There are reasons I have to stick with my Solaris machine. One is that my ISP requires me to use the same MAC address. So I backed up /home, /etc, and forgot /var. Guess who didn’t have a kernel compiled beforehand? I had to boot Solaris to mount my old disks and I found out that I had two /var directories and I preserved the wrong one.

Feh.

It’s about working now.

I was up at my friend Greg’s house today where he had a big barbeque and we were all supposed to be picking up sticks. He took 5 acres of tree farm and turned it into a meadow so his daughter could have horses. Now that the trees are gone and the ground is levelled off, there are a lot of branches that need to to be picked up before the tractor with the discs can do its discing. Often this involves a harrow. In Greg’s case, it involved his dumber friends. Lots of people were there, but only a half dozen of us were out piling up the sticks. Most of the time it was just Larry and I.

Well, there’s a lot more to do and Greg, being the laziest man on the planet, has his work cut out for him.

I finally was asked if someone could use the equipment I was using since I was lifting, what, 16 lbs total and the other guy was lifting 100 lbs? Tough looking kid, but very polite. But the big tough guys — the ones who need spotting and make huge noises while they lift very heavy weights — are now showing up and I don’t see the people I used to see. Well, what I mean is there aren’t as many women to look at.

But in any case I’m taking less time to lift lighter weights but it’s taking more time. Must be all the standing around I do when I move between machines.

It’s Rose Vegetable and the Festival Scum Center has opened for another two weeks of unrulyness and fights between the disenfranchised and reserve police officers. On the way home I noticed a huge increase in the odd people downtown. Women with floral wizard robes and huge ornate neckpieces, men with topknots and few teeth.

And it was also first Thursday! Another zoo, in the Pearl, full of pretentious people pretending to look at art.

I just wanted to get out of downtown so I could hide.

Isn’t it supposed to rain during the Rose Vegetable?

Didn’t see too many people at the sports club. I guess it gets kind of quiet during the summer months. That negates one of the reasons I go: watching the women. In any case, I signed up and I’m actually still going.

Now if I can remember to pay my bills.

I also finally got my “new” computer going with the $179 (if I remember to send in the rebate) monitor. It took me this long (three days or so) to install NetBSD and already I’m wondering if I should make it my one Windows box for the house so I can run ham radio software on it. Oh, the agony…

I saw the movie Audition today. That film was truly screwed up. My friends and I have enough trouble with women as it is. We don’t need that kind of help.

Plus my friend Joey is pleasantly reminding me of my mortality by mentioning my “imminent demise.” Yeesh. If the magic $80/pill pharmaceutical sorcery works, my demise isn’t all that imminent.

And a driver really ticked me off by blowing a stop sign and making a “California stop.” She rolled the Grand Cherokee through the intersection and was too busy putting on her glasses to stop at the crosswalk. I really should let it go and not let the drivers know what I think of them.

Well, not so much hiding. Saturday my friend Greg said he’d come by and kill some time while his daughter was attending a birthday party. But he blew me off. And my friend John wanted help wiring under the whatever-you-call-the-dashboard on Sunday, but he blew me off. And then today…

OK, so that really isn’t the complete story. Saturday night I went to a housewarming party at a friend’s house. I hadn’t seen him for a few years an now he’s all all growed up and married with a big house in the suburbs. We were out of there by 10PM, but it was fun nonetheless. I even forgot my jacket there and had to go pick it up the next day. I even had to go back the next day to get my jacket and cell phone that I forgot.

I ended up helping John with his boat on Monday, and he took me out for a ride around Hayden Island. Fortunately, all the wiring I did underneath the whatever-the-dashboard-is-called-on-a-boat worked out and we made it back intact.

I also got a new old computer.

That means I spent a LOT of time trying to get NetBSD running. I even bought a new monitor. All this so I can hook it up to my ham radio.

Portland is a bad movie town and I hope it stays that way. In fact, I was told by a filmmaker that the film crews here suck especially hard. That and the lack of success of the movies that are filmed here should scare off any new movies. Or so I hope.

Think of the movies that filmed here in the past: The Hunted (2003) with Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro, Zero Effect (1998) with Ben Stiller and Bill Pullman, Body of Evidence (1993) with Madonna and Willem Defoe, Down and Out With the Dolls (2001) (ok, so my ex-girlfriend was involved with this one), and something with Burt Reynolds that I can’t remember. Oh, and I think something with Andrew Dice Clay. All forgettable.

The reason I’m against movies filming in Portland is purely selfish. That Burt Reynolds movie blocked streets and rerouted traffic in my neighborhood. That’s an even larger pain when you’re riding a bike on hilly roads. There’s only a few routes over the west hills and The Hunted blocked the road that’s closest to me.

I thought about this because there’s some dumb movie trailers downtown. I have no idea what movie is filming. All I know is the names on the doors of the “Star Wagons”: Sarah, Berman, Paul, Russell, and “Enter and Die.” I think the “Enter and Die” door was for the make-up trailer.

We have enough trouble with presidential candidates showing up without this crap going on.

My NetBSD system is still kinda horked. They’re making some changes to the filesystem, and that keeps the system from booting properly. Geeky. That’s what I get for running the “latest” code rather than the “stable” code. Bad for me and for all the knitting blog fans looking for my sister’s blog.

I also updated MacOS X and WordPress today, and they’re not getting along. WordPress v1.2 doesn’t like Safari 1.2.2 (v125.7) and won’t let me log in. Yeesh.

Earlier today I had a “discussion” with my boss about kung fu. My boss practices Wing Chun and I’m not a real big fan of the whole thing. I mean, it’s all about fighting and I’m not a fighter. I think anything that advocates starting fights should be avoided. In any case, he enjoys it, but it’s not for me.

And then at the gym I saw this woman who was very attractive. Not only attractive, but carrying herself in a way that drew attention. I shouldn’t have been so distracted, since I was watching an uninteresting basketball game and slogging on the elliptical torture machine. I saw some of the exercises she was doing on the mat, and besides yoga she was doing Wing Chun Siu Lim Tao. Maybe there’s something to all this.

I tried to rebuild some software on one of my computers and it broke three of them. That’s what I get for using the current tree of NetBSD.

I went to the Bank of America ATM this morning and they’d changed the nice blue and yellow screen to grey and black. I had a hard time seeing anything because of the lack of contrast. I tried to call to complain and they changed their phone maze. Not only are they changing the phone number but the whole thing requires a separate PIN and new levels of crap to get to a useful choice. When I tried the usual trick of hitting 0 to get to a human, it just hung up on me.

Yay progress.

So I’m probably one of the few who thought Blade 2 was better than Kill Bill Vol. 1 but there you have it. Both were cartoonish and silly and took themselves too seriously, but I really like Blade. That was even the first DVD I bought.

OK, so now I have to see if I can get fix my antennas when the weather gets nice. Computer geeks have nothing on ham radio operators. We’re ultra-geeks.

Oh, and I just tried the radio. Lots of interference on 20M, but I just talked to Lithuania. Yay.

Is A Mighty Wind, which was even funnier than I expected. I watched it twice through since it was so short. The second time I listened to the commentary.

Other than that, the only thing I did was read Mortal Causes by Ian Rankin, another Inspector Rebus mystery. Also imported all the comments from my old blog into my new blog. And, most important, took a nap.