New look for Suzuki

One of the things I do on the side is support the Bismarck Suzuki School of Music by doing stuff on their web site.

When I inherited it, it was a static website. It meant that updating content was time consuming and, quite honestly, I would have made it look a lot worse.

So I installed Wordpress. It made adding content a lot simpler. Last summer Cheryl, the president of the school, spent hours putting up lots of content. It means that she does not need to know any HTML to add all this content.

When I originally set it up, I used roughly the same style as the previous site. Now I have a new theme up there. It was designed by my brother, and then Douglas Tschetter was kind enough to turn it in to a theme for me.

I think it looks pretty good. So thanks Ade and Doug.

Not again!

Not content with serving us more snow this last month than we had the whole of last winter, the weather may have more in store for us....

URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE...CORRECTED
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE BISMARCK ND
421 PM CST THU DEC 18 2008
...SIGNIFICANT WINTER STORM POSSIBLE THIS WEEKEND...
.A SIGNIFICANT WINTER STORM MAY IMPACT WEST AND CENTRAL NORTH
DAKOTA BEGINNING LATE FRIDAY AFTERNOON AND CONTINUING THROUGH LATE
SATURDAY NIGHT. SNOW WILL DEVELOP ACROSS WESTERN NORTH DAKOTA
FRIDAY AND FRIDAY NIGHT...AND MAY BECOME HEAVY BY SATURDAY. SNOW
AMOUNTS OF 6 TO 10 INCHES ARE POSSIBLE FROM THE TURTLE MOUNTAINS
IN THE NORTH CENTRAL...THROUGH JAMESTOWN AND SOUTH TO THE SOUTH
DAKOTA BORDER BY SUNDAY MORNING. FOUR TO SEVEN INCHES OF SNOW IS
POSSIBLE FROM MINOT TO BISMARCK...WITH 2 TO 4 INCHES OF SNOW
POSSIBLE ACROSS THE WEST. ALTHOUGH THE WEST WILL SEE LESS OF THE
SNOW...WIND CHILLS TO 50 BELOW AND STRONG WINDS WILL CAUSE VERY
HAZARDOUS CONDITIONS BY LATE SATURDAY AND SATURDAY NIGHT. NEAR
BLIZZARD CONDITIONS ARE POSSIBLE ACROSS PORTIONS OF CENTRAL NORTH
DAKOTA SATURDAY AFTERNOON AND SATURDAY NIGHT WHERE THE HEAVIER
SNOW AMOUNTS ARE EXPECTED

Past experience has shown that such messages are not always wholly accurate. Suffice to say somewhere in the state somebody is going to get snow this weekend.

yet more snow

It looks like we will be measuring snow accumulations in feet and not inches this winter. I do not know what the running total is so far, but I now have a bank of snow beside my driveway that is as tall as I am. I do not think my boulevards can take much more snow. In fact the section of driveway between the side walk and the road is getting narrower because there is nowhere else to put the snow.

And it is cold! I wore so many clothes walking (more like wading) to work that my cube is full of outerwear.

And then to make matters worse, Kim has posted some photos of her modeling her latest shawls. While they are nice garments, I was more struck by the fact that they were taken outside in December and she is not wearing a coat. I wish I could stand outside like that without pulling on hats scarves, coats, etc.

not the light fantastic

Now that Thanksgiving has been and gone, everyting turns to Christmas.

While we will not put the tree up for another week or two, we are starting to put up some decorations. In that vain, I decided to hang out the lights outside.

Sure it was about 28 degrees out there, but chances are it will not be any warmer in the next few weeks.

So I get out the string of lights, I test them and they all work. Next I hang them out. After what felt like a good long time perching on a ladder and messing with hooks and cables with gloves hampering dexterity, I fanally get the lights hung out. Now its time to turn them on.

So after all that, fifty of the one hundred work and fifty do not. Why does that always happen? You test them and they work, then when they are hung out they don't.

Next I go and reseat all the dark bulbs. I get to the very last bulb on the chain (the last possible bulb to test) and the bulb comes apart in my (very cold) hand. So I have the glass bit but the bulb casing is still in the socket. To make matters worse it ill nt come out. No amount of pulling at it with needle nosed pliers while cursing, perched on top of a ladder in the freezing cold helped.

