… Is you’re almost always greeted with a full house. The kitchen was packed for about 5 hours or so last night. My uncle, his girlfriend and her daughter dropped in. Then, the brother dropped by with Aiden this afternoon. Happiest I’ve seen mom in a long time. Awesome. Now, maybe I can invent time to breathe.
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The thing about family in recovery…
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Update of the mom variety.
While I try to ignore the ass kicking we’re most likely to receive tonight, for the curious, have an update. Mom’s recovering faster than I thought she would, considering the surgery she had. A bit over a week since the operation, and she’s already up and moving a lot easier than she was when she came home. We’re doing a lot more walking the last couple days; she went with me to take the muts on a rather lengthy spin around the block this morning, then did a bit of running around with aunt Holly while I cleared a few things up at the apartment. They still don’t expect her to be fully recovered until December, but she’s making nice progress anyway. By next week she should be able to drive again, which should help us both a little. She’s got a follow-up for next week to see exactly how well she’s healing. Not much longer after that, and she might be able to get rid of me. In the meantime, I think I’ll go watch this implosion.
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Stop the NHL; I want off!
We had the awesomest of awesome starts. 4 and 0. First in the division. Hanging around top of the conference. Then we imploded. Fell apart for 3, pulled ourselves together for 1, and back to imploding for 6. Oh yeah, and losing a product of probably last year’s biggest trade to injury in the process. And, hey, we occasionally slapped one or two into the back of the net for posterity. Oh, the joys of being a Toronto sports fan. You can stop the NHL any time now. I’d like off, please.
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Lightning 4, Maple Leafs 0.
Ow. That was painful. Just… Ow. Did we even show up last night? I’ve just run out of ways to say we sucked. Have this instead.
- Wins: 5
- Losses: 9
- Shootout Wins: 0
- Shootout Losses: 2
- Points: 13
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I don’t get Rogers.
Run this past the logical part of your brain and tell me if I’m out to lunch. The phone company tells you you owe them 158 dollars by end of month. Because you’re not made of money, and they’re not the only ones who’d like you to hand over what you do have of it, you strike up what you think is a vaguely sensible arangement that will both give them their money and not leave your bank account crying on the floor. The arangement is, according to the phone company, going to result in not needing to drop a nuclear warhead on their accounts receiveable department about your service being suspended for non-payment. So, you pay according to that arangement. Then, fast forward a week or so. You’re trying to do something with your phone, and get the lovely privilege of speaking to accounts receiveable about your service being suspended.
That got to be me with Rogers first thing this morning. Now, I have a question. Is it common practice at Rogers to tell the customer one thing and document the opposite? When I called a week ago, I was told I wouldn’t need to deal with service restoration according to the arangement. In the notes, apparently, was a different storry–I was aPparently made aware that such an arangement wouldn’t guarantee I’d avoid a suspension. Naturally, I provided the agent I got to argue with today with an education. 20 minutes later and service ended up being reenabled.
A suggestion for Rogers employees. If indeed you must insist on not getting your info straight, perhaps give not escentially calling your customers liars during acts of not getting your info straight. It really makes you look like idiots. Well, more so than usual. Please to be seasing and desisting. That’d be awesome.
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Uncle for two?
This family just keeps on growing. Amidst all the other insanity going around over here, I very nearly missed something that may be a little more than slightly huge. The sister-in-law is confirmed pregnant with number two. Their oldest, pictures of whom show up here occasionally, isn’t even 2 yet. I can only imagine the sudden lack of boredom in that household.
In related news, this post serves a dual purpose. When next I happen to be in front of my own machine, I have Aiden pictures of a halloween variety that need to see the light of day. As for right now, I seriously need to see the inside of my eyelids. The mom update is tomorrow.
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Sabres 3, Maple Leafs 2.
Another game, another lead, another shootout. Wanna guess at the result? Yep, another loss. Sigh. Well, we once again didn’t suck. Well except that part where we imploded. Hey, at least it was a good game. Right? Right? Anyone? … Bring on the reshuffle.
- Wins: 5
- Losses: 8
- Shootout Wins: 0
- Shootout Losses: 2
- Points: 13
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Return of the palm-sized keyboard.
