If you've been wondering why this place has been so quiet lately, it's because I'm busy entertaining an old college buddy of mine who's visiting from Spain. We spent the weekend barbequeing, drinking, and canoeing...although not necessarily in that order.

Yesterday, we rented a 17-foot canoe and went for a long paddle down the Chippewa River. We arranged for the rental place to pick us up at a bridge about 9 miles outside of Eau Claire.

We had the river all to ourselves and the weather was perfect. We spotted several majestic bald eagles as well as blue herons, Canadian geese, beaver, muskrats, and fish jumping out of the brown, silty water.

We paddled for hours on end against a stiff wind that wouldn't let up. The river was low and slow-moving, so we didn't make very good time. When we finally arrived at the bridge and pulled our canoe up on the shore, we felt like we'd just stepped out of the slave-galley scene from Ben-Hur where Charleton Heston paddles for months on end while his biceps get bigger and bigger until he steps off the boat looking like Hercules. We were ready to fight in the Coliseum!

A couple of pathetically inadequate photographs can be viewed here.

I should return to a more regular blogging schedule next week, good Lord willin' and the river don't rise...

Posted by MrBaliHai at 9:30 AM | Permalink

Sunday was a marvelous day. We started out with a sumptuous Dim Sum brunch at the Mayflower restaurant in Milpitas. Then we drove to downtown San Francisco to see the Tibetan exhibit at the Asian Art Museum. We learned many interesting facts during the docent tour such as:

• Peaceful Tibetan deities have blue hair, wrathful deities have flames shooting out of their heads.
• Tibetan gold often possesses a mysterious bright orange hue that we tentatively ascribed to the addition of Cheeze Doodles in the alloy.
• Tibetans invented the casserole dish long before Minnesotans, and fashioned them out of human skulls.
• The word "esoteric" means "knowledge that passes from a master to a disciple"
• Paintings and tapestries with black backgrounds are intended to be viewed by more advanced acolytes
• Yak butter is not made from the milk of male yaks
• If you meet the ascetic Buddha on the road, buy him a hot meal.

After the museum, we headed over to the Embarcadero for dinner at the fabulous Teatro Zinzanni. Nobody who knows me should be surprised to hear that I dislike Joan Baez, and her performance as the Gypsy Contessa did nothing to alter my opinion. She affected a hideous Cockney accent for her role that would've made Dick Van Dyke proud, and led the audience in a dopey Kum Ba Ya hand-waving performance of "I Shall Be Released" that had me flashing back to every lame hippy cliche that made the emergence of Punk Rock seem like a cultural imperative back in the Seventies.

The rest of the show was fantastic, however; Christine Deaver as Chef Penelope Wilde owned the stage and delivered a lusty, plus-size performance. Several men in the audience found themselves subjugated by her unstoppable libido into wearing such outre accoutrements as chicken hats and leopardskin fezzes, reciting Shakespeare, and singing "You Are So Beautiful" in high, squeaky voices. I would've been more than willing to bear her several children had she demanded it of me.

The food was passable, but not fantastic; the rice in my paella had the consistency of mushy oatmeal, and the dessert was a disappointment, but overall I'd have to say that the evening was a smashing success.

Well, back to work.

Posted by MrBaliHai at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

In a tale that's guaranteed to make your short 'n' curlies stand up straight, Ron shares the harrowing story of the day that his cojones were introduced to the shifter of his Schwinn Stingray.

Every guy who's ever ridden a bike has a similar horror story, of course. When I was a kid living in Denmark, I had one of those weird European folding bicycles, and I was riding it along a busy highway on my way to visit Trelleborg.

I was in the habit of pedaling while standing up off the seat, so when I went over a bump, the quick-release lever on the handlebars popped open, they swung down, and I dropped squarely onto the bottom bracket of the frame.

The pain was unbelievable. I spent what seemed like an eternity jumping up and down on the side of the road grimacing and clutching my jewels, which must've been a highly amusing sight to the people cruising by.

I wonder how you say 'racked' in Danish?

Posted by MrBaliHai at 11:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Not much going on this holiday weekend except for west and wewaxation. Read the extended entry of this post if you're interested in what's happening in my life lately (beware, contains Linux geekery).

