brett's logjam

Merrystar and Trip are spending the week down in Williamsburg at her parents, where my son is discovering the joys of ceiling fans in every room. So I’m on my own for a few days.

Pop quiz:

1) I am amusing myself by:

• A) Burritos!
• B) Blasting ABBA and Pantera!
• C) Watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, The 13th Warrior, and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country!
• D) Editing my photo albums!
• E) All of the above!

2) I am supposed to be:

• A) Getting some sleep.
• B) Filing old paperwork.
• C) Cleaning the house, or at least my office.
• D) Installing a new Linux distribution.
• E) Pimping my ride.

3) I miss:

• A) Merrystar.
• B) Trip.
• C) Both Merrystar and Trip.
• D) Chicken Pie.
• E) All of the above.

4) Things I really shouldn’t be considering, but am anyway:

• A) Pimping Merrystar’s ride.
• B) Converting Trip’s baby monitor into a house-wide stereo system.
• C) Dessert.
• D) Installing another Linux distro on Tsiolkovsky.
• E) Driving 4 hours “just to check in on the baby.”

Does anyone actually need an answer key for this?

I was actually only kidding about downloading another linux distro. Looks like I’ll have to do it anyway, as Novell frees SUSE Professional under new branding:

Novell is renaming SUSE Professional and releasing it as 100% open source. Novell spokesman and director of public relations Bruce Lowry says his company is “pushing” to make SUSE Linux available to anyone who wants it. According to sources close to the company, SUSE Professional is to be rebranded as OpenSUSE.

Lowry says Novell is will make SUSE freely available, starting with the 10.0 beta, at the Linux World Conference next week. “We really are focused on pushing Linux adoption as aggressively as we can, and think opening up SUSE Linux to users and developers is a good way to do this,” he says. “We’re opening up the development process up front.” Sources say Novell hopes its flagship Linux product, SUSE Enterprise, will benefit from community development.

An insider’s view of Ciscogate.

In Hawai’i today. FOR WORK. Sheesh.

It’s very sunny here.

No one at work believes me that I’d rather not be in a sunny place. But it’s true.

You see, in my world, get a tan equals break out in hives and go into shock.

So I’m the only one on the beach in long sleeves and long pants. And in the shade. See? I REFUSE to enjoy myself on this trip! REFUSE, I TELL YOU!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m late for my spa appointment.

(It’s actually very nice here, despite the sun. Better pictures to follow once I get something to read my CF card; untill then, you’re stuck with my camera phone.)

Wireless router just stopped working tonight. No reason, no idea why. It loads a page, or two, and then … stops. Nada. Zip. No page for you! Thank you, come again.

Fortunately: I have a really, really, really long ethernet cable.

Unfortunately: I have a really, really, really long ethernet cable stretched across my house.

Wired talks about Google Talk.

Update: getting Google Talk to work with other IM clients.

Further update: updated my contact page.

Via jwz: Earth Departure movie:

The Mercury-bound MESSENGER spacecraft captured several stunning images of Earth during a gravity assist swingby of its home planet on Aug. 2, 2005. Several hundred images, taken with the wide-angle camera in MESSENGER’s Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS), were sequenced into a movie documenting the view from MESSENGER as it departed Earth.

Comprising 358 frames taken over 24 hours, the movie follows Earth through one complete rotation. The spacecraft was 40,761 miles (65,598 kilometers) above South America when the camera started rolling on Aug. 2. It was 270,847 miles (435,885 kilometers) away from Earth — farther than the Moon’s orbit — when it snapped the last image on Aug. 3.

Earth rotation (4.90 MB) or Earth rotation with date and time (5.78 MB).