Doug Warner

Lots of stuff have been going on around here.  I've been busy with a number of household projects and Jocelyn and Jared continue to grow.

Project-wise I've been busy setting up some home-automation. It's mostly focused on Christmas-y things right now, but I'd like to move it past that.  I finally found some wall switches that will allow me to replace my midi wall switches without converting everything to the paddle-type wall switches so I'm planning on replacing the switches for the outside lights so I can then remotely control them to turn them all on/off at the same time.

We also got a 40" Samsung LCD TV (LN40A550) for Christmas and I've been busy fixing various things to accomodate that.  I updated our Logitech Harmony remote to include the proper inputs for activities, but needed to contact Logitech to have them fix the input switching (it cycles to the previous input if the same input is selected again - a problem when switching to another activity that uses the same input).  I'm also having some problems with my PVR - video tearing and no surround sound.  The former problem is new, but I knew about the latter one for awhile, just hadn't looked into it.  I've ordered a new video and sound card to try to rectify those problems, so we'll see how that goes.

I've also been trying out new photo management software.  f-spot seems pretty nice and I'm pretty much ready to start importing photos into it. I have a problem where photos edited with it are inheriting the incorrect umask which needs fixed first.  This is one of the reasons I'm so behind on updating photos on my website; once this process is smoothed out I hope it goes a lot faster.

One of the reasons I haven't made more headway in that department is because I was sick for a couple days last week with a nasty stomach bug.  It only really lasted one day and another day to recover, but it of course removed an entire day of productivity that is difficult to get back with two little ones.

Jocelyn is growing up so fast.  Yesterday she started saying "love you" which was very exciting.  She's forming 3 and 4 word sentences for some things now, and her vocabulary is definitely growing every day.  She's not thrilled about going back to day care yet, but I'm sure she'll adapt quickly.  New schedules are always difficult.

We had tried taking her pacifiers away over Christmas but it Did Not Go Well.  There was a couple days where she refused to nap and was a royal grump.  We tried trimming the pacifiers since they were starting to die anyway, but that didn't work either.  After a couple days we ended up buying her new ones since she needs the sleep right now.  She only uses them to sleep and she definitely isn't the oldest toddler I've seen with one.  I'm sure it'll come in time.

Jared is getting big and learning new things as well.  He's at least 15 lbs (14 weeks) and sits very well in his Bumbo seat.  He has big grins for his mom, dad, and sister.  Jocelyn's really starting to warm up to him, and I'm sure once he starts sitting up and really playing with things in a couple months she'll be very interested in playing with him as well.

Dennis and Michelle moved up a couple weeks ago and we were able to go out to dinner with them last Friday.  It twas really nice to be able to see them and to be able to just sit and talk with friends w/o the kids around.  Tiff and I hadn't been out by ourselves since Jared came along and the break was very nice.

Tiff started back to work this week since taking off for maternity leave.  So far things have been going well, but it's too early to tell how much her kids will like her compared to her sub. that was in for most of the school year so far.

Other projects going on?  trying to build a new firewall that uses vlans and runs Fedora instead of CentOS to provide access to more up-to-date software.  Cleaning the garage.  Fixing my laptop.

Oh yeah, I need to write about the laptop.  My Dell Latitude D630 (purchased in Feb 2008) seems to have two primary problems right now:

1. The battery is dead.  It last about half an hour and reports its run time incorrectly.  Luckily I contacted Dell about this before the warranty ran out (1 year on batteries)
2. I have the dreaded "vertical lines" problem with my nVidia GPU.  Its looking like I'm going to get a motherboard replacement out of it. Joy.

While the battery problem wasn't critical, the video problem locks my laptop up when it happens, and it happens frequently after the computer is warmed up -- typically a couple minutes after booting now.  Evil.

Because of my laptop problems I've re-visited my need to get my homedir into a VCS.  I'm slowing getting this set up and will blog more once I have a better solution.  The biggest problem I'm running into right now is needing a way to symlink dot-files in place from my checked-out folder to my root home dir.  ie, If I check out my .vimrc to src/homedir/dotfiles-core/vimrc I need to symlink ~/.vimrc to ~/src/homedir/dotfiles-core/vimrc.  And I'd prefer to not do this manually.

I'm also moving my rss feeds from akregator into rss2email on my server.  This gives me two things: 1) I get updates even when my laptop is off, and 2) I can check my feeds from webmail.  I can also add new feeds remotely by ssh-ing into my server if needed, but that happens pretty infrequently.  I'd probably just email myself the link to add later.  The biggest thing going on with this right now is re-categorizing my feeds.

To categorize my feeds I'm giving them a custom email address to send the updates to; something like rss-(category)@.  Then my .mailfilter looks like this:

if (/^User-Agent: rss2email/:h)
{
    include ".mailfilter.rss"
}

and then .mailfilter.rss has:

if (/To:.*rss-([\w-]+)/:h)
{
    to "Maildir/.INBOX.rss.$MATCH1/"
}

# other lists
to "Maildir/.INBOX.rss/"

This allows me to easily add folders and categories without modifying my maildrop rc file.

