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Bike to Work 2008: Tree to Trees: The Parmer Commutes
May is Bike Month, and here in the Austin area Bike to Work Day is Friday, May 16. I've only ridden my bike to work once so far this spring, and intend to ride on May 16, possibly another time before then too.
One of the activities this year is Tree to Tree: The Parmer Commutes. This ride starts in Cedar Park and heads down Parmer Lane and beyond to the Arboretum area in northwest Austin. It just so happens that I commute on part of this route, so I intend to join this group at Lakeline and Parmer at 7:10 and ride down to Music City Cycles and then beyond to Sun. The ride map shows the group going along Riata Park Circle, right next to Apple and a short distance from Sun.
If you live up north in Cedar Park or Round Rock somewhere near Parmer and work somewhere towards northwest Austin, consider joining the ride.
Posted at 11:20AM May 08, 2008 by Dave Marquardt in Bicycling | Comments[0]
And then there were 13
On Friday the kid's elementary school PTA held its annual carnival. One of the attractions was a petting zoo. They had goats, piglets, rabbits and chickens.
Karen has been trying to figure out what to do with one our young roosters, Harry, who was hatched out in early January. He's acting more and more like a rooster, and is getting a bit unpleasant to be around. Also, living in a suburban neighborhood, we think sure the neighbors might get annoyed with hearing a rooster in the early morning, so we've always intended to get rid of our roosters. Karen had posted a "free rooster" note on a pet chickens web site, but got no interest. The next alternative was to take him up to the feed store and give him away.
Anyway, back to the petting zoo. Karen asked the petting zoo owner if she'd take a Rhode Island Red rooster, and she said she would. So Karen got our rooster and took him over there.
Our son Nick was upset and said he was going to miss Harry, but hasn't talked that much about him since then, so maybe he won't miss him that much. He still has 9 other chicks, 4 hens, 3 cats, a brother and mom and dad on which to shower his affection, so maybe that's enough :).
Posted at 04:52PM Apr 14, 2008 by Dave Marquardt in Life |
Riding with Cyclopaths
On Thursday April 10 I decided to join a local cycling group, the Georgetown Cyclopaths, for one of their evening rides. I really love that name!
There were eight of us that met at Berry Springs Park and Preserve and headed out. One of the riders had an idea for a route, so we took the lead from him. We ended up getting in about 24 miles before finishing back at the start. This was a nice rural ride, going in a loop to the east, then north, west to Walburg, and back to Georgetown. I recorded the ride with my Garmin Forerunner 305 and uploaded it a couple of places:
Another interesting feature, at least to me, was the amount of poultry I heard while we were riding, since we have 13 chickens ourselves. I'm pretty sure I heard chickens, and I saw a sign about a guinea fowl crossing or something like that. I need to take Karen out there, since she's the person in our family who's really into poultry.
I enjoyed the ride, and will join the Cyclopaths again when I can.
Posted at 04:41PM Apr 14, 2008 by Dave Marquardt in Bicycling |
My Texas primary and caucus experience
Yesterday I voted in the Texas primary at my polling place, Round Rock High School, in the morning. The Democratic side seemed busier than the Republican side (that's a switch!), but didn't have lines at that time, around 9:30 a.m.
In the evening, I attended the caucus, or precinct convention, at the same location. The caucus was supposed to start at 7:15 p.m. or shortly after the last voter voted, but we weren't let in the building until 7:55. We all had to sign in and give our presidential preference, and apparently had to have our credentials verified, but I don't know if everyone got the message on that. We had about 130 people show up, which is impressive in what's been a heavily Republican district. I recognized at least 4 of my neighbors there, and that was nice to see. Sometime we Democrats feel a bit lost amongst our conservative neighbors.
The Clinton campaign complained that at some precinct the Obama supporters controlled the caucus packets, which are apparently just the instructions and paperwork. In our case, the temporary chair was a Clinton supporter. The first order of business after calling the meeting to order and signing in was to elect a permanent precinct convention chair and secretary. Two candidates ran for chair, one an 18-year-old high school senior supporting Obama, and another a 30-something Clinton supporter. It was close, but the 18-year-old won 17-15. Someone then nominated the Clinton supporter for vice chair, and we approved that by acclamation.
After this, the chair announced the vote count. Obama won around 59% to 41% or something close to that. We had 16 delegates to send to the county convention in Georgetown on March 29, so Obama got 10 and Clinton got 6. I was in the Obama camp and we had 10 volunteers to be delegates, and 4 of us, including me, volunteered to be alternates.
