Happy Father's Day

Despite yesterday being rather windy, it has been a pretty nice weekend so far. This afternoon has been warm and only a little breezy. I grabbed a cup of coffee from Bernie's and came back and did a little programming. Then I called my Dad for Father's day. So far so good. All in all this has been a pretty relaxing weekend. A bit later I think I may be making a trip to a hardware store for various supplies and then groceries. Hooray groceries! They're good for eating.

I've also discovered that my desk is completely disgusting. I think a marathon bout of cleaning is definitely in order.

In other news: this is going to be a pretty busy week. We're trying to wrap up a major work project this week and make it, hopefully bug free. On Friday we'll be holding another Vodka Taste Test Challenge for Science after work, and on Saturday I've got a housewarming party in Berkeley at my friend Gary's place. In short, good times shall abound.

I've got some various work projects going on. They're keeping me busy but otherwise are quite manageable and, strangely, somewhat fun.

Also, my conversion to a Linux only system (Slackware 12.2 and using KDE 3.5 as my desktop environment) is still going well, and more or less without incident. There have been some hiccups along the way. The most recent hiccup involved getting my USB drives recognized. Well, when I was logged in as root they would mount correctly and I could get access to the files. When logged in as myself, however, it would mount, but I couldn't access the drive. Obviously, I do not want to login as root every time I want to put something on, or take something off, one of my USB drives.

It turns out the solution was pretty easy. I just needed to add my user to the 'plugdev' group (I added myself to a few others, too). My USB drives were still inaccessible, however, until I restarted the HAL daemon by running /etc/rc.d/rc.hald restart. And then everything started working correctly. You can find all this info online if you do some major google searching. But I'm reposting it here in case it saves someone some time.

Also, just let me say, I am completely in love with both the Xine media player and Amarok. Which brings me up to one other little hiccup I encountered. For reasons I don't really want to explain, I got the urge to listen to John Denver's "Country Roads" the other day and Amarok was complaining about not having the correct plugin installed to play mp3 files. This is confusing because a) I'd used Amarok in the past just fine and b) what system can't play mp3 files? I mean seriously. Anyway, the fix was also relatively simple. Something, somewhere, had removed a bunch of necessary configurations from my ~/.xine file. Not sure how, why or when. But it had. i moved ~/.xine to ~/.xine.old and restarted Amarok, which recreated ~/.xine and everything was hunky dory after that.

If anyone knows what caused this problem I'd be interested in knowing.