Brian's Blog

We just got back a few short hours ago from our weekend at the cabin. It's been quite some time since we've taken the kids and they had a blast for the short time were were there. Unfortunately Ellie ended up feeling sick on Friday and we didn't leave until Saturday morning so we lost a day. Still, it worked out well enough I think. We did a little bit of boating, some basic fishing for the kids, and grilled up some burgers and dogs on the charcoal grill among other things. Maybe next time we can stay a bit longer.

We took a handful of pictures as usual. This year, after learning the software we use at work to create the security badges also had a stitch feather I was sure to take a couple of panoramic pictures of the lake. Unfortunately, I had to use a Windows application to stitch the pictures together because I don't know of any good Open Source programs that do it. Speaking of, if anyone knows of a quality program to stitch a sequence of pictures together into a panoramic that will run on Linux please let me know.

I've been using qmail as my MTA for some time. It was just something that I installed in order to get mutt to send mail. I never actually used it to receive mail making it overkill for my purposes. Also, as I've proven in the past, my knowledge of E-mail servers in general is pretty poor. So, for the sake of simplicity I've gotten rid of qmail and gone with msmtp as a simple "relay only" MTA. All I was doing with qmail anyway was using the pobox SMTP server as a smart host anyway. I did some searching and asking about and sort of randomly chose msmtp. It compiled and was setup super easy. There are also some useful scripts that let use have mails go into a simple queue if you are offline to be sent later. There's not much more to say about it simply because it was so easy to setup. Part of the motivation for moving away from qmail was because I just don't want to go though setting it up again. You see, Slackware 12.0 just went RC1 today and I am likely to upgrade via a fresh install when it is released due to the cruftieness of my current system. qmail seems to be a great program and I've heard high praise of it but it's way to much work for what I'd use it for. Basically I'm just trying to simplify my system down to make the impending upgrade easier.

On a totally unrelated note, I'm finally getting acceptable results in the practice exams for the MCSE Cert for work. I figure I'll do a bit of reviewing and take another practice test or two. If all goes well I'll be scheduling my exam sooner than later.

As I predicted I am playing the Gamecube more often than my daughter is. As a result I've just finished X-men Legends today after work. It was a pretty good game and I enjoyed playing it. It kept me interested and was also a source of new geeky X-men knowledge that I didn't have previously. The final battles seemed a bit anti-climactic though. Even so it was cool to face Master Mold. Of course, Magneto and others were there to be fought too. The end sequence was sort of a let down, but I'm used to that in games. I don't often find a game that gives me 100% satisfaction at the end.

So, I guess the next game is either Metroid Prime or Resident Evil 4. I'd like to play the sequel to X-men Legends but I don't want to OD on a good thing.

OK, I admit feeling a bit silly posting something like this but I really have fond memories of watching Mr. Wizard aka Don Herbert as a child. When I read about his death this morning I actually felt a significant twinge of sadness. I used to just love his show and learned quite a bit from it. I just wish a show like his was around for my children to benefit from. He really made learning fun, to the point where you didn't realize that you were actually learning.

Yeah, I know I've been neglecting to post anything for a while now. There's been things I've wanted to post but just didn't get around to. Now they aren't fresh enough in my head to make a meaningful post about. My oops is because I totally missed the date to renew my TZO subscription and only discovered it when I tried to access my music from work this morning. That's taken care of and I'm all set for another two years.

I've had a major backlog of picture to get in my photo gallery. I finally downloaded them to my PC and got about half of them on-line. There are some pictures of my wife's rose bushes that kind of nice. I don't have the patience for gardening but I enjoy the end result of her work.

On tllts a couple of episodes ago they interviewed the developer of Moneydance. I've heard of Moneydance before but never gave it much of a shot, mostly because I'm a cheap bastard. After hearing some specifics I gave it a whirl and actually registered my copy. Moneydance imported all my Quicken data flawlessly, and interfaces with my bank on-line. Plus I think you get future upgrades for free. So you don't have to buy each major release as far as I know. With Quicken I wasn't doing on-line banking because my copy was way to old and didn't work correctly with the bank so moving to Moneydance was worth it just for that. Oh, and I think it is much more intuitive to use than Quicken ever was. It looks like I've just gotten rid of my last Windows based app that I relied on! Moneydance runs on just about every platform known to man, including OS/2 of all things, so I can move on over to another PC in a pinch if my Linux box takes a dive. It's a java based app but it doesn't feel like it and it's pretty darn fast, not the slow stuff that people associate with Java.

On a totally unrelated note, may daughter had her very first performance on stage this weekend. She's taking ballet lessons and her school put on a nice show. Performers ranged from what looked like 3 to 4 year old kids on up to the advanced classes. The show included Jazz, Hip-Hop, Broadway, and Ballet styles so it covered a wide range of tastes.