Mon Jan 28 22:49:03 PST 2002

Lots of fun stuff today. Got to practice guitar with James for a couple of hours and I’ve got a number of new songs to add in now. My fingers are a bit sore, but it’s worth it. Also, lots of fun stuff came in the mail, although not entirely the stuff I anticipated.

First up was the Usagi Yojimbo book #6. I read through it fairly quickly and it’s pretty good. On a par with his other work. It’s got parts of several stories that are referenced in other books, like a bet-maker who tries to rig duels and get townsfolk to bet on the duel, and also Jei has a significant role. It also deals heavily with Usagi’s past and the town he grew up in, revealing a number of suprising bits, and filling in some details that didn’t quite make sense earlier in the series.

The second fun package was Lisa Loeb’s "Cake and Pie" CD (it’s an advance copy that I got via ebay and won’t be released until Feb 28th). It’s got some really fabulous songs on it like "The way it really is" and a couple of others that I like a lot, and some songs that I’m not too keen on just yet. But I think that if I listen to it another time or two some of them might grow on me, although one of them is a bit odd, and I’m not sure if I like it at all. But anyway, the studio version of "The way it really is" is just about worth the price of the CD anyway. It sounds to me like it had the most time and effort put into it, and it sounds great.

Tue Jan 22 22:50:44 PST 2002

I dropped by the computing support center and after a half hour of reboots and driver installs, it looked like the wireless card was happy. When I got home I fired up the laptop, stuck in the card and it worked perfectly. I’m really happy about that. Now I can work from home, anywhere in the house which is really a nice advantage.

I also picked up at 120GB WD hard drive to put in pooh for a ‘media drive’ for all the .mp3 and video files. I got a really huge one (I remember buying a 80MB drive for my 386) since it’s the last open IDE slot in the server so I figured I’d better go all out since adding more space beyond that would involve replacing a drive, which usually is undesirable. And about $40 per 20GB from 80 to 100 and from 100 to 120, I figured it wasn’t too bad of a deal anyway. I’ll drop it in the linux machine sometime later this week. There isn’t too much of a rush as I don’t have video recording set up just yet.

Instead of Bible study this evening the group takes one week a month off to help with a program called ‘Tuesday Treasures’. It’s basically a outreach program for people with mental issues. This week it was a consolidated group of around 150 treasures and helpers with a concert. I was told that normally it’s more of a children’s Sunday school format with a Bible story, a few songs and a craft of some kind.

It’s probably a good thing to start out this way with a little less interaction the first time. I think everyone avoids people and situations that remind them of their own fragility or mortality. It’s not that the people who are often avoided are contagious, it is that "healthy" people don’t want to think about being sick, or loosing capabilities that they take for granted or being dead. I’m fairly certain that is why many people avoid hospitals, nursing homes, funerals and other similar events and locations.

For me, it’s brain-stuff. I could handle loosing my hearing, or the use of a limb or two. Maybe even going blind. I could still envision myself living a happy productive life with a number of physical handicaps. It might be really frustrating, but it seems possible. But the one thing that I can’t really imagine is having some kind of mental handicap. Quite honestly, it kinda freaks me out a bit. And so that’s probably part of the reason that I’m not comfortable around these kind of people.

The other part is also that people who aren’t exactly playing by the same social rulebook aren’t predictable, and society is based a lot on people using the same social rulebook to interact so that people can predict reactions in other people and use that to prevent problems. I’ve always found it concerning whenever I notice someone that appears to be acting outside the social norms. What most people would call "behaving strangely" even when they don’t know the person, they are referring to the unwritten rules about what should be done in public, and how to react in basic social circumstances.

Anyway, I’m not trying to justify my initial discomfort, but rather to understand where it is coming from, so I can try and deal with it. This is really fairly important because they are people too. People who God loves and cares about, and so I need to care about them too, and I can’t do that if I’m preoccupied with thinking about the other stuff. So I need to at least deal with it mentally so that I can start working on figuring out how to show them that God loves them.

Sat Jan 19 16:39:04 PST 2002

Well, time for another shot at ATI video capture under Linux. I’ve already backed up /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc (very important, as this is the script that normally starts gnome, sawfish and all that good stuff) and I’m just about ready to try and install X, the ati.2 and DRM drivers… Needless to say, this should be interesting. I’ll also need to get Jason and Phebe to pause playing Diablo II for at least a little while to try out in case it crashes the machine again.

My copy of found magazine (http://www.foundmagazine.com/) arrived in the mail. I read the whole thing cover to cover and enjoyed it a lot. It’s really werid to see little bits of other peoples lives like that. The next one isn’t due out for another six months or so, but that’s the way zines generally go, not as regular as normal mags. TMCM is the same way, but they try and be somewhat regular. I think I actually like Found better than TMCM. It sometimes feels like TMCM is trying too hard to be ‘indie’ and does have some political leanings that seems a bit out there for me. Found just is what it is, and doesn’t try and overcommentary. We’ll see what Found can do with their second issue (assuming they manage to get it out) and what it is like.

