I’m tired this morning. Not the I should have slept longer
kind of tired, but rather a more physical, muscle-aching kind of tired that I don’t get too often, what with spending most of my working time at a desk. I spent yesterday afternoon rearranging my yard. I moved the trellis that arches over the front sidewalk a bit so I could plant my hops next to it. I planted those hops, moving the piece of sod I cut loose to the hole left where I pulled out one of the clothesline poles a couple weeks ago. I trimmed a bunch of a dead shrub out of the chain-link fence (I would have tried to finish the job, but the shears I was using broke). I tore out the edging on one of the garden spaces the previous owners left for me (it’s going to get peonies and grass, I think). I planted onions and garlic in the other garden (making it about half-full). And then I sat on the lawn and watched the birds play in the sprinkler while quaffing a couple beers.
It was the kind of afternoon that’s fairly satisfying. None of the changes are huge, but they all aim at making the house feel more like home, and will hopefully make it a more pleasant place this summer. This afternoon I hope to plant the peonies, but if I get rained out, I’ve got inside work to do, too. There’s still a section of kitchen wall that needs to be replastered, and there’s a bigger section that needs a good scrubbing before I repaint it. I need to replace the light fixture in the bedroom I’m going to move into one of these months, and I want to put a thermometer with an outdoor sensor in the bathroom so I can look at it in the morning and figure out what kind of day it’s going to be. There’s also a bunch of stuff in the basement that I either need to figure out a use for or throw away, and the big pieces of wood that were the edging for the garden I removed that probably need to be cut into smaller pieces so the trash-man will take ’em. Then again, maybe they’re the kind of thing that one of the neighbors will want, and I won’t have to worry about it.
But I’m tired enough, and feel enough of a sense of accomplishment that if I just spend the afternoon watching TV, I’ll still figure it was a productive weekend.
- In something of a shocker, Symantec Confirms Norton Utilities & SystemWorks’ Demise. While I wasn’t using either of the products, since Norton Utilities quit being useful with Mac OS X, and I switched to Diskwarrior, but many people were using them, and it’ll shake up the market a bit, especially when 10.4 ships sometime later this year.
- Says here you can CARP your way to high availability if you’re running OpenBSD. It lets you warm-swap servers, so if one goes down, the other will just automagically take over. More spiffy stuff from the OpenBSD team. As the article mentions, it’s not perfect (the machines have to be on the same subnet), but it’s the kind of thing that a certain ISP I know might want to consider (it’s been ported to FreeBSD, too). [openbsd]
- I see these same sort of USB MakeDevice errors on my Mac sometimes when I plug my Samsung i500 into the dock. Annoying, since they often prevent the Mac from sleeping. Google doesn’t find anything more useful that that page, and an email to some people who might know about this sort of thing didn’t produce anything useful, either.
- The Transit center gets it in gear as drivers are called back to work, and buses are being readied for service on Monday. I probably won’t even need to ride the bus anywhere this coming week, since it looks busy with work and with longer trips, but it’ll be nice to have the option if I decide I can take the time to have lunch downtown with a friend. [press-patch]
- Jim also points out that the Bus Strike [is] Over, and gives more details about the photo in the Daily that I linked to, and agrees that the union lost on the health-coverage for new hires. He also points out that this contract only runs for a little more than a year, so we could be facing another strike in summer 2005. Lovely. [jim]