As you know, I live a sedentary lifestyle; the only exercise I get is on my elliptical trainer at night, when I also watch movies (and occasionally TV shows) on the DVD player.
This being the new year, I have closed the books on last year, and here’s the hard data on 2006.
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For some reason the Ubuntu Linux distribution (or possibly Debian, on which it is based) doesn’t lie about /bin/sh. Fedora used to lie, and pretend that /bin/bash was /bin/sh. That way your stock /bin/sh still had functions and other post-Version 7 Bourne Shell features in your stock shell. But, as I say, Ubuntu doesn’t do that.
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Every day I get about 15-20 comment spams here. I think that’s about the total number of readers I’ve had since I started my first blog.
I’m going to have to get tough. I figured that it would be enough to make all comments go to moderation, that the spammer wouldn’t post 4 more comments if the first one hadn’t shown up yet. But no. So I’m going to have to find out what sort of plugins are available to auto-delete this junk.
(Sorry for not posting, by the way. It’s not that deleting comment spam takes that much time. I’m just busy is all.)
I’ve had trouble with Fedora pretty much forever, despite having used Red Hat since version 4, back in the day. I could never figure out how to set up the yum feature, and ever since I moved to FC6 I couldn’t get package updates or anything.
So, about a year after the grass started looking greener over there, I moved to Ubuntu. I’m running 6.10 (“Edgy Eff” or something like that). So far, I couldn’t be happier.
This town doesn’t sell a 4-cup measuring cup. Not even the plastic ones. Forget Pyrex.
It’s an hour drive down to PSP (Palm SPrings, from the airport code; has nothing to do with handheld game consoles) and if the trip I made to get my new glasses a couple of weeks ago is any indication, things won’t be any better there. (But the 2-cup measuring cups will cost half-again as much there, so that’s something.)
In other news, I wrote a paragraph for the family Christmas letters. The best part assumes you watched SNL back in the 1970s and saw the routine where Garrett Morris goes into a church for absolution, and the priest (Dan Akroyd) uses a computer as part of the process. But nobody remembers that, so it will have to go, in the final letter. (Not “go in”, but “go, in”).
Here’s three things off the top of my head.
Famotidine, for GERD (since at least 1975).
Guaifenesin, particularly during cold season.
Ibuprofen, for an assortment of (mild) RSIs, including arthritis, carpal tunnel syndrome, and tennis elbow.
The amazing thing about these cheap OTC meds is that Croesus and Louis XIV couldn’t afford any of them.
I made some updates to old posts instead of writing new ones. (If you understand this pattern of behavior, you’ll understand why I want to install a wiki instead of a blog.) Anyway, I don’t have anything to write. (Now. Later I’ll update this. See above.)
We’ve got family here for Thanksgiving. Right now, they’re off climbing rocks or something. Good weather for it: high overcast but the temperature’s in the 70s.
Me, I’ve been at work, writing a sermon about how Christ is a king. I get to talk about history, viz., Pontius Pilate — did Mel Gibson give him a pass with that Noble Roman portrait in The Passion? — and theology, viz., the 3-fold office of Christ and dialectic eschatology.
The text is from John. Which I have no good commentaries for. But I do have some Bible dictionaries and theology textbooks, hence, Pilate and dialectic eschatology. It’s not that I’m writing a bad sermon. It’s just that it isn’t as anchored in the text as I might like. Or to put it another way, the texts I’m exegeting aren’t the Bible. Anyway, before I left work I ordered some commentaries from Amazon. I had previously gotten Luke squared away, since Year C starts in just 10 days, but I hadn’t planned ahead for all these random Johannine texts they scatter around throughout the liturgical year.
Here’s a self portrait of me at work. Enjoy.
A cool thing about living in a military town is that you have parades on Veteran’s Day.
The high-school bands from the area are supplemented by one of the local outfits:
Oddly, the local high schools’ bands were not there. We had 3 HS bands, but none from the Morongo Basin. I only heard one, from Riverside (!). It kept playing the main titles from Nightmare Before Christmas. From what I was told later, the Marines mainly played the Marine Hymn, but during their warm-up they were playing the main titles from Pirates of the Carribean: Curse of the Black Pearl.
Also, parades in towns like this one tend to feature jet flyovers. In this case, the jet was a F117A Nighthawk, the so-called “Stealth Fighter”:
I got this photo about 20 minutes before the parade. The plane made a single circuit of town and then went away again until the parade. I foolishly forgot to be alert for it and sure enough, I had my camera off when it went over for real, much, much closer. These planes are so ugly-cool it will be a shame to see them replaced by the F22 Raptor. I thought they were based at Holloman AFB in New Mexico. I wonder what this fellow was doing in the California desert? Edwards?
You shouldn’t notice any changes.
There is one, but it’s not WordPress-related. But while I was ftp-ing up a storm doing the WP upgrade, I also set up a FAVICON.ICO for my site. This is what it looks like, up close:
I’ll owe you a nickel if you can identify this icon and tell me what it signifies.
Update. A reader (gasp!) asks how I made the ico file, whether I used PhotoChop or whatever. My answer is, negatory, good buddy. First, why would I spend a fortune on PhotoChop when the Gimp is free (libre and gratis), unless I needed CMYK, which I don’t. Second, I used ImageMagick‘s convert tool to get the original image to the size I wanted. Then — I don’t know why, out of the 6 zillion file formats ImageMagick supports, .ico isn’t one, but no matter — I used png2ico to convert it to a .ico file.
I’m not dead, just pretending.
Actually, I’m busy. Busy at work and at home. Even my hobbies like this one are busy, it’s just that you can’t tell. For example, this domain is now hosted on a new system. (You might have noticed I was offline a couple of times in the past week or so.) I’m working on a new project (a wiki for my non-blog site) and the server I was on didn’t have a feature I needed, so I had to have them migrate me to one that did.
I also set up a mailing list, but you’re not on it so what do you care?
(Huh. I just noticed that WP is up to 2.0.5. I suppose I ought to upgrade; the blog shouldn’t just be the victim of unrelated system configuration changes. It should be the victim of related changes.)
