The Treehouse Blog

John Harvey Alleman, my great uncle, passed away on Saturday August 7th 2004. I can’t say I know most of my great aunts and uncles very well, but John was an exception. He visited us often, usually weekly, sometimes more often. I’d be surprised if none of you had noticed his green Festiva parked at my house at least once. He will be missed.

Despite my mother unplugging the phone line before the storm got very close, my newer ISDN TA got fried hard. The old one is back in place at the moment, all quirks included. I was driving home when it was storming, and a lightning strike was visible directly ahead of me (probably in the field, maybe half a mile away). A second or so later I briefly smelled unhappy electronics smell in my car… nothing seemed unhappy though, hopefully it was the cables along the road. We didn’t have any power problems (except blips) at home, but AT&T had at least one nearby site down most of the evening. Doug called after the storm had passed to say that they had lost phone and power, a good while after the storm had passed them. The tornado potential kept the local news on the air until 8PM.

Despite what Doug says, I really enjoyed most of that hike! Well, except the part about wondering if the road was actually a river. It’d be good if DCNR put out some maps where mountain-sized hills aren’t displayed as two elevation lines. Besides, Ian, Isaac and Chris all have similar stories and I don’t hear them complaining (well, very often, anyway) :).

Monday, Doug and I hiked up to Lewis Rocks, or what Ian calls South Mountain Falls… both names are equally applicable. The lighting was awesome, and we got some great wallpaper photos. Wow, my camera is pitiful in quality compared with Doug’s ;).

Tuesday, the last piece (motherboard) arrived for my Oak upgrade. I proceeded without much problem (except for nearly destroying the processor via misapplied heatsink… my thanks to the A7V8X motherboard for shutting the machine off when it detects the processor is about to melt…). Oak is much faster processing-wise, and transfer speeds have improved, but are not quite at the media-limiting point.

Isaac and Ange organized a Capture the Flag event, which I was able to attend. I think they had 16 people at peak, divided over two teams. We got three games in between around 11:00 and 1:30. Due to the moon, only the last game was *really* dark. And this morning, the family went to the Silver Springs Flea Market. I didn’t get anything except for my usual breakfast sausage… most of my past purchases had been junk for treehouse assimilation, and that pretty much came to an end when I started working.

I finally got around to taking care of the lannic images/graphs, and they’re available here. I had to regenerate all of the graph images, as my nemesis tmpwatch ate the first ones. If only the tetex package didn’t require it…

This has been a really busy week, and it’s only Wednesday. The rest of the week doesn’t hold much of chance of calming down either.

The laptop is in! The Thinkpad R40 arrived Friday (after ordering on Wednesday night, pretty good… about worth the $45 in shipping). I visited both Ian and Ship to acquire media and networking resources required to bring it up to speed. It still hasn’t replaced spruce (no files have moved), so it probably won’t be seen outside of my house much until it does. First three thoughts about the laptop: fast, big, quiet. The first and third are obviously completely good… the second is a mixed blessing. Complete article to come at some point….

Other stuff is happening too. We had a family picnic on Saturday. VBS is this week (Sunday-Thursday) and I’m running the sound/lights for the program as I’ve done for a number of years now. Friday night Isaac and his SO are planning a CTF get-together. Saturday and Sunday are ARRL Field Day. (Need to drag Doug to the last two.) Sunday is the conculding VBS program, as well as a more major family reunion at Doubling Gap, during which Chris and I can hopefully uncover a large quantity of geocaches.

So, not much NetMRG is getting done. My uncle who works for the navy base said that he had come across NetMRG while doing some RRDTOOL searching… might order a T-Shirt ;). This week is work, VBS, and a few hours of DS9 watched on the new laptop to gauge battery performance (as a primary objective, anyway). Some interpersonal stuff, too. Evil ambiguity. And… Blazer doesn’t seem well this week, and Katelyn’s at field hockey camp, and Ship is getting a 24TB SAN, and… well, you get the picture. Busy.

Yeah… so that’s why there isn’t a lannic photo/graph archive yet, nor have I logged the last geocache find…