I’ve completed an extensive overhaul of my site. I believe everything is working now, except for the track back link for each posting. Since I’ve never had a track back this is not a major concern.
I used a design from the CSS Zen Garden called “utilitarian” as the base for this design. Originally it didn’t make use of columns, but I refactored it with the help of the Layout-o-matic site.
I hope you like it as much as I do; please let me know if anything works especially well, or even if it doesn’t.
Leslie Veen was one of many who talked about the recent signing of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban.
I completely agree with her statement, “I find it striking that not one of those pictured will be directly affected by the law they just enacted. How is that representational government?”
Whether you support the current administration’s policies or not, you must realize that the neo-conservatives and the ultra-right Christian coalition have an agenda to rework this county, and indeed the world, in their image. They are using fear, uncertainty, and doubt to divide us and steal our democracy.
If we the people don’t get out and vote and express our displeasure with our “elected” government we may well lose the ability to control it forever.
Thanks to Matt Haughey, Leonard Lin, and this Apple document my Powerbook G4 (867 MHz) is once again running at 867 MHz.
I just last evening upgraded to 10.2.8 figuring that all the quirks have been flattened by now. Silly me. Less than 24 hours later I read that 10.2.8 may have reset my cpu frequency to a figure 2/3rds of its rated speed.
Running the sysctl hw.cpufrequency command in the Terminal I discovered to my dismay that my CPU was running at a mere 667 MHz. Following Apple’s directions I reset my PMU and restarted my machine. Once again I am running at a full 867 MHz.
The month of October saw a slight increase in the amount of spam I’m getting. For the month I had 6,312 spams, up from last month’s 5009. My total for the year is now 64,023.
My average is now 6,402.3 per month and 210.6 per day. My new estimate for the year is 76,600. Wow.
Last month I talked about setting up a Linux server and using it as, among other things, a mail server. I haven’t done anything towards this goal. I guess the daily pain of sifting through the junk filtered messages for false positives hasn’t reached my breaking point.
CNN is reporting that Voyager 1 has left the solar system.
Well not completely. But it is believed to be in the region of the heliopause. With another 17 years or so of power on-board scientists should get a chance to discover what’s out there.
Can you imagine that a man made object is now traveling at 1,000,000 miles per day and is 90 times farther away from us than the sun? Incredible.
Michele and I spent yesterday morning cooking both a pot of spaghetti sauce and a crock pot of swiss steak. Originally we had planned on preparing and having swiss steak for dinner. It is one of our favorite meals and we hadn’t made it in too long.
We use a 2-3 pound eye roast, cut into 3/4 inch slices. Yesterday’s roast was a good 3 pounds so we sliced two filets off the thick end to have as steak later in the week. The rest of the slices are pounded with a meat tenderizer and then dredged through flour, salt, and pepper. I pound them again lightly after the dredging to make sure the floor really sticks. The meat is browned in oil and then added to the crock pot. While I’m doing the meat prep, Michele dices an onion, a green pepper, a rib or two of celery, some baby carrots, and 3-5 gloves of garlic. These get sautéed in the same oil as the meat and then are added to the pot. I de-glaze the frying pan with a can of beef stock, which is then poured into the pot.
I add a can of stewed tomatoes and a handful (2-3 tablespoons) of brown sugar. Of course salt and pepper are used through out to season each layer of the mix. Put it on low for a good 8 hours and you have a wonderfully tender, flavorful meal. Perfect with mashed potatoes and gravy made from the liquid in the pot.
When Michele was nearly done with the vegetables for the swiss steak she suggested that we go ahead and make a pot of spaghetti sauce to have later in the week. Since the swiss steak was now nearly on auto-pilot I thought this was a fabulous idea. While she started dicing more green pepper, onion and garlic, I completed the swiss steak preparations and then started grinding the meat for our sauce. We buy good quality ground meat from the store and re-grind it at home. The consistency is smoother, and we enjoy the texture of the meat more.
Once the veggies are ready I sauté them in a little oil with salt and pepper. These are set aside and the meat is browned, again with salt and pepper. After draining the meat the veggies are re-added. We use a 14.5 oz can of diced tomatoes, and a similar sized can of tomato sauce, along with a small can of tomato paste for the liquid in the sauce.
For seasoning we add anise seed, oregano, italian seasoning, cumin, cayenne, bay leaf, salt, pepper, and a dash or two of sugar. We let it simmer for a couple hours before cooling it and storing in the fridge for later consumption.
