Rockwood Roo 23B Mods

I built some nice shelves for two of the cabinets in the trailer. It was a little challenging to design since there is a limited amount of places to attach to for support. The project looks pretty nice now that it is done. The remain step is to remove the piece of trim & stain it and then put it back into place.



Overall it took about 5.5 hours on Sunday since I had to scratch build it a piece
at a time.

Linux & Windows Fun

I took Friday as a PTO day so that I could work on a project at home today.



While working on my project at my electrical workbench I wanted to listen and
watch some podcasts. So I boot up the linux
workstation on the workbench that had been off for a while. I then proceeded to
patch the system. Once that was complete I figured that I would be good-to-go.    --Wrong!

It turns out the players on the system did not have the proper codecs. So after a
lot of searching & testing I stumbled across (again) VLC.
What a great program. So after adding the package I figured that I would be good-to-go.    --Wrong!

It turns out that VLC will
not attach to a SMB folder. This is a problem that I have seen before. Since I am
not a die hard Unix guy it took a little bit of Googling to figure out what to do.
It turns out that I needed a few more pieces of Samba installed
so headed off to the package manager again. After a bunch of messing around I finally
got the Samba connection to work properly. I then reformatted my commands so that
it could be added to the fstab. After a bit more testing that was working properly.
I then created a symlink so
that it shows up in an easier to access location.

I then discovered that the Linux workstation did not have an SSH service installed.
(I wanted to be able to SSH in from my XP laptop in my office.) So I went back to
the package manager and downloaded and installed the OpenSSH service.



I then download Putty and PSCP on
my XP laptop.

A lot of messing around so that I could listen & watch some podcasts on that Linux
workstation.

Post upgrade speeds

I probably can't pass judgment on the changes to the upstream bandwidth until the
network stabilizes. I will try to run the same test Friday during the day.

Spring Chores

Tonight after work I put another bird house in the front yard then cleaned and refilled the frog pond in the back yard.



Birds have been making nests all around our lot. A couple new ones under the deck
+ one on the tire of my SUV. The new bird house that I put up near our frog pond
already has residents 4 days later.



The birds were really upset that we were near the bird house while we were working
on the frog pond. The birds were trying to drive us away... I wonder if there are
eggs in there already.

Inflation grows - no real surprise

Come on... who figures these numbers without food/fuel included. Here is the
table with all of the categories broken out.

Food is going up at 6.3% for the quarter & 5.1% for the past year

Energy is going up at 5.6% for quarter & 15.9% for that past year

It sure looks like a case of inflation combined with
a weak US dollar.

President Bush and the Internet

http://www.thegoogleontheinternets.com/









I found this after it was mentioned on CNN in a story about Bush giving Yahoo an interview.

A little rain... very little

We got about 1/4 of rain today. I guess that we will be running the sprinkler to keep the new grass seed damp. I was hoping for a little bit more rain than we got today.



It is a awkward dance... too much water and the grass seed floats down the hill...
too little rain and the grass seed does not sprout.

Burn & Seed

We have a couple areas of grass that did not make it from last fall to this spring.
Today once all of the family visitors for the weekend left I decided it was time
to deal with the scared grass.

I burned off the dead grass & weeds with a very large yard torch and then put
down another 20lbs of grass seed. I then drove my tractor over the new grass seed
in order to try to make sure that seed is in direct contact with the dirt. We then
ran the sprinkler for about 10-15 minutes to get everything wet without the water
running off (and forcing the seed to float away.)

Slow again (not a big surprise)

Wow... talk about a real bummer. Xtratyme was 3-4x faster earlier in the weekend.
I am now back below the rate that I am paying for. I am starting to wonder if I will
ever see the upgraded bandwidth rolled out to my area. It is getting kind of frustrating
with bandwidth speeds circa the mid 90's.

Rainy Saturday

Saturday May 10th, 2008 produced about an inch of rain in our rain gauge. Spring is
still running quite a bit cooler than normal in our area.

At some point this year I would like to get an automated Weather Station running at
this house. I miss having the data that we used to have at our old house. It is fun
to stuff the state into a database and then run some queries on the data and see the
max variation and the trends.

Yes, I am a weather geek.