August is Birthday month in the family, and last weekend was incredible - basically a birthday weekend for Grandma, who has turned 70. I bought a used Macintosh IIsi, which Uncle chipped in for, and mom and Aunt Linda organized a scrapbook full of kind words and stories for and about Grandma from all sorts of people whom she knew.
John and Bill McConeghey, her brothers, arrived on Saturday from their homes in Iowa and Pennsylvania. Cousin Marian and her husband Dan also arrived from Washington. It was a very pleasant sort of mini family-reunion, and all the attention and forethought overwhelmed Grandma. Most impressive and mysterious to her was Aunt Linda and Mom's ability to contact all sorts of acquaintances for the scrapbook without her knowledge. mom confessed that she'd actually dug into her purse and copied information from her address book just for the occasion.
Saturday we had Pizza at our house, and Sunday was a barbecue at Linda's place out in Des Plaines. Both were pretty awesome and lived up some by Allen - Orley's younger brother who must have been visiting with Uncle Bill and Aunt Lucille. (Orley is Uncle Tom's son, and Uncle Bill's grandson. The brother's are Mexican, and Allen's English is still pretty limited, making communicating fun. Everyone remarked that he was a good laugher though. I figured that as a kid, it must be kind fun, if discouraging, to spend some time with another half of your family in a foreign country where ya don't speak the language. Orley is working in Pennsylvania, doing CAD work.)
Yadda yadda ... work and work. The only frustrating thing about work is that things on the Unix system administration side continue to move painfully slow. This, and some other stuff kinda hurts morale. Friday afternoon though I was tagging along with Blake as he worked on some telco issues so that Mike and Tracy can move to the recently-acquired, but not-yet-refurbished sixth floor offices. These offices are numerous and beautiful, coming fully furnished with nice wood stuff. Now, I feel jealous and hope maybe to work down there someday. Anyway, Blake started asking me why don't I just go ahead and do some stuff and make some progress rather than waiting on consensus? Yeah ...
So, Friday night roundabout midnite, owing to having drunk soda at dinner, I attempted to take my insomnia to work to use it toward productive ends. My goodness, but there are a lot of drunk or otherwise unhappy-looking folks on the El at that hour! Anyway, evidently my idea of the building code wasn't working out, so after being frustrated by the electronic keypad thingy, and realizing just how badly I wanted to pee, I walked in through the door anyway, my pocketknife proving invaluable in this situation, and as I headed toward the elevator, I noticed the alarm beeping, which then turned into an extremely loud alarm sound the like of a police siren.
I reworked a utility for adding users into our system in perl, after hitting a wall with implementing one part in C. The user-interface is ready to be glued together, the actual implementation I can do soon enough. After two hours of rapid progress I began to feel unimaginative and silly for the long commute in at such an odd hour. I headed home and slept fair soundly.
One big thing we wanna do soon enough is get a system of multiple shell machines in place. One holdup is hardware, the other is just a plethora of troublesome issues. But talking to Blake, I was reminded that I think there's sort of a spiritual or motivational issue involved as well. This is something that I think it prolly my task to understand and work around. It's not something I'm going to talk about too much here. Let's just say I've got an idea where I'm going to try and go on this, and it's consistent with things I've been moving towards of late anyway.
Anyway, I've set up qmail on my workstation, and I'm hoping over the weekend or early next week to get some serious work done in testing a multiple-delivery mail system over NFS between it and sasquatch. It was that excitement and initiative I think that called me toward the singing sirens of the Old Colony security system the other night.
Maybe you noticed, things have been pretty slow around here again lately? I've been rethinking things, reinventing the wheel, yet again, as it were. I'm moving towards using stylesheets. This is just one part of a larger change where I hope, as I hoped once before, to use this web site as a springboard for regular writing practice, and arranging my thoughts, explaining things. So far, I revamped the main index page, in an attempt to explain myself.
29 July
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