Checking In
The trouble with holidays is, though it seems like an expanse of time
with which one will be able to do whatever one wants, there always seems
to be a list of high priority things to be dealt with. The problem with
priorities is practical
always seems to trump fun
.
Despite the whininess of the previous paragraph, this (long) holiday weekend has been nothing to complain about. Everything has been relaxed and fun. If I do have a complaint, it's that there aren't enough hours in a day, and I have too many toys.
Christmas morning I picked Caitlin up at a quite godly hour, we came home, opened our modest pile of presents, all of which we appreciated by the receiver, then went to Shannon and Curt's for Christmas dinner. The most interesting gift I recieved was a black silk obi from my mother. It's a beautiful piece of work; now I only need the kimono (and the occasion) to wear it. The most useful gift I received was a pair of fenders for my bicycle. I will likely install them as soon as I finish this entry.
The jukebox is working great, though I've been spending more time than I thought I would fixing up metadata downloaded from freedb.org. Partly this is because many mult-artist discs have not been well-catalogued to start with, but my own anal-retentiveness cannot be ignored.
When I started the project, I had intended to rip our discs piecemeal, as we wanted to listen to them. Ripping has proved so easy, though, that I've just been working my way through the collection. When the machine spits one out, I just drop the next one in the drive. The whole issue of play-on-rip seems to be moot. (...Which is fine, because it saves me some trouble.)
The next issue we've tackled involves long term storage of our CDs,
and indexing those so we can find them if we need to. (I say we
because this seemed to me to be a library/archives kind of issue, so I
asked Barbara what she thought would be best.) We settled on Rubbermaid
Revelations 31 qt containers—they're the perfect size for two rows
of CDs in jewel cases, 100 per box—and a flat text file for
indexing. For a while I was thinking about generating a summary report
from the rhythmbox metadata, and saving it in XML format or something,
but this is much better. Ease of implementation is a good thing.
The day after Christmas, I helped Steve find a computer to replace the one Amy is currently using. He tells me her monitor is dying and the machine is old and glitchy. I told him we could try cleaning up the system or even reinstalling, but he felt a new system would be a better choice. We did some comparison shopping, and he felt that the HP s7220n best suited their needs.
There are a few other project's I'd like to work on in the near future:
Finish implementing search for this site. When I put it down a couple of days ago I had swish-e indexing the vellum generated pages, and was thinking about how best to proceed in indexing the pyblosxom-managed pages.
Do something about comments. The distributed comments modules needs some slapping around before it's ready for primetime.
The perennial move-services-to-musashi project.
Settle on an OS for the new (old) laptop. It's running FC4 now, but comes in way under the hardware specs. I'm not running a desktop environment, and that helps, but it would be interesting to try a distro optimized for legacy hardware, like DSL.
Continue learning about XSL with my FOAF-via-XSL project. (See foaf link at the top of this page.)
Learn to knit. Barbara says if I do this, she will spend some time learning about linux. I almost said
learning to install linux
, but with modern point-and-click installation, this is a non-issue. Plus I'd like to know how to knit.
See? Too many projects, not enough time...
Today is the eighth anniversary of our marriage. We are celebrating by walking downtown and dining at Vincenzo's, our favorite Italian restaurant.