Life in the Virtual Lane

Lisa's up to her ears in Google Wave and all-things-Google. The dog has been out to tinkle and had her mid-day snack. UPS brought me one of the video cards I bought on eBay so, if I can find a machine to test it on, I'll send it to the friend who needs it but can't afford it. We diced up some leftover meatloaf, stir-fried it with leftover short-grain-brown and wild rice and had it with fried eggs and bacon for breakfast. I spent a half hour practicing jazz licks and sundry minor scales on the funky-but-cool little Kay guitar Clenton gave me. We got a picture of our grandsons and a card from my middle daughter in the mail, along with a card from Jerry Fox who's a good friend though we've never met. He's one of the folks we describe as web-siblings. I don't think that's for lack of a better term, I think that's about as accurate a term as we could find.

Web-sibling: noun   (hyphen optional) Someone who is as close as family but whom one has never met in person.

We own a TV set; it's connected to the VCR and a DVD player in the living room. My daughter Lily gave us a digital converter box. One of these days I'll probably put up an antenna. We don't rent or buy movies but we borrow one from the kids every now and then. I snagged a copy of the BBC's Planet earth series on Listia.com. There are five DVDs in the set and we've watched the first one. It was three hours in length. Gosh knows how long it'll take us to watch the other four. Three hours is an awfully long time to be sitting in one place without a mouse or keyboard.

I've been upgrading from Debian Etch to Debian Lenny and I think I'm going to like it just fine. I set up a PCLinuxOS 2009.1 machine to use during the upgrade (as a sort of back-up w/learning-curve in case something broke). PCLinuxOS is awfully nice but some things don't seem to work well. For example, I can't get Konqueror to do a file search and I've no idea why. Very frustrating. In Firefox, when I click to bookmark a website the scrollbar won't work on the subsequent dialog box and in Thunderbird there's no scrollbar on the right side of the screen. All of which makes it highly likely I'll just settle back into my Debian machine and use the #2 machine to play with other distros. I've been wanting to try Puppy and Frugalware again anyway.

We're going to visit the Beierle's this evening. We're taking dinner with us. Venison sausage w/Bavarian Sauerkraut (hot buttered brown and wild rice on the side). Charlie (Beierle) is our favorite Linux Geek. He's got more computers, and more different operating systems, than anyone we know. For example, he's got an SGI computer which uses the IRIX operating system; I believe this is the type of machine used to create the original Pixar animations. He's also a geophysicist with a Ph.D. and one of the all-around nicest people we've ever known. He's our go-to-guy for problems with Windows, Mac or Linux and the buck usually stops with Charlie. I'm going to take the little Kay guitar and Lisa's taking her washboard so the Beierle's are in for a surprise. With luck, it'll be a pleasant one.