Another 23 mile bike ride today; there is an awesome bike path in Scottsdale. Neil and I rode from North Scottsdale to Tempe and back. No killer pace; just chill, with some BS'ing and stuff.

On the way home I started thinking about music. I've been resurrecting a lot of seldomly used music in the past few weeks, since I've been grabbing many of my CD's and ripping them to mp3 for iPodifcation.

Someone once told me, "The mechanic always drives the broken car." Lately, this has been the computer situation at home for me. Last Christmas, my friend Erik sent me an Athlon 64 and motherboard for the holidays. What he didn't know was that I didn't have an Athlon 64 capable power supply or RAM, so I ended up getting myself a case and some RAM, and for kicks, a CD burner.

My observation is that so far, Linux for x86_64, while certainly capable in the server market, is not quite ready for the desktop. Over January, I played with many x86_64 distros: FC2, FC3, Whitebox, FreeBSD, Gentoo. I really wanted to make this machine my primary desktop machine, since it has the studliest configuration. I think I might have liked Gentoo, as well, but alas, I couldn't reboot out of stage 1 or whatever because I wanted to use LVM, and I couldn't get the LVM port to compile so that my filesystems would be remounted on startup. I ended up just sort of giving up.

93 degrees presently. Summer is coming fast. I'm not looking forwardI'm going out on a bike ride with Neil and Kari tonight. This time, I'll try to remember that the bike is on top of the car, and not drive into my carport. That sucked.

Work has been furious but productive. We got another guy, and I've had him doing stuff I hadn't had time to get to yet. Now we have a yum server for our stuff to update from, and it's sweet.

Just got back from a partial hike of Camelback mountain with a co-worker. I wanted to try to make it to the saddle, but I got totally hosed with a last minute "we need this now!" type request, which nearly made me homicidal. I decided to hike with what time I had left to work out some aggression. It was good.

Outdoor stuff kicks ass over a gym, big time. At least you get some reward in the form of a good view for your labor. In the gym, you should sweat more, and try to ignore the foulness of the air and people. The summer here is hellish, but begrudgingly, I can see why people live here. The other 9 months of the year are simply perfect in terms of weather.

As it turned out, I probably should have just called and asked to take Monday off; the trip back took a long time. Things went pretty great for the first part of the trip back; I talked to some hams on the same repeater I used coming into L.A., and hauled ass eastward. I was talking to Neil on the cell phone, and another friend called (who just got back from Europe). We caught up for a bit, and as I was climbing the hills out of Indio, I lost reception and we got cut off.

I'm headed out to L.A. for the weekend. Acitivities will include ham radio geekiness and whatever else I can find. If you want to talk, give my cell phone a shot!

I listened to the demo CD of the last band I played with when I was still in Washington this morning. I really enjoyed playing with this band...I'd probably still be playing with them if I lived there.

Looks like the T1's that serve my domain are down, so if you're a user of the services....sorry. It's being worked on...it knocked out my friend Dave Isom's domain as well.

South Park yesterday....I enjoyed both epiosodes. The Hippie episode was great, and I really enjoyed the Japanese toy inspired re-run episode, which I hadn't seen before. Chapelle kicked ass too; the "Rick James" episode made the #1 spot on the top 5 they did for the last 5 weeks.

Bike ride tonight with Neil and Kari. Hopefully I don't get my ass kicked, but I did do the ultimate self-sin and had McDonald's for lunch. Damnit, McDonald's really sucks. I've got to quit eating crap.

Nothing earth shattering over the weekend, I just took care of dumb stuff.

My friend Erik came over from L.A. on Friday. I almost missed him; I was at work until about 10:30pm on Friday night, and his cell phone was out of service when I called it. He's a ham too, but he managed to be on the wrong repeater than what I normally use around here, so I couldn't here him either. I got home, and about five minutes later, he showed up. I felt pretty bad that I had done that to him; not being in communication sucks, and work really did need me.

I work in a big building that has a culinary academy in it. Today I found out that they give out free dessert every Friday. That rocks! So myself and the AIX admin from work went down there to check it out. It was grand. Today they had a Tiramisu type cake thing that was pretty damn good.

I went on a bike ride for the first time since last January's ill-fated critical mass with Neil and his friend Kari. We rode in Scottsdale, but we went through residential neighborhoods so the traffic wasn't bad at all. Those neighborhoods don't have too much street lighting (which is great), so there was a great big view of the sky and it was awesome. We did some hill climbing and that can be tough on the Revive, as it works different muscle groups. I stopped at one point and stretched pretty good, and although I thought I'd be paying for it today I don't seem to be having too many problems, so I'm happy about that.

Didn't pay for lunch or dinner today. That rocks. I was in a meeting with our equipment vendor most of the day. They sent out some system engineers to talk about the issues that we're having and stuff. One of them was a woman (and no, before you ask, she was *not* hot), who was sharp as hell on arcane UNIX / Linux stuff. It's nice talking to people that actually know what the hell that they're talking about.

Today I got around to replacing the belt on my dryer. It broke last Sunday, leaving me pretty short of clean clothes this week. I couldn't figure out why my clothes weren't dry until I tried to run it; the motor would run but the drum wouldn't spin.

Now, I rent, and I could have called my landlords, as the dryer is technically theirs. But anyone who knows me probably knows that I would regard a man who can't fix something chickenshit like this as either less than heterosexual or someone worthy of being clubbed like a baby seal. So, to defend my masculinity, I decided that I was going to fix it. Not to mention that I really didn't want to have to do a super clean up so that my landlords wouldn't freak when they walked in....

Anytime I have a nightmare, it's almost always something really dumb, but it always seems really scary while I was asleep.

I've been working pretty hard this week at work; today was the first normal hour-ed day that I had. I went home and crashed out, because I was starting to feel the lack of sleep. I woke up like a shot at about 5 til 10, though. I think I had a nightmare; it's already hard for me to remember. In the dream, I was lying half-awake, just in that state of almost-consciousness, and apparently I had a burglar alarm or a panic button or something that I tripped. All of a sudden, there were voices coming from speakers in the wall, and someone was knocking at my door. A touch of paranoia for sure. I remember trying to open the window and see who was knocking at the door, but I couldn't see very clearly and they were sort of mumbling their voice. It was totally disorienting, and I was really confused.

Damn, I'm feeling like a golden god after getting this done.

My work laptop is a Dell D600. I use it with a dock and an external monitor in a dual-head configuration. I run Fedora Core 2 on it. I tried FC3, but it was the suck on this laptop, especially the dual head stuff.

The crux of the problem is / was that when running in dual head, no 3d (or other) acceleration is supported. This resulted in my CPU time going nuts, and the whole system slowing down, if, for instance, I had a script scrolling in bash or something else equally trivial.

Tomorrow will mark the the three year anniversary of my discharge from the Navy. For the first time, it actually feels like some time has really passed since I got out. I wonder if that's due to the time or because my circumstances have changed so much since getting out.

Speaking of the Navy, I got ahold of someone at DFAS last week and they actually admitted that there was a mistake! They say that they're going to fix it, and send me and the IRS an explanation letter and corrected W-2 forms. I'm crossing my fingers that this might actually be over with.