brett's logjam

Tonight is my first Red Plate dinner. Hooray for me! I’ve never had a red plate dinner before.

• Bruce Perens provides an Analysis of SCO’s Las Vegas Slide Show
• Linus Torvalds Slams SCO
• Ernie Ball ran afoul of the BSA, switches to open source, becomes a Linux hero.

Go help Ryan move! Buy his old AD&D books!

Add to the home network todo list: quiet fans, more quiet fans.

Huzzah! The whole Lord of the Rings - extended versions for the first two - will be shown in theaters this December!

The current timetable:

• August 26: Two Towers DVD
• November 18: Two Towers Extended DVD
• December 5: Fellowship
• December 12: Two Towers
• December 16-17: Entire Trilogy, with bathroom breaks!
• December 17: The Return of the King

Visited a new bookstore: The Book Bank. It’s pink. And wonderful.

Found: many nice treasures, including the Anchor Atlas of History (Vol II), which I’ve been seeking since 1995. Merrystar found even nicer books, but I don’t know all their titles.

Installed Red Hat GNU/Linux 9.0 on my old IBM Thinkpad 1400i (now al-rassan). Space prevented me from installing with existing windows partitions, so I backed them up to Atlantis and wiped them clear. 9.0 is much improved from previous installs - RH detected the Winmodem, sound card and video card without a hitch. Minor problem with the display was fixed by increasing the resolution from 800x600 to 1280x1024.

After long discussion with Ryan last week about network nomenclature schemes (weapon names, Tolkienian weapon names, starships), decided to stick with the established use of Guy Gavriel Kay’s fantasy worlds. Renamed Atlantis to Sarantium. Renamed Ithilien to Al-Rassan. Two other machines waiting in the wings: Arbonne and Gorhaut. It will be some time before we run out of names.

Anyhow, back to the linux installation. Wireless card was easy to configure with the drivers already present - connected to my Windows desktop (sarantium) via Samba.

Nasty surprise - Red Hat removed MP3 support. Was aware of it in the back of my mind but still unexpected. Still, gives me a chance to reburn entire CD collection. Add to todo list - find MP3->OGG converter. WMA not an option.

Tigana’s left mouse button remains broken. This is the second time the mouse has broken on this computer (a Sony Vaio 505TR), but this time it’s out of warranty. Took the case apart last night but couldn’t get the buttons out of the top plastic casing. Curses!

Maybe one will show up on eBay.

Stayed up entirely too late last night finishing Busman’s Honeymoon by Dorothy L. Sayers. Don’t tell me what time I went to sleep, I don’t want to know.

Mozilla 1.5 beta is out. Don’t forget the release notes.

Further adventures in Linux: couldn’t get Al-Rassan’s Winmodem working last night. The wireless card works perfectly, though. Will have to start documenting the actual steps of what I’m doing with this thing - otherwise, I’m just spinning my wheels.

Spinning, spinning, on the launchpad.

Boy, do I feel itch today.

BBC NEWS | Ancient stone circle discovered on Isle of Lewis.

May have found answer to prayers: eBay item 3428656168 (Ends Sep-03-03 10:31:31 PDT) - Sony VAIO PCG-505TR Laptop Notebook PARTS. May be able to fix Tigana after all.

Liebchen, There’s a Piggish Eater on the Lawn:

In honor of settling the network nomenclature question, I polished off Guy Gavriel Kay’s A Song for Arbonne last night. Note to self #20942: must stop staying up and reading.

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