zen.org Communal Weblog

A good friend, when pointed at my new blog, responded with, ”I mean this in the nicest way possible, but you are SUCH a nerd boy!” I’m gambling that my love of my wife, son, and even of lots of different kinds of wine all help me wear a mask hiding this fact. Such a label is one earned through effort, anyway. Kinda like not staring too long at the cool plasma screen in the Sony shop up the road or they’ll call security. No, it wouldn’t really work in our livingroom anyway, but why spend so much time focusing on reality? Besides, there’s a Panasonic plasma TV that’s even cooler. (Insert daemonic laugh here.)

When I was in college, I took a cool course about the etymology of words. It touched a great interest I had, and has resulted in me having all sorts of books about word history, the origin of words and phrases, you name it.

You can sign up to receive a daily Word of the Day from the Oxford English Dictionary. (Check out The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester to learn about the history of the dictionary; I got it as a great birthday present and really enjoyed it.) Each morning (relative to your timezone) you’ll get a new word with its complete OED entry, including pronunciation, etymology, definition, and the variety of specific texts that used the word over the last 500+ years. They’re amazing, ranging from swelling to the more recent addition of D’oh.

To finally do a blog, I first started playing with my friend Sven’s cool hacks. I also fiddled with b2evolution though that was 10x the complexity I needed. Then I happened upon WordPress which looked more like a book or magazine text. A big fan of nice fonts, I’m going to give this a shot too. Who knows what I’ll finally settle on? At least I’m learning MySQL on the fly. Now I need to figure out stylesheets and understand how to modify wp-layout.css to make this whole page look better. And if I’ve got the ability to register or do comments disabled, why does it still say “Comments (0)” there:

Yesterday I changed my Comcast cable service to limited basic cable. 余艾蕾 and my idea was that with Zoë and Netflix we will be watching more movies, but more important then that, cable channels kind of suck. My wife and I seem to agree that EWTN is a waist of bandwidth, as is Lifetime, Spike TV, the Game Show Network and many other channels.

Some channels, like CNN, The History Channel, and some of the Discovery channels will not be missed even though I would sometimes watch shows on them.

I will miss more channels then 余艾蕾 though: Alton Brown and Iron Chef on the Food Network; Stargate SG-1 on the SciFi channel; international soccer games on the ESPNs; and more then anything The Daily Show and South Park on Comedy Central. South Park can’t really be watched with Zoë around anyway. All that is not worth the extra $25 bucks it costs me.

So hear me Comedy Central, ESPN, SciFi, et all. If Comcast didn’t put so muth other shit on I might still be watching you.

余艾蕾 signed us up for Netflix, with a new baby it seemed a good way to watch movies. Actually we have been really behind with our movie watching for quite a while now. One of the first movies we got was Les Triplettes de Belleville. A wonderful dream sequence of the French Mafia trying to get the excitement of les Tour de France in North America. Unless you are adverse to cartoons, it comes highly recommended.

Some have been asking of Zoë’s size, height and weight at birth. Even though she is several years before considering going into a boxing ring, she was a sprite 17¾ inches at 5 pounds 13 ounces.

The last thing I did yesterday was complie the 2.6.6 I²C drivers in the 2.6.3 kernel. The first thing I did this morning was try the patch HighPoint sent me in between. It was a short modification to their code, and it works. Thanks HighPoint support and programmers.

Hopefully the fix will make it to HighPoint’s site soon. I would put the patch here, but I don’t thrust the copyright of it.