This morning one of my freinds recounted a similar story. I smiled and said it was murphy. Whenshe hears this story I'm sure she will return the compliment.

electoral parrallels

I am a fan of the now finished telly program "The West Wing". In the final season, the presidential election campaign was, in my mind, spookily similar to the one we have just experienced in real life. Let me point out some similarities:

1. In the West Wing, the Democratic candidate was a Latino, in real life, he is African american. So, both are non-white.
2. In both cases the Democratic candidates are young.
   
3. Both Republican Candidates were old men with centrist tendencies and who were dragged to the right by their parties.
4. Current events hampered the campaigns of both republican candidates (the nuclear power plant in the West Wing, and the financial crisis in real life).

I'm sure there are more.

In the West Wing, the Republican candidate becomes a member of the new Democratic cabinet. If I remember right, he became the secretary of state. So, if the parallels hold true, should we expect McCain getting a job in Obama's administration?

first snow of winter

Winter came to North Dakota with a thud - well more of a whoosh and then a flump!

Snow came yesterday afternoon with high winds. Blizzard conditions ensued for pretty much the rest of the night. During the evening the wind started to gust up to 40-50 mph.

While we were eating our evening meal, the power started to blip off and back on again every so often. As the evening wore on the blips would start to be a couple of seconds then at 8:30 we lost power for about an hour.

Woke up in the morning to find that school was cancelled, and we had a waist high snow drift going all the way down the drive. I dug a trench through the snow to the roadside and then went back in and worked from home for the morning.

By lunchtime, the risk of more snow showers was pretty much gone and I started to shovel snow. After an hour and a half, all I had managed was to clear away the shallow drifts. I still had the big waist high drift to do. Time to call my father in law. He brought over his snow blower and an hour later he had the big drift cleared away too. It would not have been so hard if the bank of discarded snow at the side of the driveway was not taller than the outlet for his snow blower.

After all that I then tramped t work.

Liferea 1.5 has this cool feature where you can read blogs you have subscribed to on Google Reader. Now that is a feature worth compiling source for.

So I did!

Not all that bad of an install - was expecting worse.

Feature kind of works right now but seg faults every 10 minutes. So it is back to version 1.4 for now and I will eagerly await the stabilising of 1.5

Open Solaris

So I tried Open Solaris this week. I tried both the current release (2008.05) and the latest beta for 2008.11. I must say that they have done quite a nice job of it. It installed nicely and was quite simple to get a running system going.

What made me remove it after a couple of days was the lack of packages for it, and laziness on my part. In order to get Open Solaris up and running with all the extra stuff that I get from the Ubuntu community, I would have to spend a long time researching alternative package locations and probably compiling a bunch of stuff. Right now I am not willing to put in that much effort.

I have always had a soft spot for Solaris. I do want to use it and give it a decent shot. Its niche nature, underdog status and all those toys I want to play with make it a compelling thing. It flirts with me and every so often I install it. The thing is I am usually far too lazy and the draw of the seemingly effortless Ubuntu pulls me back.

So I have been thinking I should maybe try and resurrect this whole blogging thing. I have been feeling the urge to write something quite a bit recently, so that is a good sign to start again.

I thought about starting a new blog. In fact I shopped around the free blog services with that intention. I eventually decided to resurrect this one. The other free services did not seem to offer much more than what I have here, and I thought maybe if I started posting here again, then the three people who read it before may come back.

I took a look at Zim; a desktop wiki. In fact it is pretty much the same as Tomboy, only the one compelling difference was that Zim had in built subversion support.

The Subversion support should make it easy to do version control on your notes and potentially have a backup off-site. It would be really nice for things like sharing notes and documentation between people or computers.

The first big issue with this feature is that there is no documentation on how to get this to work. I went through the Zim website and found nothing that was helpful. I ended up having to do some digging around myself. Here is how I got SVN support to work with Zim:

1. First you need to create your subversion repository. Use

svnadmin create

to create your repository.

2. Create your notebook in Zim. Note where you told the files to be saved. Close down Zim completely (not even hanging around in your notification are)

3. In a terminal window, cd to the directory and then run

svn import

to get the initial files in to the repository.

4. Move the original directory out of the way, or delete it if you are feeling brave.

5. Check out the svn repository in to the location where Zim is expecting the files to be.

6. Start up Zim again and open the notebook.

You can now start working away in Zim, writing stuff and saving the changes. IF you create a new page, then it automatically does the svn add stuff for you. You should then pull down the Tools menu periodically and choose the "SVN Commit" option.

If you are nervous that it is not behaving as you expect, you can always check out another working copy and see what it looks like.

Another thing to note is that Zim logs stuff to you .xsession_errors file. tail that file to get