Low Bit

I had posted about a lost drunk guy that was lurking outside our home. Well, after eating my lunch one day I thought I would take a walk around the back yard and get some fresh air. I didn't expect to find a United States Passport lying on the ground beside the house. We looked up the phone number for the address listed and I spoke with his Mom. Her son, the owner of said passport, had recently lost his wallet as well. She gave me his phone number and I gave him a call. I asked him if he knew how his passport had gotten in my back yard. He replied that he had absolutely no idea, but he lives on my block and walked by to pick it up. Yes my friends, I believe this may in fact *be* "Woooo guy." So I guess you can get so drunk that you can't find your way home, at least on the first try.

I have long been a fan of Volkswagen. My Jetta was the first car I bought some seven years ago. Well I have found my next car, though my wife has already said no.

Can you say GTI W12 650!

Inspired by Rama, we have some tomatoes in the ground. Well tomatoes, a red bell pepper plant and two basil plants. This is the first home my wife and I have had with a yard. Not a big yard mind you, since we live in the city, but we do have a handy flower bed that can double for a garden.

Yes the need for weeding never ends. In addition, that line of ground cover and bulbs you see in the back used to extend all the way up to the rock barrier. As one who used to hate yard work when my Dad made me do it, I have found a great deal of enjoyment working outside on the weekends.

As spotted flying over Nashville.

I took it with my Treo so yeah, the picture is horrible. What you can't see is an ad that states "Face it coal is filthy." This is part of a recent campaign to get the word out around colleges about global warming. By the way, that site has problems rendering for me in Firefox. OK, so your plan to make me think about how coal damages our environment is to have an airplane needlessly circle a city for who knows how long? That isn't what I call leading by example. Well I guess you have to burn fossil fuels to save fossil fuels from burning. Wait what?

Perhaps mobilize your community to get the word out on foot? Maybe even do some printing on recycled paper?

I just came across Adobe's kuler (Flash required) and I love it. What a great idea to share and rate color themes. Having not really had much in the way of color theory training, I will certainly get a lot of use out this site.

911 Operator: 911, please state the nature of the emergency.
Us: Yes, um there is a drunk college guy outside looking in our window.

Well we didn't know it was a random dunk college student at the time and really it is slight speculation after the fact. Here is what happened.

Last night my wife and I were just getting ready to go to sleep when we heard some noise outside. From our second floor bedroom window, I could see someone hunched over in the neighbor's driveway and we both heard glass breaking. I decided to head downstairs to get a better view of what was going on. As I was coming down the stairs, I heard more noise along the side of the house. As I approached back of the house, I saw both the motion sensing floodlights trip and light up the backyard as this guy walked from right to left. I peeked out and found him right up by my office window on the far side of the house. I quickly went into the office and kept the light off. Throwing back the blinds I yelled at him to get out of there and rapped on the glass. It was here that I thought this guy wasn't at all "with it." As I yelled at him he hardly registered that he had noticed, just sort of stood there with a listless look about him. He began to walk away and by the time I moved to a better window to look out, I had lost sight of him.

By this point my wife was on the phone with 911 giving the report. A short time later, I see a police car scouting around the neighborhood within about a two block radius. When the officer arrived, I went out and told him what I had seen. We first walked over the the neighbor's driveway where I had first spotted him. There we found the broken bottom of a beer bottle and a receipt. Said receipt amounted to $10.65 for a bag of snack mix, a sixer of Southpaw Light beer and a pack of Marlboro Lights. I guess he was looking to get healthy, what with all the light products. As the officer and I walked back to where he jumped the fence into our backyard, we found the discarded sixer. It appeared the bag ripped going over the chain link fence. Spoils lost. My wife recalls hearing the fence commotion, the crash and an audible "uggghhh" from said consumer. We then walked to the other side of the house where I had encountered him through the office window looking a bit lost.

Here is what we think happened. Our house used to be a duplex, as such the outside stairs that used to lead to the upstairs apartment are right off my office window. Our neighborhood hosts a lot of students who attend the local University. That being said, there are occasional parties on the block at various existing rental properties. Now, a few houses down lives "Woooo guy" in the upstairs apartment of a similarly configured house. We call him "Woooo guy" because he likes to yell out his namesake at the occasional odd hour of the night. All we can figure is this poor drunk sap was a friend of "Woooo guy," went on a beer run and ended up at the wrong house. It could be he figured out it wasn't "Woooo guy's" stairs when he got around to them. That and the fact that I was yelling at him.