I think the rules for all this are a bit weird. You can vote in just the primary and the caucus, but not just in the caucus. I suppose the idea is that the people who care about the party get a second shot at voting. But I think Clinton has a point about the caucuses excluding those who have to work that night or have other duties. We have 12 hours to vote but we have to be at the caucus at a specified time.
I enjoyed the experience, and kind of regret that I didn't raise my hand to be a delegate to the county convention. Maybe they'll call me as an alternate.
Posted at 02:30PM Mar 05, 2008 by Dave Marquardt in Politics |
14 chickens
When I last wrote about chickens, we had nine chicks indoors and four hens outdoors. Last week I came home from work and was looking at the indoor chicks in their 2' W × 4' L × 2' H box and noticed a little black chick. To this I said "Where the heck did that come from?" I was told it was a silver laced Wyandotte pullet (female chick). Karen knows she's going to have to get rid of the new roosters at some point, so she wanted one more hen. Okaaay.
At first, the little chick seems quite wary of the much larger and older chicks, and got chased around by a Rhode Island Red rooster. But by the next morning, she seemed to have settled in and started hanging out with the larger chicks and keeping warm. She particularly liked our largest chick, which we think is a Buff Orpington rooster. She even roosts with the larger chicks. Also, she really stands out as the other chicks are buff and red and she's black with a bit of silver. Pretty cute.
The older chicks have a few weeks before it's warm enough for them to go live outside. We're not sure how this will work with the little Wyandotte, who may not be old enough to go outside yet. When we've taken the older chicks outside for a few hours, the poor little Wyandotte makes lots of noise and really misses her friends.
Posted at 01:21PM Feb 13, 2008 by Dave Marquardt in Life |
Nick is 10!
On Sunday my sone Nicholas turned 10 years old! Congratulations Nick! We had a sleepover party on Saturday night with four other fourth grade boys, and they were up and kept me awake until 1 a.m. Sunday morning. I think our family is still trying to recover. Nick in particular was not feeling well on Monday morning, so we've sent him to bed early the past couple of nights.
My wife Karen and I were chatting last night, and I mentioned how some of my memories have gotten muddled and I "remember" Nick being at certain places with us, when I know darn well he wasn't born yet. Weird. But we agreed it is difficult for us to remember life before Nick entered our lives during the 1998 Winter Olympics, which we remember watching on the television while Karen was in labor.
Posted at 12:51PM Feb 13, 2008 by Dave Marquardt in Life |
First VirtualBox experience
Yesterday we at Sun announced we are acquiring Innotek and their VirtualBox software. As someone who runs OpenSolaris in a VMware virtual machine on my home PC, I decided to give VirtualBox a try.
As other reviewers have mentioned, the installation package for Windows is quite small, around thirty megabytes or so (yes, I remember when that would be considered large). It installed easily and I was able to start it up and create a new virtual machine to install Solaris in very little time. The virtual machine wizard allows you to select machines for many operating systems, more than VMware.
I then tried installing Solaris Nevada 79a, a preview version of the latest SXDE release. I got to the nice install GUI, it started installing, but somewhere along the line decided it couldn't read the rest of the yet-to-be-installed packages from the DVD. Weird. I didn't try it again, as I had other things to do, but up to that point it was pretty smooth. To be fair, I'm not convinced this is a VirtualBox problem at this point, as I had problems with installs of Solaris Nevada 79 on VMware.
The other thing I found difficult to figure out was how to get 1280x1024 screen resolution. It appears to default to 1024x768 or even smaller, and VirtualBox complained about the 24 bit color depth and suggested I use 32, 16, 8 or 1. It seemed to work anyway, though.
At some point I'll try the install again and give a bit more detail about the various warning and error messages. So far VirtualBox seems okay, but I'm not going to abandon VMware for my personal use at this point.
Posted at 12:46PM Feb 13, 2008 by Dave Marquardt in Solaris | Comments[2]
SXDE.next
I've been running Solaris 10 in a VMware virtual machine for several months. This has worked pretty well, and somewhere along the line VMware decided to support the VMware Tools with Solaris 10.
A few months back, Solaris management asked us engineers to test
an early, internal version of the next Solaris Express
Developer's Edition (SXDE), snv_79. I attempted to install this
in a new virtual machine. The installer didn't work in that it
failed to partition the disk. On a Sun internal mailing list I
heard this has something to do with the disk driver, but that
you could install from text installer. Okay, I did that and it
worked fine. One other problem is that the VMware Tools don't
seem to install correctly, but that's not such a big deal. One
final issue I had was getting the hostname set correctly. I set
the system up to use DHCP, and I tried various ideas I found in
Sun's documentation and on the web, and finally remembered the
trick is to put the hostname in /etc/nodename.