Sat Jan 19 23:04:10 PST 2002

So, after compiling xc and installing it to alt-X11R6, I tried to get the ATI drivers working. Below are the commands that I figured I would need to get the whole thing working.

sync mv /usr/X11R6 /usr/X11R6-RH ln -s /usr/alt-X11R6 /usr/X11R6 rmmod radeon cd ~/GATOS/drm-kernel insmod ./radeon.o /sbin/modprobe videodev cd ../km make test sync # fbtv, v41-conf scantv startx xawtv

At least it didn’t crash the machine, but the drm-kernel mods or the ati.2 mods caused X to no no longer start, complaining about missing symbols or something similar. I basically have given up for now and pulled the ATI out of the linux machine and moved it back to the windows machine. I did put the Matrox G450 in the Linux box so that I could get better resolution and color over the built-in graphics and it’s performing well. I may even play around with dual-head sometime, but that’s for another day.

After replacing the ATI in the WinXP box, I had a nice time playing a little UT and watching a little TV. I like having at least the basic functionality back, even if it is the wrong box. I think what I need to do is to get another hard drive (which I was planning on doing anyway) and replace the system disk in the WinXP machine with the new drive running linux so I can really experiment with the ATI drivers and not worry about crashing or messing up the configation on the main linux server.

Speaking of pooh, I’m having some issues with the sound. I disabled the onboard sound to try and get the Equanox sound card working. I’m thinking this wasn’t such a bright idea. I had orignally thought that the sound issues in some of the MP3s were related to bad hardware, but the act of letting kudzu remove the configuration for the 815’s audio seems to have confused many other things, most critically the mixer. Also, the same audio artifacts, particularly in some of the .mp3’s seem to still be in the audio. Natasha’s Ghost seems to be the worst. It could be that the decoder has some problems, as they seem to play OK other places, but I really should double check on the WinXP system sometime, as I haven’t actually listened to that file on any other machine.

If that is the case, then pulling the PCI audio would be a good thing to do, as that would also free up a PCI slot, possibly enabling a PCI-based video capture card. It seems that the Hauppage cards are much more popular and may be better supported. If that actually worked, then I could get dual-head displays and PVR support which would be incredibly, incredibly cool.

But for now it’s time to concentrate on some more short term goals, like getting a basic home site up, practicing playing the guitar and getting song sheets set up for Bible study in two weeks.

Thu Jan 17 23:24:38 PST 2002

Well, practiced guitar with James for about two hour or so. Went fairly well and I got a few cleanup bits. Unfortunately, he didn’t bring a copy of his music, so I don’t have anything new to practice. But the good thing is that I’ll be able to reuse the code that I have for stashing the music and printing it up which is great. The only downside is that my fingertips on my left hand are a bit sore.

The biggest problem is that the ‘user interface’ to the scripts is pretty painful. The right answer may be to build a web interface. Strangely, that is likely to be the easiest thing to do. The scripts are all close to robust so driving them out of a webfront for organization seems like a pretty attractive option. But I probably should get the ATI video issues resolved first.

Wed Jan 16 23:33:23 PST 2002

Got the house cleaned up a bit and a few little things taken care of. Not a lot, but mostly it was just reducing the clutter and piles of stuff that had grown to pretty huge levels. Maybe we should have company over more often so we keep the house cleaner. Still haven’t worked on doing the big ‘replace X’ thing to get the ATI working. Jason and Phebe were playing Diablo2 a bunch this evening, and I don’t want to be experimenting too much with it while they are using it. Maybe I’ll get to it this weekend. I really need to figure out if I can get it working so that I can get my WinXP box up and running again sometime soon. But then again, I haven’t really missed it that much since all I use it for is gaming.

Tue Jan 15 23:55:43 PST 2002

I convienced Jason and Phebe to go to the homeowners association meeting so I could go to Bible study. I’m glad that they agreed. I had fun, and am growing more confident of James’ ablilties and theological standing. On one question, we both turned to the same passage to answer it, which was pretty cool. Good sized group this week also.

The HOA meeting went well according to Jason and Phebe. We are spending a big chunk of change to clean up and get the park built. I’m OK with it, it only works out to a couple of hundred per house, and I think it will be good for the community to have it.

I’ve got to get up a bit early tommorow to give Ryan a ride over to the Beaverton Ford dealership so he can take his car in for mantance and still get to work. And it’s pretty late already. Oh well…

un Jan 13 23:23:23 PST 2002

Attended a different church today. Vally Hope, or something like that. We mostly picked it since it had ‘hope’ in the title and had a close address. Turned out to not be such a good idea. Nice building, well equipped (they even had bars for hanging theater lights). The service was a bit awkward in some respects. They were trying to have a more modern worship time, but were playing the music for the modern songs off of tape/CD, and the few hymn songs they had both a piano and an organ for. The preacher was an elderly man (the bulk of the congreation was elderly as well) and seemed to be well in tune with the needs of his congreation. But their needs and ours seem to differ substantially.