I do hope the guy had enough wits to get out of the 20 degree Fahrenheit weather and into some house where he belonged. Sorry about the beer but it wasn't good enough to keep. I tossed it out with the garbage.

I have been wanting to switch over to compact fluorescent light bulbs at home but a few things stand in my way. First off, we have six different styles of light bulb currently. Finding suitable replacements for all of these might take some time. Just swapping out the run of the mill standard 60W bulb seems like a good start. My main problem here is the color temperature. The few I have tried have not been warm enough. I have never liked the slickly color that fluorescents have exhibited.

This past weekend I picked up a Phillips Marathon Soft White Plus bulb. It almost gets it right. First off the shape (A-shaped) is like a traditional incandescent, this is good in my opinion. It is a 16W bulb that is said to be the equivalent of a 60W incandescent. It doesn't quite match up and is noticeably dimmer than the bulb it replaced. They apparently make a 20W (75W equivalent) which I will try next time. Now the color temperatures is better than any other compact fluorescent I have tried but it is still too cool, still too noticeably different to me.

What I need is a 20W (75W equivalent) warm white compact fluorescent light bulb. So far I have not seen any warm white options locally. Does anyone out there have a recommendation and perhaps a reputable online source?

I have been working some more on migrating what I was doing on Windows to Solaris 10. To my wife's delight, I got SlimServer 6.3.1 going. Astute readers will note that this is not the most recent version. I ran into various troubles with their "build-perl-modules.pl" script which attempts to download and install the required CPAN Perl modules. Apparently, version 6.5 starts to use MySQL and that was a source of pain. For the time being, I have version 6.3.1 going after ditching their script and downloading/building the required Perl modules manually. The fact that my wife now has J-pop again hitting the stereo via the Squeezebox is a good thing. Now to get it setup with SMF which should be no trouble.

Having returned to Tennessee after a stint in California it is amazing to observe all of the changes. New development is springing up everywhere and certain Sushi restaurants that used to be favorites have gone down the tubes. I was rather interested to hear about a new project in downtown Nashville. Signature Tower will drastically alter Nashville's skyline. In this rendering you can see it is a rather tall building. Metroblogging Nashville has a pretty good write up describing the official web site and the pretentious flash intro. Beware the cuff links and classical music.

Like rama I happen to be the fortunate recipient of a shiny new Ultra 40. I am up and running with it and so far it is great. Since I work from home, I have big plans for this system. My goal is to use it and Solaris 10 as my one and only computer. I don't want to be running three different systems in the home office, it needs to be my main box as well as the home server. I used to be a pretty big Mac user but then switched to Windows around Mac OS X 10.2. My Powerbook was getting long in the tooth and I wanted to build a new system. So from that point on, my primary home desktop has been Windows XP. It still is, but I am looking to change this.

As for Solaris, I was instantly shocked by the ease of which I was able to configure a large mirrored storage pool using ZFS. I had watched a tutorial and it all looked so simple but I wasn't convinced. Going through the same motions brought it all into focus. It really is that dead simple and cool. As for applications, I have been using Solaris as a work desktop for the last 6 years or so. There really isn't anything I need to do that I can't do on Solaris. My main sticking points are Quicken and various photography applications.

Quicken is probably the easiest one to tackle as the thing has gotten so full of features I never use, that I won't miss them in the available alternatives. Right now I am leaning towards Moneydance. It is a Java application and that makes it simple to get going. The latest GnuCash would likely need to be compiled, though I have seen older versions compiled for Solaris. I see Blastwave has it but I would like to avoid all the extra CSW dependencies. The one Quicken feature I will miss is automatically connecting to my bank and downloading transactions. From what I read I will have to add a manual step here and import the data files I get from my bank's website. I can live with that.

As for photography, yes I know about and quite like the GIMP. Version 2.0.2 is present and accounted for in Solaris 10. My main problem is I like to shoot photos in RAW as opposed to JPEG. I haven't done a ton of research here but I see at least one possibility for GIMP. There is also another Java application that looks promising called Lightzone so I will see about getting that one going on Solaris. It isn't supported but there are some posts in their forums about running it on Linux... I also need to tackle photo organization and tagging, so if anyone has any suggestions, I am all ears.