This was very frustrating. I'll need to write this down, as I
must have done this on the Solaris 10 machine earlier.
Last week we were asked to test the respin of the next SXDE,
snv_79a. I created another virtual machine and this one
installed as advertised. VMware Tools don't install right here
either. The installer also set up /etc/nodename,
so I didn't have to remember to do that. Very nice! It appears
from the internal survey we were asked to fill out that snv_79b
is in the works so we have a little more time to go before the
next SXDE is released.
For the issue of VMware Tools, VMware open sourced some or all of the tools (I'm not sure) a few months back, so I suppose I could figure this out at some point if I ever care about it. Or just wait and keep trying occasionally until the tools install correctly.
Posted at 03:32PM Jan 23, 2008 by Dave Marquardt in Solaris |
Running again
After some months of driftless, occasional running, I've decided I needed a goal to motivate my training. I looked at some of the upcoming local half marathons, but they're too soon for me to train up in time without a high risk of injury. I decided to train for the Capitol 10K, which I've run a few times in the past, but stopped running due to lack of interest. It's such a large race that fighting the crowd of people who've lined up in the wrong place takes a good mile, and I got tired of that. But it turns out to be about ten weeks out, long enough to get back into the groove. I set up a plan using the Runner's World Smart Coach tool. I'm hoping this will be motivation enough to stick with it and build my weekly mileage back up from about 5-10 miles up to 20.
Posted at 02:44PM Jan 23, 2008 by Dave Marquardt in Running |
The Wild
I rented The Wild for my boys this weekend, and we really enjoyed it. If I recall correctly, this movie came out at nearly the same time as Madagascar, and parts of the story are similar enough that I'm sure a lot of people said "Oh, this is just like Madagascar, why bother?" In truth, while there are some similarities, like animals in a zoo in a large city go on an adventure, the characters, the reasons for their trips and the trips themselves are quite different.
Nick and Sam enjoyed The Wild enough to watch it a second time a couple of days later, and they talked and laughed about various scenes afterwards. This certainly isn't the case in all movies they watch, and I take it as a sign they give it "two thumbs up." :)
Posted at 03:57PM Jan 22, 2008 by Dave Marquardt in Life |
Texas vs. Colorado, Jan. 19
My son Sam's Tiger Cub Scout den decided to take advantage of a deal offered by UT (University of Texas) to get basketball tickets for $6 per seat for the UT vs. Colorado men's basketball game on Saturday 2007-01-19. We arrived a little bit late due to slow restaurant service, and UT was already a ways behind and it wasn't looking too good. At the half, UT was behind around ten points, and we weren't too hopeful that they would win.
Coach Barnes must have lit a fire under his players during half time, as they came out blazing in the second half and fairly quickly caught up. The Horns were up close to ten points for a while, but towards the end of the game they started to slip a bit and Colorado was catching up. The Longhorns hung on to win by two points. Quite an exciting game, particularly the second half.
I'd never seen a basketball game in an arena, and I figured we'd have nosebleed seats and wouldn't be able to see well. But I realized when we got there that no one really had a bad seat, and the view was pretty good.
We'll probably go again, particularly if we get a good deal on tickets like this time. There's another opportunity coming up for Cub Scouts to see the women's basketball team vs. Texas A & M for $5 per seat next month.
Posted at 03:39PM Jan 22, 2008 by Dave Marquardt in Life |
Brand new chicks
Late last week and over the weekend we had 9 chicken eggs hatch in our incubator. We started out with 20 or 22 (don't remember), discarded some earlier as they weren't developing or had stopped developing, and were left with about 15 eggs we hoped would hatch. Getting 9 is pretty good, as Karen knows folks who've tried hatching multiple times and gotten no chicks at all.
We have
Buff Orpington sounds like some sort of macho guy to me, but Buff Silkie sounds like an oxymoron, as we think of buff as well built and silkie as kind of prissy looking. But in this case, of course, buff refers to the color, a light blondish color.
