Drinking from a firehose

While at Penguicon I upgraded this computer to Ubuntu 11.04 - the Natty Narwhal. I still have both of my home machines to upgrade. I'm in the midst of upgrading my work machine, which is why I'm typing on this one while here at the office.

The second Penguicon Drag Show took place on Friday night. Two of the songs are still stuck in my head (this is unusual, it's typically the last song I've heard). I took lots of photos but the lighting wasn't enough to overcome my distance from the stage so most of the pictures are regrettably blurred. I had a great time and recognized about half the songs. This is much better than last year when I didn't even know who Pink was.

Friday night I found someone's cell phone laying in the hall. I turned it in to Ops (lost & found) and I'm hoping the phone made it back to its human. I wanted to try to call back the most recent caller to say I'd found the phone, but I couldn't figure out how to make the phone dial before the guy at Ops took it from me.

Saturday I went to some programming (including a session on the latest release of Ubuntu, during which I learned nothing useful but discovered that the guy giving the presentation put a hell of a lot of work into the new release and he's totally in love with it. (This was more charming than annoying.)). I also did some knitting and discovered that when I combine a knit with two wraps I confuse myself. When it comes time to knit the next row, I can't tell what's the knit stitch and what's a wrap. This lead to my stitch count becoming wildly off and to frogging nearly a full skein's worth of knitting. I then modified the pattern, so that I'm using a single wrap instead of a double. The resulting fabric is different, but the pattern still works and I'll soon be able to prove or disprove my theory about the pattern works.

Sunday I left the con around noon and went to ACraftThing at the Woodward Avenue Bar. The event was not nearly as crowded as I expected (65 people confirmed as attendees; I'd be surprised if I saw 24 in the two hours I was in attendance. Perhaps the others showed up after I left. I hope so as I want the event to repeat in the future.

When I got home the cats did their best to break my heart. I'd given them the last of their food before leaving the house Friday morning and their bowls were licked clean to the point of being shiny. I've trained the cats to sit at their dishes when they want food, so both cats rushed down to the basement and sat and meowed piteously as soon as they saw me. But there was nothing I could do until Jebra arrived home with the fresh bag of cat food.

While waiting for Jebra to get home I started the laundry, scrubbed out the cat's food pail, and moved stuff from the living room to the hallway so that we could put the futon into bed mode, strip off the dirty sheets, flip it over, put on clean sheets and the recently washed duvet, and then return it to couch mode. Once the futon was back to being a couch I got to move the miscellaneous boxes and stuff back to the living room.

Jebra suggested we run billing (for work, from home) before I attempted to upgrade Logan (my desktop machine). This was good idea as we had enough trouble getting billing to run. Jebra'd recently upgraded his work machine and some of the parts he needed to run billing weren't reinstalled yet. So billing took longer than anticipated and there were more hoops to jump through than usual, but we got it done.

This morning on the way in to work we dropped the old car ("The Boat") off at the repair shop. We think the thermostat is intermittently failing. I pulled up next to Jebra at the repair shop to tell him he one of the break lights is out and as soon as he opened his car door we heard a chime we couldn't identify. We also couldn't identify where the sound was coming from. From the way Jebra checked his pockets, I could tell he thought it might be coming from one of his electronic devices. I, meanwhile, wasn't sure it wasn't coming from Chet (meaning the car I was driving). When Jebra stepped out of The Boat, he discovered someone's cell phone laying between our two cars. Mystery solved. Odd that we'd found two phones within three days though.

On the agenda for tonight is more laundry and more knitting. And starting Logan's upgrade as when I tried last night, Ubuntu reported their servers as being overloaded.

The photos are from Penguicon 6.0. Awesome show, guys.

The photos are from Penguicon 6.0. Awesome show, guys.

We've been here at the con since Friday afternoon. Today I attended two panels on robotics. I wanted to go to the demonstration of easy wok cooking, but either it wasn't when it was supposed to be or I was in the wrong room.

Last night Jeff Larsen and Steve Ward played music with their Tesla Coils. Very, very cool. I took photos, but bloggerchick put a vid of the performance up on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDejvryAFN0

We've been here at the con since Friday afternoon. Today I attended two panels on robotics. I wanted to go to the demonstration of easy wok cooking, but either it wasn't when it was supposed to be or I was in the wrong room.

Last night Jeff Larsen and Steve Ward played music with their Tesla Coils. Very, very cool. I took photos, but bloggerchick put a vid of the performance up on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDejvryAFN0