This Northern Mockingbird is one of the many birds in my yard.  I can’t quite pinpoint what it is about birds that fascinate Danielle and I, but we love to watch them cavorting around the yard and interacting with each other.

I’ve been wanting to try Arch Linux for quite some time now.  They seem to have a similar aesthetic to Gentoo in that the main mission of Arch is to build your operating system from the ground up.  You only add the things you need.  So you don’t have any cruft on your system based on what some other people think you should have.  So let’s pop this CD in and see what happens!  (I’m also following the directions on http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Official_Arch_Linux_Install_Guide)  The disc is the 2009.08 snapshot.  I booted into the LiveCD.

I looked at Zenwalk 6.0 back in June and Zenwalk 6.2 is now out.  I’m going to do a mini-review just comparing 6.0 to 6.2 to see what has changed.  This may end up being very short if it’s mostly the same.  One difference right away is that it’s using ext4 instead of XFS.  The install was basically the same.

[caption id=“attachment_3019” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“The final part of the Zenwalk 6.2 install”] [/caption]

This was taken as I was testing the effects of different f-stops on diffraction.

It’s been a very snow-filled winter this 2009-2010 winter season compared to the last five or so years I’ve lived here.  I think I’m over it.  Spring couldn’t come quickly enough.

In my Slackware 13 review mfillpot gave some suggestions to improve the Slackware experience and I thought I would give them a shot.  First off, changing the init level to 4 to allow KDM to show up instead of this startx business.  I was happy to note that Slackware had emacs.  So many distros have vi and I never really learned how to use it well.  So I changed the value to 4 and restarted.  And there she is:

This fox likes to sleep on a pile of grass in the back yard.  This grass came from the first time I cut the grass after buying the house.  The grass was so tall that it filled the compost unit and there was still too much grass.  I didn’t know at the time we had yard pickup in the neighborhood, so I put it on the edge of my property for nature to do its thing and decompose it.  At first I thought it was working because some mushrooms grew there.  But they were eaten or somehow destroyed after a few days.  Since then I haven’t seen any more mushrooms on there.  It MUST be decaying, but it seems to always be the same size.  A few months ago we first spotted the fox sleeping there.  On the day I took this photo, my wife was home sick and she saw and it called me at work saying it was just lying there.  Hours later it was still resting and I was able to get this photo.  I’m not sure what attracts the fox to the grass.  Is it warm because of decomposition?  Is it just softer than the ground?  Both?  Either way, it’s always a special treat for the fox to show up.

What I love about programming is the instant feedback.  In most programming languages, after you set up a framework for the barest bones of a program you can then run it at every step of the way to confirm that you are moving towards your goal.  What I love second-most about programming is the fact that I am using my computer to solve a problem and free myself from tedium.

This time last year I was in Hawaii on a business trip while most people here were at the Inauguration.  See this photo capsule online at the photojojo site.

Unlike some other web admins, I respect your ability to choose to have ads blocked.  The ad providers brought them upon themselves by making ads really freakin’ annoying into the mid-2000s.  I just want to say that I don’t run any of those kinds of ads on this site.  I have an ad for Servint, the company where I have my site hosted.  By clicking on that ad or the link for Servint in this post, you can help me recoup some hosting costs.  If you sign up via that link, I will receive some amount of time (depending on the package you choose for hosting) of free hosting.  I also have an affiliate program with B&H Photo and Video.  I chose to have an affiliate program with them because I buy all of my camera equipment from B&H.  Ever since I went to their store in NYC, I was very impressed with their customer service.  Anything you buy from B&H from that link in this post or the ad on this page will net me some percentage of the cost which I will use to offset hosting this site.  I also have some Google ads, but it’s against the terms of service to tell you to click on them.  Instead I’ll tell you that you probably shouldn’t block Google ads in your adblock program because they are very unobtrusive and usually are only text so they won’t sap your bandwidth.  Also, they are usually very relevant to the post or my site in general.