Have the house filled with all these wonderful cooking aromas was enticing and wonderful. Knowing that we have several meals already prepared for the week felt liberating. We we both in the right space to do some serious cooking yesterday, our energy was light and playful. The resulting food was spectacular. Our swiss steak dinner was one of the finest we have every had or made.
I can’t wait for spaghetti tonight!
I haven’t been posting much here lately. I’d like to think that meant I was doing great in all things and that I didn’t need a place to vent. However, I suspect that my seasonal depression is starting; I have felt flat and tired more than not lately.
A week or so ago Michele remarked on this, saying something to the effect of “you are going into your annual depression.” I remember bristling at her statement, a sure sign it was a truth I didn’t want to hear or face. Yuck.
Every fall I say that I am not going to fall into the same old pattern of depression that has plagued me for most of my life. And every fall there comes a day when I realize, and can admit, that I have slipped into depression in spite of myself. I know that in recent years my low point hasn’t been as depressed, that I am less depressed overall. Still I’d like to go through a holiday season without feeling like a tired old man.
Somethings are helping; my employment situation is stable once again. My relationship with my brother is at an all-time high, and my relationship with my parents is also doing better than ever before. Thanks to the beautiful soul I married I am now looking forward to Christmas. We decorate the house, and have fun wrapping presents and watching old Christmas movies. She has shown me the joy and wonder that is the true spirit of the season.
And I am better at taking care of my inner child, who was so hurt and confused all those years ago when Amy died. There is a small piece of him that is still selfishly angry about the lack of Christmas that year. Instead of fighting his anger I now know to express in it positive ways. By opening myself up to those ancient emotional memories I am able to move past them and develop new, happier memories of Christmas.
This year will be a challenge to me as it will be the first Christmas I’ve spent with my family in several years. The work I have done to change the holiday from a time of mourning to a time of joy will be put to the test. Even though Amy will have been dead 30 years this Christmas, the lack of open emotional expression by my family, as a family, still casts a pall on the day.
I have grieved for Amy and mourned her loss time and again. I’ve expressed the anger I had at her for dying, and at my family for not understanding my turmoil over her death. And I have forgiven myself for surviving when she did not. Now I need to truly celebrate her living and her memory by letting the joy and love of the Christmas season into my heart once again. When I can do that I will regain a connection to her that I have been missing for such a long time.
Once upon a time I wrote about using ssh to connect to a server outside of the restrictive environment at my primary client site. Since that time I have been happily connecting from my laptop, which isn’t logged into the LAN, to my NT workstation, which is logged in, and from the NT workstation to a server out in the wilds of the internet.
Originally I was using a fine piece of software for the ssh connection and subsequent TCP/IP tunnel called ‘SSHTunnelManager.’ A fairly straight forward user interface made it easy enough for me to create the necessary port forward to allow my laptop to connect to the open ssh process running on the NT workstation.
However, I recently learned about scp, or secure copy, on Unix and wanted to be able to use it to move files to and from my laptop. In order for this gem to work I needed to forward port 22 through the tunnel. SSHTunnelManager has one flaw, it doesn’t allow forwarding of ports owned by root, or in other words, any port numbered 1024 or less.
So I resorted to using the command line interface (terminal) and a command like this to make my secure connection and necessary port forwards:
sudo ssh -C -l_userid_ -L22:localhost:22 -L8080:localhost:8080 10.21.85.76The breakdown goes like this:
sudo allows the command that follows to be run as if you were logged in as root. You supply your password, and provided your ID has administrator access, the command runs.
ssh -C run the ssh command, and the first option is ‘-C’ or compress all traffic. Should get some performance gain from this.
-l_userid_ the id on the remote system you want to log in using
-L22:localhost:22 forward local port 22 to the remote system and once there resolve it as localhost:22. (remember in my case the remote system has another set of forwards to a server beyond the firewall.)
-L8080:localhost:8080 again forward local port 8080 to the remote system and once there resolve it as localhost:8080.
10.21.85.76 the IP address of the remote system I wish to log in to using the userid specified in the ‘-l’ parameter.
So that I don’t have to type this command every time I wish to connect I created an alias in my .tcshrc file, like this:
alias remote ‘sudo ssh -C -l_userid_ -L22:localhost:22 -L8080:localhost:8080 10.21.85.76’
Now I just open a terminal window and type ‘remote’ to connect. I’m prompted for my administrator id first (from the sudo command) and then for my login password on the remote server.
