Journal of a Sysadmin

Snowboarding with…

jhb!

For the first time since she was preggers with Jonah we were able to go boarding together today. Since she wasn’t working, I wasn’t working, and little J was in daycare we went west and got a few runs in. She’s getting good too. We had lunch in the rather cramped lodge (a lot of people out today) and put a few runs in then drove home again. Long drive, well worth it.

Any time we get to spend time boarding together it’s great!

Babies Grow

Speaking of Jonah and presents he’s changing almost every day right now. jhb and I couldn’t figure out why he has been so restless lately and now we know.

He is learning to talk.

It’s preoccupying so much of his brain at the moment that he couldn’t even sleep right for a while. Now it’s getting better but it is so funny and so cute to see him imitating us and his big brother while we go about our daily lives. On Sunday before I took Connor up, he was helping Connor with some shoes. Connor was saying, “Dads shoe, Jaime’s (to which jhb yelled MOMMY’s) ^W mommy’s shoe, Connors shoe” to which Jonah replied, “SHOE!”.

There have been other things, Mommy and Daddy are more frequent and correctly targeted, puppy, kitty, num num (food), counting, up a couple of times. A lot of other things.

So many things.

Christmas Time is Here!

Christmas today was a blast.

Little J had so many presents I think he was overwhelmed. So much so he didn’t get to open all of them and there are still 3 wrapped and under the tree, he could be saving them for tomorrow =).

jhb loved what I got her, though I knew she would. Only problem is there’s a little hack you have to do to the iPod Touch in order to get it to work with Linux and that hack requires the use of iTunes.

Did you know, iTunes won’t work from within a xen VM? It can’t see the USB device I guess. It also won’t work from within wine (I tried both of these). It also will not work on a PowerPC Mac with Darwin, that’s too old. You need at least Tiger to run iTunes and Lepard won’t run on a 733MHz G4… It also will not work on Windows XP base install, which jhb found out about tonight before she was forced to install SP2, just to run iTunes…

Did you also know that we have a grand total of 3 copies of windows in our house. One which is for middle C’s computer, a copy of XP home. I have a copy of XP Pro which was a free (as in beer) copy distributed by M$ at a seminar I went to on storage but it is damaged to the point of being unusable at the moment. The third is for adelle, which is jhb’s old Dell Optiplex, the one she moved here with.

It’s a good thing she had that CD, but cause now (after about 15 hours) she is installing adelle and she will use that to load the 1.1.1 firmware and crack the Jail on the iPood, then upgrade it to 1.1.2 again and we’ll be able to copy data via wireless using gtkpod. Can’t wait to see that work, since it’s been all FREAKING day getting to this point…

Makes me want to *never* purchase anything running any proprietary software on it, evern. I mean why the hell can’t Jobs get them to write a Linux iTunes or at least release enough specs so that the community can flash their iPood without resorting to booting Tiger on a G4.

But jhb likes it, so I guess it’s worth it.

BTW, after the Sony root kit BS, I still haven’t bought much if anything in the way of Sony hardware. I unfortunately can’t see doing that with Mac right now even though they desperately needs their heads pulled out of their asses… Please someone at Apple, make them port some of that to Linux!

Inagural Ride

For my Christmas present jhb bought me a new snowboard which is exactly what I asked for. We’ve been riding now since March of 2004 and I bought the board I had, second hand from a pawn shop 2 years ago. I did about 25 days that year, about 20 days last year and now that board has more gouges and gashes than Van Gogh’s ear.

So she let me take the pick of a few different boards, all in the mid-range and I picked out a K2 Select Wide.

On Saturday Connor and I woke up early, and drove the 1.5 hours to Sunshine (the closest decent hill is where we have our passes) and I took it for it’s first outing in the snow.

Now, I have to say coming from a 156 narrow to this thing is a big change. I’m having a bit of trouble in the switch ride department but it is more stable, which helps me to be faster, it’s more difficult (at least at this point) in the deeper snow but I think that too will be just a transition thing. I have really noticed the stability though, wow. Smoking along, you can hit a bit of a drop and catch some air without worrying about wiping out, as long as you can stay standing up :).

We’re hoping to get out again on the 27th, hopefully that comes together, then again maybe on the 31st or on the 1st. The more time on the hill the better =).

I officially really suck

At posting that is. I never seem to have anything really that good to say so mostly I suck.

I am also behind my wife, who is on the portal still (I’m in the at home category now) and I seem to have fallen behind as well.

Hehe, oh well. No need for a 50 word minimum now at least!

First Evar

Today is my first ever holidailies posting, and in a style which is true to form, it’s a day late.

I only came to know about holidailies after I met my now wife Jaime. Some things this woman didn’t tell me about are the piles of yarn she will accumulate, the knitting needle sets she will have to buy, or the way she is part of this online cult^H^H^Hlub which posts miscellaneous bits of their lives for google to index and remember until the matrix swallows us all. I did know that she was an avid journal-mistress but I was unaware of the extent of her mistrossity.

Every other year she has made a fairly solid effort but last year she had problems doing holidailies as she was also dealing with being a new mommy, which is a lot of work in itself, and trying to organize all of us for a vacation to paradise to see her parents for Christmas. She had lots to post about, just no time or energy to manage it. This year I thought I would help.

I made a deal with her that I would attempt to also post every day, kind of a "keep up with the husband’" thing because she secretly loves to be challenged that way (at least in my mind…). So it came to be that yesterday was December 1, 2007 and it has slipped my mind how I was going to post and get my post out first and then use that the bait her into getting her post up before midnight…

So far it’s backfiring when last night around 1am I was reminded that I needed to write my post. I saw her post scroll past my RSS ticker line in my browser while I was at work, so now I’m playing catch up.

Her mistrossities online journal-world is now formally introduced to her husband. Please, have mercy on me and accept yet another journal owner who can’t meet his own self imposed deadlines.