So the laptop ended up being not such a hot idea. It’s got a problem taking orders. Such as, you know, the order not to implode when I shove the AC adaptor into the thing. Sigh. Well, I tried. Next?
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I despise Bell Canada. Again.
I came back to the parents’ place for the week, and to a computer who’s video card is still pretty well toast. They lack the financial room to get a new one, so in place of that, dad’s leaving his laptop here for the week. That meant setting it up so mom could check her email. Not too difficult for someone like me, you’d think, but Bell has decided to break email.
To start, they use Hotmail to manage customers’ mail, which kind of presents it’s own crazy fun times. When they set it up, though, they took fail to a new level. I’m not exactly technically challenged, and I still had to work my head around the brokenness. If they were setting it up themselves, the booze supply would be a whole crap ton lower. Short and simple: I despise Bell. I despise Hotmail. And right now, I wouldn’t mind taking a clue to both. Now where’s that booze?
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Linux, virtualized. The hard way. Twice.
Every so often, I’ll consider finding some new and creative way to install Gentoo, my Linux distribution of choice. And sometimes, I’ll do it in such a way that it actually doesn’t blow up in my face. I’ve been trying to convince Shane to give it a try, but he hasn’t got an extra machine he can clean out and turn into a test platform. What he did have, though, was an instalation of VMWare and lots of free time on his hands. So it was high past time to shove an OS inside an OS.
The actual instalation process, for the most part, wasn’t a whole lot different from the steps I followed to install it on the laptop. But there were a few subtle differences in what was required. And naturally, they were just tricky enough that the easiest way to implement those differences was to blow the instalation away and start over. So we did, probably two or three times. On the third try, we managed to actually get the thing mostly up and running. By this point, we were very nearly on easy street. So I decided to do the exact same thing locally.
My install required a little bit more creativity, mostly because I was also using it as an excuse at guessing which VM settings would play a little bit nicer with our instalations. I got mine up and running on the fourth try, or thereabouts, and threw the modified settings at the first attempt at a Gentoo install. Now, with both machines up and running and not threatening to explode, we could play.
Shane’s heavily into the whole beta testing thing, so we went on a dependancy hunt to trick out his install with the requirements for at least one game he’s been testing. Then, we threw Gnome at it, and while that took its time installing, we threw a small party. The new and exciting part of all this was over by now–virtual Gentoo plays just as nicely as nonvirtual Gentoo, post-install. So now comes breakage.
I had no idea exactly how hard Gentoo, even in a VM, was to break. Or how easy it was to fix when it did. We’d try this or that nifty little trick, compile something, and watch it fall over. And in about 10 minutes at best, we had the why, the when, the how, and a fix was on its way down. The two things we didn’t intentionally break are apparently fairly common, or at least, simplistic issues–apparently, kernel 2.6.36 is still way, way too knew. As in things that depend on the kernel sources being installed–hello, NVidia drivers–fail quite fantastically at the compile stage. Same with the latest current stable version of Speakup, which escentially meant if we wanted the instalation to talk at us, we weren’t about to be using that kernel version. There’s apparently such thing as *too* bleeding edge. Who knew?
Another potentially kernel-related almost failure isn’t actually what I’d call breakage, but it is kind of annoying–and equally not either of our falt, lucky for us. This is the more common/known/widely experienced issue–when you run certain commands from the console or a remote session, it throws an “Unknown HZ Value!” error. It doesn’t actually break, and I’m assuming the results you get from that command are what you’d expect to get, but the error, or notice if you’d rather, regularly makes an appearance. We traced the problem to Procps, a utility package that contains several system monitoring programs among other things. I was about ready to report it, then saw it was already taken care of–hence the more widely experienced/common-ness of this annoyance. This is not something I’ll be fixing any time soon, but the activity so far as this bug report shows indicates people far more experienced than me with Gentoo, kernel tweeking and all the fun crap that goes with have it well in hand. Or at least are faking it very well. So now, we just sit back and see what else decides to implode.
The install actually went a little easier than I was hoping, if only because hey, I needed an excuse to break things on a more permanent basis. But, oh well. The OS works, on both machines, and any lingering loose ends we can safely reject any and all responsibility for. For my next trick, I’d like to see if I can install MacOS on the VM. I’d be interested in seeing how badly that breaks. In the meantime, time to go play fix the video card. Thank god for caffeine.