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm on vacation until the 11th. It's not like I won't be doing anything over the next couple of days though. I'll be smokin' with the smoker, of course, 'cuz you can't have a proper Fourth of July without a BBQ, and the weather looks fine, so I may attempt a bike run from Eau Claire to Menominee on the Chippewa River Trail. My yard, giant overgrown patch of weeds filled with creepy moles that it is, needs attention as well.

Work on the tiki bar is progressing slowly, but surely. The ceiling went in last week, and now I have to finalize my designs for the wall coverings and the bar itself. The basement is a mess right now: there's a coating of drywall dust over everything and the smell of paint is pretty nauseating. We'll have a quite a cleanup job awaiting us when the workmen finish up. Hopefully, this will all be worth it.

In other news, MrsBaliHai has been hogging the computer for the past week or so, because she's taking an online course in web design for her Masters in Library Media Science. This is the final class she needs to complete her degree. Next week, she has to drive to the UW Whitewater campus to attend the classroom portion of the course, so I'll stay home with the kids.

Seeing as I haven't been able to use our home computer much, I decided to try and sort out the dual-boot laptop I use for work. I have Windows 2000 installed on one partition, and quite frankly, I despise using it because all the security crap that had to be loaded onto it in order to conform with the *$%#@@# Sarbanes-Oxley act, makes it run slower than molasses in January even with a Gig of memory. Trust the U.S. Congress to invent a cure for corporate fraud that's worse than the disease.

However, the Linux partition of the laptop is unsupported by my IS department, so I'm pretty much free to do and run whatever I want to on it. I decided to see if I could make it my default workspace in order to dial down my frustration level with the sloth of the Win2000 side of things.

Typically, I only use Linux to perform system support functions, so the distro was pathetically out of date (RedHat 7.2). Since my company works exclusively with RedHat and SUSE, and my general comfort level with Linux is low, I decided not to attempt a switchover to SUSE, and instead rounded up a newer, but still obsolete set of RedHat 9.0 CDs, figuring that it would be easier to upgrade than to switch.

In hindsight, I'm not sure that my assumption was correct: the upgrade has been a major pain in the ass. If mine represents a typical Linux desktop user experience, then it's no wonder that it hasn't taken over the world yet (Apple fanboys/girls, please spare me any gushing over OS X; my company ain't gonna buy me a PowerBook in this lifetime, so I'm stuck with IA32). Installing IRIX or Solaris is a breeze compared to to this.

Now I consider myself quite a bit more knowledgeable than the average user, practically a sysadmin, but getting even the most basic stuff up and running in Linux seems akin to building a rocket to the moon. Here's a list of things that didn't work:

- Anaconda didn't configure my Ethernet devices correctly and I couldn't search for a solution online because I didn't have a network connection, so I stumbled around in the dark for several hours before figuring out that the modules.conf file was hosed
- In order to add wireless support, I have to rebuild the friggin' kernel which I can't do because I don't have the kernel header files installed, which I can't install because of conflicts and dependencies with various rpms
- The system can't recognize both my touchpad and my USB mouse at the same time, and it doesn't configure the thumbwheel on the mouse, so I can't scroll
- The typical installer for the Linux version of an application doesn't seem to know how to add a shortcut to the start menu of KDE or Gnome, and I haven't yet figured out how I can add them manually; in addition, the installers for Firefox and Thunderbird leave all the application executables in whatever directory you installed from, and the install notes on Mozilla.org are crap.

On the plus side, whatever apps I can actually run at this point seem to be pretty fast, but I suspect that's because I don't have the virus scanner, policy orchestrator, and firewall all running at maximum settings, not because of any inherent speediness in the OS.

[sigh] Guess I'll hafta suck it up and install SUSE if I want any reasonable amount of supportedness and functionality. From what I've seen of SUSE enterprise installs, migrating from RH is basically a re-install, so I'll probably lose everything I've accomplished up to this point (which admittedly ain't much).

I could grump a lot more about this, but I think you get the general idea, and I'd rather be outside in the sunshine right now anyway.

Happy 4th to all my US readers, and general good wishes to everyone else!

Posted by MrBaliHai at 9:59 AM | Permalink