The Weatherman

This last weekend I got a big jump on painting the nursery. Steph prepped the room by laying paper on the floor and taping the edges. I primed the room on Saturday, applied the first coat on Sunday, and did a second coat on Monday.

It’s going to be a garden theme. The bottom third is green and the top two thirds plus the ceiling are a light blue. I’m going to attach a mini garden fence as a rail one third up the wall. Steph will then paint on plants, birds, clouds, etc.

We are going to decorate with the Happy Bugs collection from Pottery Barn Kids.

This last weekend we also registered for the basics at Babies-R-Us. These stroller “systems” are wild. They have all these little latches, attachments, levers, etc to make things easier…hope I can remember how to use them.

Our contractor has spent the last two days installing new Simonton Signature 7300/7500 windows in our house. Our house was built in 1948 and we still had the original windows. These new dual-paned windows are awesome.

They have all of the windows done but they have some patching to complete. The need to patch the stucco around the green house window and they have some substantial dry rot repair to perform around the living room window.

Overall, I’m very happy. It will be cool to have windows that open, to have windows without mildew, and to have windows that keep it quiet.

So I spent a little time yesterday on sfgiants.com searching for tickets. It’s pretty tough to get decent seats…which is good for the giants…but bad for us non-season ticket holders.

I picked up one pair of tickets for Sept 8th against the cubbies. I’m pretty excited for that games since I can’t remember the last time I saw the cubs…if ever. To see our seats check out the seating chart and click on the View Box in section 326. Not too shabby.

If you ever search for tickets on the Giants web site and you get to the page with actual seats you can buy…be aware that the seats are reserved for 1 minutes and 30 seconds…so if you leave the page and do another search — you won’t see those previous seats. At least not for another minute and 30 seconds.

Ok, so I got MythTV 0.16 working on my old Sony Vaio desktop. I’m pretty impressed with the OS overall. It has a very generous package database and Portage is an amazing tool. So I decided to rebuild my newer desktop machine (Shuttle SN85G, AMD 3200, 1GB RAM, 160GB SATA). I had originally built this with Fedora Core 2 32 bit.

Now I’m a pretty impatient person. That holds true when installing OSes. So I need to built up a little patience before installing Gentoo…it takes days. I also attempted to install 64bit Gentoo…without going into details, I didn’t complete that installation.

I reverted to the 32bit version instead. The installation was relatively easy once again. When booting I specified ‘gentoo noapic’ or else my SATA drive wasn’t available. The LiveCD recognized my hardware so I made sure to note the drivers — this is helpful when configuring the kernel later. My boot partition is ext2 and my main partition is reiserfs.

As for kernel configuration, I had to enable forcedeth for enabling the ethernet interface on the nforce3 motherboard. Otherwise it was fairly standard. I think I only rebuilt the kernel about 5 times to get what I wanted.

I have the following applications running on it

• Firefox 1.0
• Thunderbird 1.0
• Sendmail, Procmail, Dovecot, Fetchmail, Spambouncer for email management
• mplayer
• gaim
• mysql
• my weather app

I plan on installing gimp, open office, and various development tools as the days go on.

It a good OS…just need patience since everything is built from source.

PC Magazine has an article on the Top 15 Firefox Extensions. I actually found this on Galaxy

• About site 0.1.1
• Adblock 0.5.2
• Bandwidth Tester 0.4.1
• Cards 0.16.1
• Clusty Toolbar 1.0.2
• ColorZilla 0.8.2
• DictionarySearch 0.7
• ForecastFox 0.5.8
• FoxyTunes 1.1
• GoogleBar 0.9.0.30
• Google Preview 0.8
• MapIt! 0.4
• ScrapBook 0.12.0
• Tabbrowser Preferences 1.1.1
• xMirror 0.1.1

So far so good. I now have my older Sony Desktop running Gentoo 2004.3 I basically followed the Gentoo Installation Handbook. I also threw in a second 80GB hard drive. The primary drive is a 40GB drive for the OS

The 80GB drive is for storing my MythTV recordings.

I was able to install ivtv for my Hauppauge PVR 350. I actually emerged the ivtv driver from Gentoo. Of course, I had to recompile the kernel several times but ultimately I got everything to work. There are some helpful sites for the install, here is one. My kernel compile required similar changes to the aforementioned documentation…fyi, for me, I was only able to get the intel8×0 sound card working as a kernel module.

I was able to emerge MythTV without much difficulty. It just took a while for the compiles to complete. I had some minor differences compared to the online directions but they were easy to figure out.

That’s it