Last year, at Art In The Square over at Southlake Town Square I found a watercolor artist named Preston Steed who pained a piece called “You Blinked”. The little boy in it bears a striking resemblance to my son and so I had to have a copy. I recently found his business card and placed the order. It arrived today and is now out at Michael’s getting framed.
Author Archives: Pat
I Bought A Kilt At The Irish Festival
I took off a few hours this afternoon and headed over to Fair Park to check out the North Texas Irish Festival. I’ve missed it for the last few years and finally jumped at the chance to go.
There were a number of great vendors there, including two who I have bought artwork off of in the past. I have a photograph by Jeffrey Lance Gottesman and a print by Brad W. Foster of Jabberwocky Graphix already on my walls and it was nice to finally meet the artists.
After that I found the Utilikilts booth and got fitted for my first kilt. I’ve been wanting to buy one for a while now but really wanted to get fitted instead of guessing, and it was a good thing that I did because the sizing is different enough from pants sizing to make a difference. I picked up one of the Survival models because of all the extra cargo capacity. The fit and finish on it are great, and while I didn’t wear it there due to how cold it was, I’ve got plans…
My First Patriot Guard Mission
I had the chance to go on a Patriot Guard mission this morning and took it. The Patriot Guard are a group of motorcyclists and non-riders who attend fallen servicemen and womens’ funerals at the invitation of the family to show respect to them and to ensure that their mourning is not interrupted by protesters.
It was an extremely emotional and moving day, one that words really do fail to describe. You’ll have to be there to understand. And I strongly suggest you find a mission near you and take the time to give something back to the family of someone who gave everything for us.
Ghost Rider
I cut out around lunch time to go see Ghost Rider over at the Harkins in Southlake. It seems like 2007 is the year for comic book movies and Ghost Rider certainly is that. The special effects were great, I don’t think that the movie could have been made even a few years ago.
The story revolves around Johnny Blaze, who makes a deal with the devil and becomes his bounty hunter. It’s really the beginning of the story as we see him becoming the Ghost Rider for the first time and learning to use his powers.
There are, obviously, a lot of motorcycles in the movie and it was refreshing to see the Sportster featured so prominently.
Server Upgrading
As some of you may have noticed, I took an outage yesterday to upgrade the OS on the main server from Fedora Core 4 to Core 6. I’ve been planning this one for a while and decided to go a different route with the upgrade. In the past I’ve bought new hardware and installed on it, copying the data over and for the most part running in parallel. I decided not to do that this time because a. I’m cheap, and b. the hardware in place handles the load just fine.
Because of that I needed to come up with a different plan, and thankfully I have 1.5 terabytes of NAS sitting here on a gig-e network. So I used rsync to back up the entire filesystem, verified that it was there and looking good, and then did a fresh install. It was a little scary, but worked out well. In fact, I think it went faster than the previous attempts.
I had the usual problem, such as getting SELinux tuned correctly, but for the most part it went off without any major issues.
Some words of advice, plan carefully. Make a list of what you’ve got to do to complete the migration and in what order. That list will be missing steps but they’ll be minor. Update the list when you find missing steps so that you’ll be better prepared next time.
Parallels Build 3150
Parallels just released release candidate 2 of version 2.5 of their x86 virtualization software and the last thing that was making me keep a Windows box around is finally working reliably.
I can now connect my Garmin GPSMap 60C to the virtualized Windows instance and successfully send and receive all data from it. No more USB conflicts, no more frustration.
And best of all, no more Windows box. I can finally shut it down for good. Good bye and good riddance!
MacWorld 2007
I lucked out and was able to attend for a couple hours today. It’s the first Apple trade show I’ve been to in about 15 years and was just as much fun and a LOT bigger. There were a ton of vendors and quite a few caught my eye.
Software Bisque is about to bring out a port of their The Sky package and I will be buying it when it’s available. The demo they had running looked great and I can’t wait to have a native Mac based astronomy package. That only leaves the Garmin GPS holding me to Windows.
I also picked up a Tough Skin iPod case from Speck Products because the show discount was so good. It’s a great case, and covers up everything possible, including the screen. The controls and data ports are all still available and the thickness of the case doesn’t impair them at all.
Canon also had a big booth set up showing off all of their wares. I got a chance to play with the macro lens I’ve been looking at picking up and it’s now at the top of my list.
All in all it was a lot of fun and if I’m in town the same time next year I’ll more than likely attend.
Omega
| On the way back from San Francisco I finished off Omega, by Jack McDevitt. Once again I’ve managed to jump in to the middle of a set of books. They’re all set in the same universe and have some of the same characters, but it does stand alone just fine.
Humanity has encountered a primitive alien race which is threatened by certain extinction by a poorly understood artifact of unknown origin. Ultimately it’s the story of a group of people’s struggle to understand that race and save them. I’ve really become a fan of Mr. McDevitt’s work because he really knows how to craft a believable, consistent universe. While his books are science fiction through and through, they are also studies in human (and non-human) interaction. |
Alcatraz
Since I was staying over the weekend in San Francisco I decided to visit Alcatraz island. It’s only about a mile and a half off shore and is easy to reach via a ferry. Just in case you’re thinking of going, make sure to follow the link from the National Park Service site since it’s the only company which has permission to land at the island. The others will circle around but can’t land.
The island and prison are really interesting. There’s a good audio tour to go along with the site with insights from both former guards and former inmates. The prison and grounds aren’t in pristine condition, but were left more or less in the shape they’ve decayed to over the last 40 or so years, including the graffiti left during the Native American occupation in the late 1960s.
Overall the tour was great, and the gift shop has a lot of cool stuff. I even got a copy of Alcatraz: A Definitive History of the Penitentiary Years
Night at the Museum
Reese, Joi, and I went to see Night at the Museum tonight, and despite what the critics were saying, it was a fun movie and definitely entertaining. The only part that the little guy didn’t like was the first T-Rex scene, it scared him a little, but he got over it quickly.
I’m not the biggest Ben Stiller fan, but he was definitely good in this role. There were many other big name actors who had cameos and bigger parts in the film, all of whom added something to the overall fun of the movie.