Brent’s Thoughts

We went to have 6 month pictures taken at wes davis photography the wed before christmas. If you would like to see them, go to his website Wes Davis Photo and type in kitten for the password.
If you do view them, please post about which one you think is best. I will end up having to select one pose to go in a frame for the baby club

I hate to even put that in the title, because I hate to help them get more exposure to that term, but I want to be clear on what I am talking about.

The latest spew of garbage from the fundamentalist christians is this “War to put Christ back in Christmas”. The first telling point to me is that they hired a “record number of lawyers” to try and make people not use Holiday Tree and force them to use Christmas Tree. The is a pretty impressive feat for supposedly “Non Profit” organization. I guess they have to find something to spend all the cash they are fleecing from the masses. They can’t save it, that would be making a profit.

Anyway. The point that I really wanted to bring to light is that Christmas isn’t even a Christian holiday. From the Wikipedia article on Christmas:

Continue Reading »

So Mom agreed to enter their new house into a parade of homes in Burkesville for Christmas. I think the proceeds are to go to a scholarship. She had been working on getting the house decorated for several weeks now and on Saturday she thought she could work all day and be ready.

Instead she was woken up by Dad to the tune of Stacey having seizures again. So she had to spend Saturday in the hospital with her. When she called me to tell me about it, I was in the middle of running a swim meet for Bowling Green High School and couldn’t leave. So I told her that P and I would be over there Sunday morning to help her.

We got over there about 7:30-8:00. We dropped some stuff off at the house and then went to see Stacey at the hospital. She seemed pretty groggy but I thought it looked about like she was normally when she was them. Mom decided to ride back with us and see if we could finish the house up before it was time for the people to show up. We worked pretty steady until about 12:30 and got everything ready. I went back to the hospital to take dad a sandwich and stuff. Stacey was looking a lot better. We ended up talking about stuff and I realized that it was after 1:00 when people were supposed to start showing up to look at the house. I called Mom and she said that they had about 10 people in the house and no one from the homemakers group had showed up to help her and P.

So I headed back to the house to help. By the time that I got there a few people had shown up to help them and things were moving along pretty good. One lady accidentally spilt some candle wax down a wall at one point, but the lady, Virginia, that runs the florist shop in Burkesville had come to help and she used the “Warm Iron and Brown Paper shack” trick to get it off. It cleaned up really well and I don’t think anyone really knew too much.

Mom and P sold over $100 of the “glass block, Xmas lights, ribbon and bow” decorations to people that were walking through and liked them.

Toward the end of the night things started to settle down a little and I was talking to a couple of the older ladies about my relatives and stuff. We were in the middle of talking about something and one of the ladies hurriedly excused herself and left. I thought was kinda odd until like 2 seconds later when a huge foul smell wafted through the room. She had dropped an F-Bomb and beat a hasty retreat. Smile

Things turned out pretty good though and we had well over 65 people go through the house.

I snapped some pictures of the decorations and put them here:
http://www.brentnorris.net/gallery/farm_xmas/

By the end of the night Stacey was sitting up and eating and stuff at the hospital so I think she is ok too.

Well Xmas is over, time to tell the tales. Pauline and I headed over to the farm for Xmas Eve and exchanged our gifts over there. I really went for the moon with only one expensive gift that I wasn’t sure if she would like. It turned out that I hit it pretty dead on. I got her a portable Mp3 player that has an FM radio built into it as well. She seems to really like it and has spent a lot of time listening to the stuff I put on it.

My parents got her a lot of stuff like clothes and PJs and stuff like that. We got my parents a lot of towels that match the new bathroom and my mom her standard Xmas fair of lotion that she always wants.

We got Stacey a puzzle that she seemed to really like and a thing to work them on that lets you roll them up and store them between working on them. I also picked her up some Oscar the Grouch Slippers that I think you liked.

Pauline headed over to her parents house Xmas morning to spend time with them and I stayed over at the farm for the rest of the week. We ended up cutting up some wood with the new chainsaw that dad got and just chilling being a family. Stacey shot some video with my camera, that I am going to have to edit to death, but I hope to get some of that up here soon. Hopefully, I won’t piss Maxx off and overrun my storage/bandwidth limits that he has set in his head.

Though it seems like it to look at the way I am now, I haven’t been messing with Linux that long. Just now three years I guess. I remember asking Lamont something about it as we walked out of our last class before Christmas break. Somehow I got a copy of it on CD shortly after that and headed home.

I remember why I got a copy too. The Dell Optiplex that I had bought (the first computer I had purchased) wouldn’t run Windows 95 or 98 worth a damn, amazingly given its INTEL chipset. The onboard ATi graphics chipset wouldn’t work right and it kept crashing and rebooting. I had a beta copy of Windows2000 that worked sorta, but it still had the problems. I got tired of being in the middle of something only to have the thing crash and reboot. After several reinstalls, each one where I thought I had fixed it, I was ready for a change.

So heading home with my new Redhat 6.1 CD I fired up the install and blew away everything on the drive. I worked my way through the install guessing on a lot of it and hoping that stuff would work. It was a terrible install. Nothing like the first installs for Linux I am sure, but it was still bad. Nothing like todays installs either (unless you are talking about Debian and then it was a lot better). I rebooted and found a machine that worked. I left it up and tooled around in the menus looking for something to do. Not knowing shit about it I found little to do except play the games that came with it. I did find that it didn’t ever crash on me no matter how long I left it on. Well that was a good thing I guess. Still I didn’t know what to do with it since I had no programs to install, no idea what was on it, and no idea how to get to it. I had noticed that during the install Redhat was kind enough to show everything that it was installing and give a brief little summary of what that package was. So I went through a reinstall and made sure to watch the whole install trying to catch all the packages and what they were supposed to do. This time I learned enough to promptly break everything beyond repair by me. So, I reinstalled it and broke it again. This process repeated for several weeks, with various excursions back into W2k Beta when I was tired of messing with it. Slowly you learn to use it and to find that there is some really cool stuff out there.

Now I use Linux exclusively as a desktop, no Windows here. There was an interesting road from one to the other, but I think that I am happy with the walk.