BilikFamily.com

Weekend - It's been a rather cold weekend with a few inches of snow. The snow was welcome as it allowed the kidlets to go sledding in the back yard. Unfortunately it wasn't enough to last very long. Already some grass is showing through on the hill.

The electrician who wired our basement came in today. He had been by a few weeks ago to see if it was possible to put a switch for the downstairs lights at the top of the stairs. Alas, if only we had thought of it near the early stages of the basement work, it would have been easy. Today he tried an X10 approach, ie. remote control switches that work via an RF link. It had issues because X10 tends to want to be a dimmer (or at least the modules he had did) and our basement is lit by compact florescent flood bulbs. Florescent bulbs hate dimmers. They want a clean AC signal for the fancy electronics inside that excite the phosphors. In the end we abandoned that approach.

Once again Abigail and Claire had friends over. And yet, by evening they both were in a bit of a less-than-grateful mood. I suspect that they were just overtired from all the playing that they did.

The girls have off all week for winter break. For once their break will coincide with a family visit! My mom and dad start their drive to NH bright and early tomorrow morning with an ETA of Tuesday afternoon. We are doing our best to make sure everyone stays healthy.

Computer - Way back when I started my second computer related job in the USAF, I spent the first many months using a simple terminal. Nothing graphic or fancy, just something akin to an early Digital VT100 series terminal (like the VT320 seen at right). The same was true my first several months at Sanders. Such large organizations often have long lead times on getting equipment for new staff so you end up with leftovers and get by. Actually having such a restriction was extremely useful as it taught me a lot about unix command line and keyboard interfaces just as everything was shifting to graphical mice-driven interfaces. I learned a lot of the skills that still have payoff today.

I say this because even though I have a kick butt computer setup at work, my iBook is nearly useless there. I had been spoiled by my last employer because I was allowed to bring my iBook in and connect to the internet with it. It's easier to do such things in a smaller company. However now I can not connect my laptop to the internet while at work — security, bandwidth, and other such concerns. My friend, Will, is going through a similar dilemma.

I had two main solutions. One would be to go with web based email, ie. Google's GMail, Yahoo, HotMail, etc. But for now I'm trying something a bit different. I've exported all of my email to my unix (Linux) shell/command line servers at bilikfamily.com. Between screen and mutt, I've been able to keep an eye on email most of the weekend. It's very retro, very "old school", but I'm liking it. It brings back fun hacking memories of years ago. I had done email for years with tools like this until one of our acquisitions about 5-6 years ago dictated that "everyone shall now use Lotus Notes... it's the company standard". Except when someone includes a multimedia attachment, things move pretty quickly at the keyboard. I've ironed out a few kinks here and there, but so far so good. Our system administrator at bilikfamily.com's host did a good job setting things up for "command line warriors".

My friend, Will, has it even tougher. His new employer won't allow remote logins like that. He had been for years doing email via keyboard and text tools. So while I was doing the transition to text tools, he made the leap to Google's Gmail. I still may end up using GMail, but I'd like to avoid the text banner ads and am still a little upset at their recent acquiescence to China's censorship policies. In a nutshell, Google went from a motto of "don't be evil" to "don't show evil" inside of China. (evil defined as something the Communists don't want their citizens to see)

Lent - Lent starts in just a few days. I've been considering what would be a good practice and what would be a good spiritual work to read during the season. If you are a practicing Catholic, there's still a few days to think about it before it kicks off this Wednesday.