It is getting close. Probably very close. Management has been experiencing increasing pressure and contraction-like symptoms, which the doctor at today’s appointment said should be changing over to actual contractions soon. In the past week, the baby has dropped considerably and having spent the past month as a giant belly with arms and legs jutting out Management has cleavage again. So increased contractions and re-appearing cleavage all point to go-time.
Bags are packed and the nursery is nearly all set, just the valance needs to be hung and the bassinet assembled. Sleep is elusive. Every time Management rolls over, sighs, or just twitches in bed has me snap awake, hand on car keys, and feet slipping into my sneakers. I am primed for a Hollywood style labor, one that involves driving reverse down the highway, eluding befuddled mobsters, as we try and get to the hospital on time. For certain, I need sleep.
The toughest part for me is the waiting. I sit and I wait. I wait and I sit. Sure, I’m doing all of the cooking, cleaning, and general catering to, but overall I’m feeling pretty useless as if there is something more I could be doing. She has the tough job and I’m hanging around like some slack-ass K-Fed wannabe. Hopefully, she won’t be cutting me loose via a text message.
Back to thumb twiddling.
Boston.com is reporting that a Boston area IHOP implemented a policy to ask for IDs before customers can be seated. The goal is to cut down on Dine and Dash but honestly, even if the policy has been reversed, this sort of behavior can just be filed under Masshole for its sheer stupidity.
Published by james on November 28, 2006
in Site.
Spent a little time to tidy up the main menus, removing content that I haven’t touched in a while and adding a photo album thanks to the fine folks over at Tan Tan Noodles. Setting up the photo album wasn’t too arduous, just needed to make sure that I had php5-curl installed and then tweaked the view.php file to add the k2 specific div tags. The interface is real nice and it’s dead simple to use.
Now to stop procrastinating and go hang the valences in the baby’s room…
Management is taking a music appreciation class this semester and one of the assignments this week was to design a promotional poster for an opera. She chose Madame Butterfly, a truly tear-jerking one if there ever was one, and after we sat and sketched out her ideas I plunked myself down in front of the old laptop and fired up Gimp and Inkscape.
She wanted to get across Butterfly’s sense of hope, a hope tied deeply to a notion of renewal, so she decided that cherry blossoms would be the best representative object since they embody spring. We found this low resolution image…
For Butterfly herself, Management wanted get across the crushing sense of loss that has filled her life since she was a little child. The image of the butterfly was a little better…
With a handful of doodles and these images we worked to piece it together, finally arriving at this…
We used Inkscape to trace the base images to bitmaps and then proceeded to work them over for color, layering, and transparencies alternating between Gimp and Inkscape. The text was generated and layered in Inkscape. Considering neither of us have any graphic design training I’m pretty damn proud with how this came together.
So I finally got around to installing 6.10 on Management’s laptop and it was a dream now that I finally took the time to hammer out backup and restore scripts (Ted Ruegsegger has a great write up that I cribbed from to do this). Now, some people might be asking, “Why not just do an in place upgrade?” Good question, and my answer is cruft.
One of the things that I have noticed is that in place upgrades greatly increase the amount of depreciated config files and general cruft with the system and while performing one is pretty damn convenient it takes just about the same amount of time as installing the latest version, particularly since I go through the process of backing up the user directories.
Here’s the backup script I run:
cd /home
rsync -e ssh -av –delete –delete-excluded \
–exclude “tmp” \
–exclude “[cC]ache” \
–exclude “.Trash” \
me me@my.SSH-server.name:/home/me/backups
It would be nice to add this script to my Cron jobs but since this is a laptop I made a menu item so it can be run whenever I remember. Also, I have it run in a terminal and added the verbose switch so I can have the warm and fuzzies of a visual indication that something is happening.
To restore files, it is as simple as running the backup in reverse from /home:
rsync -e ssh -av me@my.SSH-server.name:/home/me/backups/me .
With Management’s laptop, I ran the restore right after I logged in and setup SSH with a pre-shared key. The catch was after the restore was done I needed to log out and back in for all the settings to work (killall gnome-panel just sort of made things wonky). All in all, the upgrade took about 2 hours from start to finish with no hiccups.
It is always the person walking the dog that finds the body, well at least that is my perception. The other night Peri and I were taking in our regular evening stroll (that is if you consider stop-sniff-mark-forward-stop-sniff-mark a stroll) when we see something out of the ordinary at the bottom of a runoff for one of the culverts in the area.
Now, it seems strange that a 30 gallon trash can, the kind you might pick up at your local hardware store, would be lying at the bottom of this culvert and my first thought was that maybe it got swept up in some storm runoff but we haven’t had any storms and the culvert is much too small for the barrel to fit. It must have been dumped.
My intrepid companion and I decided to scramble part of the way down the slope to get a better look and notice that the top is sealed with a black plastic garbage bag and packing tape. Odd. Drawing upon my vast experience of back episodes of Forensic Files and movies such as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Man Bites Dog tells me that the configuration of trash barrel, trash bags, and packing tape is the hallmark of nefarious activity, though the use of clear packing tape is total bush league. The 13 year old in me wanted to climb the rest of the way down and poke it with a stick but the 32 year old in me faltered, “But my shoes might get wet!” Peri’s vote was for sniffing something else.
When we got back I told Management about our discovery and she offered the sage explanation that it is likely 30 gallons of dirty diapers and we were more than welcome to poke it with a stick provided we cleaned ourselves off outside with the hose. For now, I’m going to keep watching it to see if the plastic peels back a little more revealing the contents within which, hopefully, are nothing more than soiled Huggies. Then again, dog walkers always find the dead bodies.