Now I have full HTTP and HTTPS browsing and scp ability from my laptop.
It all started with buying a large screen television. Now it has blossomed into repainting one room, a new entertainment center, completely re-doing another room, and maybe refinishing ALL the wood trim in the house.
We bought ourselves a brand new 57" HDTV. Looking over the room where it was to live we decided that we needed more space. So we moved things around and ended up putting a chair from the living room into our bedroom. The living room theme, if you can call it that, is taupe. The bedroom is patterned after the “Water Lilies” painting by Monet. A taupe chair clashes somewhat with dusty rose and lavender.
So we set off to get the chair reupholstered. The cost estimate for the chair alone was as much as it had cost brand new. Since we tossed in a few other goodies we ran the estimate up to almost $2400. Once we slept on the idea we each felt that $2400 spent in other rooms of the house would be a better investment. Our bedroom is already in wonderful shape. If we move the big chair to another room, then it’s taupe-ness isn’t a problem.
We decided that the living room would be our next project. We looked at and picked out a new throw rug and a new entertainment center to house the TV. And we are getting estimates on having the room repainted after some minor patch work to one wall. This will use up the $2400 very nicely, and at the same time make our living room much more to our liking.
While at the furniture store we saw a very nice kitchen/dining room table. Currently we are using eating end of our kitchen as our office. Once upon a time we thought about converting the 3-season porch into an office, but we have continually put that project off. Over lunch yesterday we talked about moving the “I love Lucy” collection to the unused bedroom, which neither of us wants as an office, and turning the Lucy room into our office. We’d rip up the carpet and put down a laminate wood floor, slap some new paint on the walls, add a ceiling fan, and get me a new desk. Ta-da! A new office, with hard wood floors and matching desks, and an actual eat-in kitchen. This would give us an excuse to buy a table and chairs. That leads (eventually) to re-decorating the kitchen. Maybe next year.
Of course putting down a blonde or light colored wood floor will clash with the darker colored trim in the new office. Once you strip that and re-paint it then the trim in the rest of the house starts to look out of place, so while you are re-doing trim you may as well do it all. It’s an 1800 square foot house with an appropriate number of windows and doorways. There’s a lot of trim. Oh and the interior doors are dark to match the existing trim. They’d need to be stripped and redone as well.
All this just to watch letterbox movies without the black bar at the top and bottom of the picture.
Saturday was spent running around doing little errands and visiting family. In the morning we went to an interior design shop looking for ideas and estimates on reupholstering a large overstuffed chair to use in our bedroom. Originally the chair was taupe colored and our room is soft pastels. The estimate for the chair alone was as much as it had cost new 2 years ago. By the time we thru in some shams for the bed and a small table cloth for an accent table in the room we were up over 2 grand.
After a wonderful soup and sandwich lunch we crashed at home for a couple of hours before going to see my parents. My father had some computer related questions concerning the use of Windows XP Professional on his new laptop. After playing consultant-to-the-family for an hour or so, we had dinner with them at a chinese restaurant.
By 8:30, when we got home we were both wiped out. In the middle of the night Michele woke up having bad dreams; when I asked her what was scaring her she said we had spent too much money on “that”, waving in the general direction of the chair. I said we hadn’t spent any money yet as I hadn’t dropped off the deposit yet. We agreed not to.
On Sunday she had no recollection of our 2 am conversation, but was still upset about spending so much money “just to reupholster a chair.” After talking it out we both felt it would be money better spent if we started on another room. The master bedroom and bath are in wonderful shape now, but the living room needs some help.
I baked a yellow cake and made chocolate butter cream frosting for it. Once the cake was done, frosted, and in it’s tupperware home, we showered and headed out to Lone Star for lunch. Our meal there was terrific, and we celebrated by going to our favorite furniture store to look at entertainment centers for the new television. We found one we both liked almost immediately, and a beautiful multi-colored area rug that has the sand/gold color we want to use for the walls in the living room. Now we just need to pick out some paint and paint the room and it’ll be much better.
After making the purchase arrangements we came home and collapsed in front of “West Wing” reruns. Later we made meatless-pasta from a jar and had magnificent cake for dessert.
All in all it was a great weekend.
You?