Mon 4 Jun 2007

Summer Hours

Posted in Summer Vacation, This, that and the other at 11:30

As much fun as this blog is, it’s time to cut back for a little while. Last summer I took a few months off from blogging, and while sipping fruit juice and thinking things over, I learned that even though I like spontaneity in my spare time, some kind of framework helps keep a blog (and its blogger) from coming up dry.

Here’s how it’s been done here since Labor Day last year:

Monday: Either (1) Home Video or (2) Man Cat Monday
Tuesday: Either (1) What is a Good Cat? or (2) Tummy/Toesday Tuesday
Wednesday: The Good things in life
Thursday: 3 Good Links
Friday: Traditional Friday Cat Blogging
Saturday: 3 Good Dots…
Sunday: Easy Like Sunday

Here’s what you should see here this summer, unless I absolutely can’t help myself:

Tuesday: Either (1) What is a Good Cat? or (2) Tummy/Toesday Tuesday
Wednesday: The Good things in life
Friday: Traditional Friday Cat Blogging
Sunday: Easy Like Sunday

How I plan to spend my summer vacation:

– Spend much time with Pat, with our Good Cats and with granddaughter Diana.

– Get outside more. Longer bike rides; emphasis on distance, not speed.

– Polish up my French (prediction: with Sarkozy as President, it’s going to become cool to like France and the French.). Haul out some of those old literature texts and read something I didn’t read years ago. Or go ahead and reread something I first read years ago. Who knows what I might learn? (Until recently, I never knew that a song from my younger days, and one I still like today, was written by the same guys who wrote Hound Dog, was arranged by Randy Newman, and was based on a short story by Thomas Mann, whose short stories I struggled through in college.)

– Catch up on reading in English, too: For instance, some of those books I’ve bought off discount and clearance tables over the years. It took me nearly 10 years to start reading “Washington Goes To War”. Still haven’t finished “Car”, and I still want to. Pat got me the Complete New Yorker for my birthday a year ago, and there’s so much more to go through. Things like the article by Garrison Keillor where he visited the Grand Ole Opry, before beginning A Prairie Home Companion.

– I have 3 teams in Internet simulation baseball leagues. Now, I know good and well that nobody but me cares about how one of my teams rallied to win a game 12 to 11, or how I traded for Felix Hernandez this past spring, so you won’t see anything else about them here. But doing these sim-league things is a lot of fun.

– Keep dinking around with Linux, banging my head against the wall, learning about it, with the goal of installing it on one of our computers. (No anti-virus needed? A sufficient firewall included? Free? You’ve got my attention.) I had some limited success with PCLinuxOS 2007, and here’s where I am now:

Action: Searched PCLinuxOS and Linux forums to see whether anyone else has had this kind of problem.

Result: Found a post that seemed similar.

Action: Followed its recommendations.

Result: Still didn’t work, but learned more about why it didn’t.

Action: Copied down the error messages and Googled them.

Result: Learned that the problem is that our laptop just isn’t equipped to handle this OS. Since the laptop was meant just for basic websurfing and playing comparatively simple games, I cut costs by leaving off a video card or sound card. Integrated video and audio are fine for a 2nd computer. For PCLinuxOS, however, more computer power is necessary.

So now I know more than I did before. Either upgrade the video and sound cards or live with the Linux live CD on the PC upstairs.

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