I think that's it for current going-ons.  Maybe the next update won't be so huge.

So a couple weeks ago I told you about some problems (I created) with our lawn mower. Unfortunately, things have gotten worse.

Well, I guess it didn't have far to go from "potentially dead" to "dead", so it's not too surprising.

My father-in-law was able to get the mower running last week after I broke it, so I was hopeful that I might get another year or two out of it. That hope was killed quickly when I started the mower up yesterday morning.

I started the mower, and a ton of smoke poured out - that was expected. What wasn't expected was the really bad knocking. I decided to try it out anyway and made about half a trip around the house when it suddenly stopped with a "klunk".

"Okay, I hit something," I thought. Pushed it back to the garage (the starter is was still being a pain) and took the starter of to shim it better, and "Oh - that's not fixable." I saw a nice crack in the block.

It wasn't leaking oil very badly, so my Dad and I pushed it into the shed to deal with it later while I push-mowed the yard. Came back to drain the oil and found that most had already drained out of a supposed crack in the bottom of the block.

So, the mower is definitely shot (despite my Dad suggesting that I could get it welded - I think I've had it with this mower for now).

I'm looking for a replacement, but I'm not sure what type of replacement. I wasn't really sold on getting a riding mower to begin with since I'm used to push-mowing about a half-acre and can do our 1/3-acre lot in a little over an hour -- the riding mower wasn't a very big time saver. I'm considering a larger and self-powered push-mower; does anyone have any experience with the newer models and how well they do? The biggest reason we got the riding mower was to make mowing easier for Tiff to do, so it would have to accomplish that (ie, it wouldn't be able to make her keep up with it if it were a self-propelled). Thoughts?

Tiff and I bought a riding mower last summer. We both knew it was going to drastically reduce the amount of work we had to do to keep the lawn looking decent (it's not possible to make our lawn look nice).

Three weeks ago I was mowing the lawn and the mower shut off on me. This didn't surprise me too much at the time; we had just replaced the battery a couple weeks before that and I was kind-of suspecting that the alternator was bad. I assumed the battery had died and there wasn't any spark left. After a fun time pushing it to the shed, I put it on the charger and finished mowing with the push-mower.

The next week I tried to start it - no go. I took the cover off the starter and noticed the gear was fully engaged. I didn't have time to work on it then so I push-mowed the lawn again.

Last week my Dad came by and pulled the starter off. He cleaned it up, it seemed to work fine, but it still wouldn't crank the mower. He took it into town to have a guy look at it.

Got the starter back today (there weren't any problems with it) and put it on, and the mower still wouldn't turn. Hmm. Wouldn't turn. As in, the starter can't turn the flywheel.

I check the oil, and there's just a tad bit at the bottom.

So, the current assumption is that the engine is seized. That pretty much means that its shot. Not a great feeling.

Of course, everyone knows to check the oil. My only excuses (which don't help me feel much better) are:

1. I've had a super-cheap push-mower for 4 years and have never had to add any oil to it (yes, I actually check it).
2. This mower didn't give me any indication it was burning oil or that it was low on oil.
3. I've never owned a riding mower before.
4. I'm not the only one who uses it.

Like I said, not very good excuses.

So, I hear Briggs & Stratton engines are kinda tough...

Other than my {NODE 399}Dad's 60th birthday{/NODE}, I spent this weekend cutting holes in my walls and running wires in my basement drop-ceiling.

I started Saturday morning around 07:30 and stopped around 10:30 (3 hours). Most of the time was spent figuring out where my one interior wall was, and the rest of the time was cutting a couple holes and running a single pull-wire.

Sunday my Dad came over (on his birthday!) and we got to work around 09:30, finishing up around 14:30 (another 5 hours). We were able to finish up all the "hard" parts - drilling holes in exterior walls (pulling out insulation where necessary), running conduit to the "master" wall plate, and pulling wires between all the outlets.

All together, I added 5 new wall plates - 3x 4-port Leviton plates with 2x binding posts with 16ga speaker wire back to the master panel, a single 2-port Leviton plate with RG-6 run to it and back to the master panel, and a single 12-port Leviton plate with 3x binding post sets, 2x CAT5 jacks, and a single F-type jack.

I still need to pick up some F-type Leviton connectors as well as a half dozen white blanks for the panels, but the project is mostly finished. I'll be able to remove the speak from my banister (rear center channel) and remove a ton of wire that was stuffed under my trim. The network wire alone was probably 30 feet long since it had to snake most of the way around the room - the speaker wires were pretty close to that length as well.

The last "big" home project I have for the summer now is to get my rack in order, and my patch panels for that just arrived today. Guess I better get started.