Everyday Stupidities

I'm not quite up to writing a new post with anything interesting to say, but I did kind of promise something "next week" so I'm fulfilling the contractual obligation tonight. Here's the big change, click the pic for a bit larger; compare to last time's picture of the side yard, circa yesterday afternoon. This isn't how the day ended; this was shot after getting the land tilled and weedblocker laid, boxes installed in the area, and four wheelbarrow loads of gravel laid down for drainage -- but right before six wheelbarrow loads of composty matter went into the boxes. My arms are pretty sore right now (shoveling in, shoveling out...) and it's bound to get worse since I will be dumping probably another six or more loads of composty matter in the boxes, plus eventually a bunch on the weedblocker so it can host foliage one can walk on (only plants obtained thusfar for that purpose being Corsican mint). The fencepost goes in where that hole front & center is later today, and I've got 90 pounds of concrete to make it stay there. Tomorrow I'll mount the fence and gate up on that post, soon as the concrete is set, so the world won't have to watch any longer.

Hmm, could always add -- mercifully briefly -- that I added the Linux operating system to a partition on my notebook. That has been an adventure, and not just because I know no Linux command language. In terms anyone can grasp: There's a lot of hype in the support and geekery worlds for a distribution of Linux called Ubuntu because it can be run directly from disk -- helpful if Windows on your computer got broken so you can't boot up from the hard drive, so you can get in there and fix things. I started with that, and discovered an odd quirk: If I boot from the CD, I can get online; if I install Ubuntu (more accurately Xubuntu, a smaller version meant for low-memory computers like my notebook) everything works except networking, it refuses to use the connection... and also inexplicably has the same effect on Windows, which it shouldn't begin to meddle with. That's not right. So I guess I can use this disk for what people are always hyping it for, but that's it. Okay, still wanting to get a taste of Linux, I did some research and found that my best friend Chrome's preferred version, Slackware, has a tangental development called Slax which is very compact, runs faster!, boots off a CD, was constructed so you can just add programs by dropping a compressed file into a folder (think in Windows terms: "run a program from a Zip archive without having to unpack and install it"), and if one can install Slax to their hard drive (the latest version doesn't make it easy or obvious how, like the previous one which had an installer right there on the programs list) it does work just fine for getting online and so forth. So I've got that, I've played with it for a little while, and I'm happy... now to actually learn something practical from this.

3 a.m. and I need to go to bed, I know I'm gonna be sore and stiff when I wake up, but you got an update of sorts anyhow. Here, have a rose from my garden, I gots plenty of them.