some things that have made me happy
This week, at least.
- when trimming the grassy strip (the pole part of our flag-pole shaped section) leading up to the road I discovered a wilding cabbage tree hidden in the grass. Goodness knows how it escaped being cut to pieces earlier in the year the last time I trimmed the grass, but there it is. And there it will stay.
- Annie Belcher’s Dry Cleaners revealed under a partially dismantled façade along Willis Street. I like how not all history is torn down: sometimes it is just accreted over, ready to be revealed years later.
- Apple did good and replaced the old iBook’s logic board again. Thanks!
- And so, I rebuilt the iBook’s system for the kids to use. It turns out there’s a range of quite cool built in options for simplifying and locking down the user interface. It’s possible to restrict a particular user’s ability to see (and use) any particular application, and if required further restrict the use of individual apps (e.g., whitelisting of web addresses and instant messaging buddies… not that I’ve gone this far).
the tuis are moving from the kōwhai, which seems to be coming towards the end of its flowering season, and on to the flax. The nice thing about this is that the flax is right outside the lounge windows, so we get an even better view.- I have a new laptop from work. The idea is that I use it for travel, and when I need to at home, using a VPN to remote desktop into my workstation in the office. I find this a little extravagant though, and am thinking of just having the laptop as my only work machine. It’s an HP nc4400, very small and very very fast. And hot – the fan blows gusts of hot air out the side at regular intervals. Still, I’m a sucker for new gadgets.
And this: Becky and I having a beer this evening in the sun, standing on the deck “supervising” the kids while they run wild on the lawn below; the breeze keeping us well supplied with the thick smells of cooking steak…
Summer is coming.
Patrick Quinn-Graham
5 November 2006, 06:16 #
Damn. I had a good comment worked out here, and it gave me a “precondition evaluated to false” error message. :(
* iBook good news
* Work laptops good, if they let you do whatever you want with them.
* Summer… good news for those in the southern hemisphere :)
* Any chance you could make the message entry textbox bigger?
Alan
5 November 2006, 09:48 #
Sorry about the 412 error: it’s part of TextDrive’s quite rigourous approach to comment spam. Something in what you wrote may have set it off.
* Yes. Unexpected, though nice.
* Yes, I have admin. Cool, eh?!
* You can’t complain – you’ve just had a summer. You having another one right now would border on being greedy, you know.
* Is this better? I’d been meaning to hunt out the obscure form responsible. and it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.
Hmmm. I wonder why Textile is not working so well in the comment box anymore? The above should be a nicely bulleted list.
Patrick Quinn-Graham
5 November 2006, 21:38 #
Ah, curses to comment spam. It’s an evil conspiracy I tells ya. Designed to thwart long commentators. Either that or just the spammers, but still.
* [admin] Awesome. I haven’t not had admin rights on a machine I used for work purposes since… well, before I worked in IT. Not that I actually run with admin privileges (which more developers, nudge nudge Adobe, should do), it’s always nice to have them. Plug in random USB things, download por- I mean programs.
* Summer. I suppose I just had two summers in a row, and a third would be being greedy. I briefly contemplated abandoning my dreams of becoming Canadian (or at least continuing to work in Canada) and fleeing back to the southern hemisphere, but it feels like it’s time for winter.
* Comment form. Great! Now I don’t feel like I’m writing huge long paragraphs only to be deeply disappointed by the preview.
Wow! That’s way better
Alan
5 November 2006, 22:04 #
Glad to be of service, Patrick!