Sam and Karen took care of turning the eggs three times a day and candling them to see if they were developing. My only involvement with the incubation was to help wire up the incubator. I wired up a light bulb to a hot water heater thermostat, and Karen used a thermometer to help set the termperature. I also wired up a computer fan from an old computer we still have around to an A/C adapter. Funny thing about that, the best place on the web to find instructions on wiring a computer fan to an A/C adapter was a web site dedicated to growing pot! :)
The nine little chicks seem to be doing well, and they act like chickens right out of the box. They test new things by pecking at them, so every new chick that was born was pecked by the others first :). We moved them to a brooder box with pine shavings, they had to peck at the pine shavings to determine whether it was something to eat. We saw one poor chick got one of her toes grabbed by another who thought it might be something to eat!
Posted at 05:26PM Jan 07, 2008 by Dave Marquardt in Life |
Strange interaction of VNC and ssh on recent Nevada build
I recently started using Solaris Nevada (first build 75 and now build 76) rather than Solaris 10 Update 4 on my Ultra-45 at work. I usually have a VNC session to which I connect from home and occasionally from work. But since I converted to using Nevada I've occasionally had xscreensaver tell me that it can't open the display. This makes it impossible to unlock the display and I have to go either kill the VNC server or just kill xscreensaver.
This morning when this happened it finally dawned on me to check my Xauthority file. For some reason I checked the XAUTHORITY environment variable and much to my surprise it pointed to a file in /tmp that didn't exist. Example:
$ echo $XAUTHORITY
/tmp/ssh-xauth-_Raqkq/xauthfile
$ ls -l /tmp/ssh-xauth-_Raqkq/xauthfile
ls: /tmp/ssh-xauth-_Raqkq/xauthfile: No such file or directory
Huh, go figure. I realized at this point that I had connected to my work system from my home system using ssh with X forwarding. It appears that at some point the Nevada sshd was changed to use a temporary file for XAUTHORITY, and this change hasn't made it back to S10.
Now I start my VNC sessions by ssh without X forwarding or directly from my desktop X session, where XAUTHORITY is not set. I should probably do something with the env command to set up a known environment, but for now this works.
Posted at 04:42PM Nov 02, 2007 by Dave Marquardt in Solaris |
Rugby World Cup final
About ten of us watched the Rugby World Cup final on Monday night. Our friend Michael downloaded the match from the Internet when it became available 24 hours after the match, and we watched it via a project in his garage.
While Michael, a Scot, wasn't really cheering for either side, I suspect he leaned towards South Africa given he has a habit of cheering anyone who's up against England. I've caught that habit myself, and was pleased to see South Africa play tough and make things difficult for the English. South Africa prevailed.
I saw three matches and part of a fourth during this tournament. We saw the opening USA vs. England match, where I was pleased to see the USA team play okay against England. We tried to view the Scotland vs. Argentina quarterfinal, but only saw the first half due to some technical difficulties. We also watched the France vs. New Zealand quarterfinal, which was really a fantastic effort by the French, especially the second half, and the best match I saw. And finally the final.
I've only been watching rugby for a few seasons now. We've seen some Six Nations matches and now some World Cup matches. One of these days I'll go see a live match here in Austin.
Posted at 11:23AM Oct 23, 2007 by Dave Marquardt in Life | Comments[2]
Outlaw Trail 100 (well, 23)
That's me in the Sun Microsystems jersey in the foreground on the left, and Nick on the right.
On Saturday 20 October 2007 my son Nick and I set out on the 25 mile course of the 20th annual Outlaw Trail 100. Things started out well, but after a while we were out in the country and things got windy and we encountered hills. We made it to the first water stop at 10 miles without any problems. A ways after that, maybe around mile 12, Nick started saying his leg hurt and wondering if he could take the SAG wagon back. We had hit some hills and wind by this time, and I think it wasn't much fun for Nick at that point.
At around mile 16 or so we hit a point where the 25 mile route went north, west and then south. But one of the longer routes skipped that part, so we decided to do so also. While it looked to me this would cut off at least 3 miles, we ended the ride at 22.98 miles, according to my Garmin Forerunner 305. So I think the 25 mile route was actually a bit longer than that.
The longest Nick had ridden in the past was 14 miles, so this was a lot longer. It took us nearly two and a half hours, and I think part of the problem was Nick just wasn't used to sitting on a bike for that length of time. Also, I think Nick may need a larger bike, as his seat post is out pretty far already, and it really ought to be higher for better performance.
I'm proud of Nick for hanging in there for 23 miles. For a 9 year old on a mountain bike (with fairly slick tires), that's pretty darn good!
Posted at 12:32PM Oct 22, 2007 by Dave Marquardt in Bicycling |