It was finally a nice night here last night. There was a cooling breeze and it was below 90 degrees for the first time in days. As we all complained about the heat and sat inside in our nice cool air conditioned houses, work places and cars it strikes me how lucky we are. I read an article today about the homeless in Harrisburg, and the problems they have fighting with the heat during those days, trying to find a cool place to go. I guess it is something I don’t think about as much because I don’t see many homeless during my normal daily routine. If you want to talk about people who really have something to complain about the weather, think about the soldiers over in Iraq. This is a place where the temperatures rise well above the 100 degree mark. Their job is not in a air conditioned office, they can’t wear short sleeves on a warm day. No to do their job they have to wear heavy bullet proof vest, pounds upon pounds of gear, and then put a heavy helmet on their head, just to make sure that they get to the next day. The men and women of our military are not only hero’s for what they are doing over there, but they are doing it in a region where a 90 degree day would probably be a nice break.
I will work harder to remember these people when the heat rises here, as well as on days when we have a nice day.
July 28, 2005
The heat…
July 27, 2005
Things that strike me…
National pride has been the story of the past week and a bit, pride in not only athletes, but also technology. Lance Armstrong wins his seventh and final tour, a very fitting way to end a great career. Also space shuttle Discovery’s launch was successful, now we must worry about the debris that fell of on this launch. I guess if one good thing came from Columbia’s disaster it is that the astronauts are ready for problems this time. On top of that they have karma on their side, shuttle name is Discovery and Lance rode for the Discovery channel, lets just hope in twelve days they have as good of a time as Lance did.
Other than that not much going on. The planning of Ireland is still going well. We have decided to take a day and fly to Manchester. With the price to fly aerlingus at 4 pounds (plus taxes and fees, which bring the cost up a lot) K and I thought that it would be nice to experience another country. A special thanks to the wsiwyg blog for her review of lunch spots that K and I will be using while in Dublin. Luckily she enjoys sandwiches the same way we do, with nothing on them.
Tonight is poker night at the house so that should be fun. Usually it is one of two things, a $20 donation and an early night or a top two finish. I prefer the second one obviously.
July 22, 2005
In case of Emergencey campaign
Here is something that I feel is important enough not only to forward but to post here, it is a simple idea, but I think it really has merit.
Following the attacks in London, East Anglian Ambulance Service has launched a national “In Case of Emergency ( ICE ) ” campaign. The idea is that you store the word ” ICE ” in your mobile phone address book, and against it enter the number of the person you would want to be contacted “In Case of Emergency”.
In an emergency situation ambulance and hospital staff will then be able to quickly find out who your next of kin are and be able to contact them. It’s so simple that everyone can do it.
Reviving a dead laptop…
I decided that I would try to bring back an old laptop that I have had laying around for a long time. Why, well no real reason other than it was something to do. The specs, it is a Pentium MMX 266 with 160 meg of ram. The ram is probably saving me at this point. It has a CD rom drive, one USB port and a four gig hard drive. I started with Damn Small Linux this is a linux OS that is very small 50 MB, and you can try it out without ever changing what is on your hard drive, if it all works you can install it onto the drive. I will probably end there as well. I do have some issues with it, but for the most part it really works for what I need, and it is by far the quickest that I have used on this machine. I installed it on the hard drive with great hopes that it would save all my preferences, this didn’t work as great as expected, but I know it can be done so if I go back I will work on that. What I like is the speed, the ability to use apt-get is nice, and I was able to install Firefox and stumble which is great. What I didn’t like was typing in my wireless network information every time I logged in, and that when I plugged in my USB card reader that it didn’t find it. These are the issues I have to work on if I install it again.
Next I tried Knoppix this is also a live CD, however it is a full size OS. When I ran the live CD, it ran pretty well, except that the resolution on the screen couldn’t be changed. I hoped that if I installed it onto the hard drive I would be able to change that. This didn’t work. So no more Knoppix for this box. I have used versions of Knoppix for other things, and think it is a great distribution, just didn’t work on this box.
Finally, I tried SuSE 9.0, I always try SuSE last because it is what I prefer to use, I choose 9.0 because I tried 9.3 on this box and it kind of laughed at me. I know that sounds odd, but when the cd was spinning away trying to install 9.3, it sounded like it was laughing, and kept telling me that it couldn’t find the CD, odd but not totally unexpected. So I got through a 9.0 compact install which seemed to take quite a while, not a great sign. Once I got in, the graphics were the correct size for my screen, and I put the wireless in once and it worked. The problem, as you can guess is the speed of this OS running on an outdated computer. I understand that it isn’t going to be blazing fast, but when it takes so long to do things that I click buttons twice because I don’t think it is working that might be too long.
All and All I think I will be going back to DSL, tonight. That install takes no time, and things for the most part work. I can build up the things I would like to use on it using apt-get, and it will allow me to learn a debian based OS, which I would like to do.
The odd part is that I don’t really know what I am going to do with this computer when I get everything working on it. My original though is to take it to Ireland with us. It will have plenty of space to put the pictures we take, plus if something happens to it while there, or on the flight it won’t be complete disaster. So as long as I can get the USB issues worked out this will be the answer for me.
July 19, 2005
Trip to Ireland
Well K and I have started to plan our trip to Ireland. This is a dream trip for us as we are going to Dublin for a week in September. Potato was kind enough to reply to my inquiry about different things to do while we are there and we will check out quite a few of them. I have left the planning to K for the most part, however as we get closer and closer to the time we leave we have both started to get excited and plan things.
I keep watching irishblogs.ie in hopes there will be a blogers party while I am there. I read quite a few of the blogs on that site and they are both well written and interesting. It always amazes me how much the US is under scrutiny for the things that our politicians say and do. Most of the time we are irrate about the samethings here, I guess blogging is all about seeing different opinions from all over the world.
So far the trip is going to be a lot of sight seeing in and around dublin along with a train tour that goes all day. We have free days scheduled in so we can do some pub hopping while we are there. K and I went to Killarny before we were married for a short three day tour, and had a great time bouncing to differnt bars and what not, so we thought we would try some of that as well. Real Guiness, and Smithwicks again, yeah.