Also, he claimed to be preaching from a specific passage in 2 Cor., but he used NLT (New Living Translation, I presume) and we kept double checking and it was way off from NKJV and doesn’t quite match the intent that is in NASB either. And what he was preaching didn’t really come from the scripture anyway. He spent the bulk of the time on ‘Therefore from now on we recognize no one according to the flesh’ (2 Cor, 5:16a NASB) and talking about how we shouldn’t complain about our physical condition or compare our bodies to those of others. I’m not saying that isn’t supported by scripture, but I strongly believe that’s not what Paul was talking about here.

Paul is talking about the old self and the new self (see verse 17) a theme common in his writings and that as a Christian, a new person, we need to not look upon people with the eyes of the world, or fleshly eyes, but with our new eyes, our spiritual eyes.

The church overall seemed a little underattended for the space available. I got the impression that this church had been much stronger 5-10 years ago and was currently slipping due to member loss due to older members passing on. There were a few younger families, but I would guess about 40% or more of those in attendance were over 55. There were some signs that there was action to turn the church around. The worship leader appeared to be pushing forward with the songs, and was also very friendly and encouraged us to return. I got the strange feeling that they don’t get too many visitors, and probably even less return visitors.

So the lesson to take away from this is that we should investigate these churches a bit more before showing up on Sunday morning and spending 90 minutes. I won’t say that I didn’t enjoy some parts of it, but it’s not the right place for us in so many ways.

I’m thinking that maybe we can call them and ask for average attendance numbers and if they tape their sermons, if they could send us a sample or maybe we could drop by and pick one up. That would enable us to get a rough feel without having to spend a Sunday morning at a church that we could have otherwise filtered out. I’m growing impatient with wanting to find a new church home. Hope Community Church was a very good church for us despite it’s location, and replacing it is going to be very difficult. I now know why I was so hesitant to go. Finding a good church home is not a easy or short task, and it’s going to take a lot more effort than I orignally thought.

In other news, I got some more info about requirements for the ATI video stuff. Turns out that you need to have the ati.2 drivers in place along with km and drm-kernel to get it all working without crashing everything. I’m a bit nervous about applying the ati.2 drivers over my perfectly good copy of /usr/X11R6, but it should be OK if I make a .tgz backup of the directory beforehand as a safety precaution.

Sat Jan 12 23:58:34 PST 2002

Sadly, no luck with the ATI card under Linux. Not for lack of trying. I even managed to reboot the machine (probably by pissing off the video card to invoke some kind of system error). I’ll read up and see if I can use the GATOS stuff to get a VideoForLinux driver working, but I’m not real confident at this point, since my first attempt at it did end up rebooting the machine. Sadly, I didn’t get much else done today.

On the plus side Girl Genius 3-5 showed up today and 4 and 5 are now in color and do look very nice. The story is progressing nicely, but the downside is that it looks like it will take at least another year or maybe two before we really have full story arcs getting resolved. I’m just too impatient! In the meantime, I’ll see about collecting the rest of the Usagi Yojimbo books. Also got ahold of Stephanie from nethersphere.com and the two prints that I wanted are available, and so I sent her the money via paypal and she’s gonna mail them to me. I’m pretty happy about that. They are a bit on the spendy side, but I think they will frame well, and we certainly need more art and stuff.

Fri Jan 11 23:53:18 PST 2002

It sure looks like getting the ATI TV features will be a little trickier than I thought. I’m having to recompile X to get the new drivers built. So far it isn’t too bad, I just follow the instructions closely and make sure to back up stuff before I overwrite anything. I’m working on a cvs d/l of the XFree86 code, and hopefully that will go reasonably well and I can see if this stuff really works. If so, writing the rest of the user interface code is actually fairly easy. A bit of XML, cron, and maybe a simple graphical interface in Python or PHP.

Also read most of a very interesting article on changes that one of the Linux kernel developers has for 2.5 that changes the scheduling algorithms to be O(1). Very intersting stuff. I’m thinking I should go read it again to try and fully understand the changes that he’s proposing.

http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0201.0/0810.html

Hopefully tommorow I can get the basic TV stuff working and clean up the house some. It’s a bit of a mess. I also need to get a longer crossover cable to move the WAP over and up on the wall so it is better positioned in the house. Maybe I can pick up a hard drive at the same time :-)

Mon Jan 7 22:19:34 PST 2002

Somewhat uneventful day. Work… Doing laundry. Stuff. I need to try and get to bed at a decent hour. I’m still a bit tired. Didn’t help that Shadow came and woke me up about half an hour early this morning wanting to get fed. I’ve got to hold off feeding him until just before I go to bed. He’s only good for just under 8 hours before he gets hungry and tries to wake me up to feed him.