and tasks that need to take place when one buys a house. I should say right now that most of the work is being done by my wonderful wife. We have been putting our financial affairs in order and things will be much better from now on.

I now have a new computer (an Apple iMac) and have been spending most of my free time getting acquainted with it and trying to get all of my favourite applications installed. One of the last things I am doing is getting things set up so I can connect to the office - since I can get called during the off hours I always prefer trying to correct things from home instead of having to go in to the office.

Oh well, back to playing with my new toy(s)!

Good night!

I think I had subconsciously resigned myself to never owning a home. So it has not sunk in yet that we have taken the first steps towards owning a home: we made an offer and they accepted. Now begins all the little things that need to be done to complete the buying process: getting an inspection done and getting a lawyer to get the contract done. Wow! We own a house!

After that, every other news I could have pale in comparison.

Good night!

Isn't it interesting how small things can be the impetus for big change? I had been having trouble with the Firefox web browser on my home machine - it did not matter where on the page I would middle-click, it would always assume that I wanted to search for whatever was in the clipboard buffer. That was really a problem when I was actually trying to do something completely different: either copy the text from the clipboard onto a field on the page, or make a big jump on the page using the scroll bar. Since my home machine was the only place where I had the problem I decided to install another Linux distribution: SimplyMEPIS. I had been running PCLinuxOS and I was happy with it until I started having trouble with the browser.

You are probably wondering why I did not install Ubuntu 6.0 LTS or Fedora Core 5, both of which I use at the office, on my home machine. It basically boils down to wanting to have all the multimedia "stuff" and not having to install them myself. Since SimplyMEPIS and PCLinuxOS are smaller players in the Linux world, they can get away with distributing the multimedia "stuff" that Ubuntu and Fedora cannot because of licensing issues. I know both Ubuntu and Fedora have had 3rd party scripts written for them that actually make the install of the multimedia "stuff" easier; but it is still not as easy as just having them installed right off the bat.

Good night!

I realized that I am using a lot of stuff created and/or owned by Google. I will not go as far as saying that they are the best, but they certainly are good enough for me.

I guess the search one is obvious so I will not link to it since the link above is the same. They other stuff I use is as follows:

• Mail
• Maps
• Blog
• Word processing
• Spreadsheet
• Calendar
• Toolbar
• Desktop
  

I guess that is pretty much all I use at the moment. There are probably a couple of more things I have tried that I do not really use, like their notebook offering. Wow, I had not realized how many of their products I actually use.

Good night!

If you are like me, you can be on one computer and you need a bookmark or a password that is on a different computer. You might have thought that it would be nice to have access to the bookmarks and passwords from the first computer on the second. Well Google has come up with something for that called Browser Sync. I have tried it at work and it works great. The main drawback is that you have to be using the Firefox web browser (version 1.5 or greater). From what I understand the information sent to Google is encrypted on your computer so Google does not have access to your data.

Good night!

We had been looking forward to the visit from my son for a while now. We called him tonight to get his flight times and it turns out that one of his co-workers broke his leg and there are not enough people in his section to allow for two people to be off at the same time. Which unfortunately means that he was told he could no longer go on vacation. So the visit we had been looking forward to has been postponed yet again.

Follow up on the new laptop: I decided that since Fedora Core 5 did not set up the wireless that I would install another distribution that does set it up. Since I have had good experiences with it in the past, I have decided to go ahead and install Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. The laptop now runs Ubuntu, but it was not without its tense moments. There was a period, after I deleted Fedora and before I installed Ubuntu, where the laptop would not boot at all. Which of course was due to the fact that I had deleted the partition where the boot code was located. Fortunately Ubuntu recognized the WinXP partition and included it in the boot menu. Tomorrow we go to the atrium with the laptop to see if it can actually attach itself to a wireless network (all the wireless in the employee areas are encrypted). If that does not work, I guess I will have to bring it home to see if I can get it to work at home.

Good night!

powered by performancing firefox

This week, if nothing comes up to change this, is the first week in a long time where I do not have any evening meetings. Of course, some of it has to do with the fact that summer is fast approaching but, regardless of the reason, it is nice to not have to go anywhere in the evenings.

I did receive my refreshed workstation and laptop today. My new workstation is very fast and the laptop is in a whole different category than the one it replaces. The fact that I (well the team actually even though it is kept at my desk) already have a similar laptop does reduce the "wow" factor. I did find out however that Fedora Core 5 (a Linux distribution) does not attempt to set up the wireless connection - other distributions actually brought up the wireless connections on the existing laptop. I should try those distributions on the new laptop to see if they will get it going as well.

Good night!

powered by performancing firefox

There has not been much to enter here as I have been very busy with the events that were taking place in our community. You can certainly read more about it in my other blog. That did not leave a lot of time for other activities. I actually spent the minimum amount of time I could get away with at the office for the latter part of last week so I could get the "Love Your City" stuff done.


Well there was not too much happening work wise during the weekend. There were 3 alerts opened over the weekend about downed drives. Only two of those were for real issues; the last one is most likely because the server was rebooted which made the reporting return a "clear" result which went away when the machine was rebooted. That server had trouble with drives before the weekend and still has trouble now; when our reporting environment saw that the drives were problematic again it opened another alert. Those can be dealt with on Monday. The other two were for real drive problems; but we still had enough operating drives that those would not be really missed and the resolution of the problems can also wait for Monday. It appears that we will have to call in the Sun/StorageTek engineer to come and clear the problems.

Tomorrow is the day I get my refreshed computers at the office; I cannot wait to see what I will be getting. Well actually I know what I will be getting - I am more curious of how much better those machines will be performing. I would expect my new desktop to be at least 3 times as fast as before - which apparently is the difference in performance that is noticeable; anything less and you do not really get a feeling that it is better - at least that is what I read somewhere. The laptop on the other hand will be like night and day. I have a very old laptop sitting on my desk just displaying one web page - that is pretty much all it is good for. The new laptop I will be getting is at least 10 times faster.

Good night!