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Around 16:30, Lisa (oobbles) sent out a tweet that she had found a kitten and needed to find a home for it tonight. As she already has two cats, bringing a third in could cause territorial issues. The kitten was provided food and water but had to stay outside or in a carrier.

I instantly retweeted it for all of my Lincoln-based followers to see. Shortly thereafter, she messaged me and asked if I wanted the kitty or would be willing to foster it until a permanent home was taken. As I’m currently unable to take it, I tried to think of anyone in town I know who might want him.

Then Sarah signed into Google Talk. She’s a pet person! I sent her a message asking if she liked cats and had seen my latest retweet. She hadn’t checked twitter all day, so I quickly explained the situation. She asked if I had any pictures, and just then Lisa tweeted a url to some pictures. Sarah instantly wanted them.

After okaying it with her husband, Sarah took the kitty!

About two hours after Lisa tweeted about finding the kitten, it had a new home. Social media for the win!

Since the concert, I’ve been busy. Too busy!.

I’ve had a lot of side projects going on lately, but a few things have taken up considerable amounts of my time (and taken time away from the others).

Curly (awesome site, no?) and I are working on something awesome, but it’s slow moving as we’re both swamped with other things. But it will be grand.

I’ve taken a couple of trips so far since classes ended. I went back home for about a week with intent of it being a vacation. I brought my research laptop to spend a morning working on research. I ended up spending most of the time I was there working on that and a side project instead of actually taking a vacation. My body and brain are in serious need of rest, but at least that helped.

The second trip was two weekends ago. I went up to Sioux Falls and grabbed Trigg then went to Minneapolis for Travis’ birthday. Fun times. Buying drinks for pretty girls with a cell phone? Sounds like a good idea to me, Tim!

The last thing that’s taken any meaningful amount of time other than random small projects is photography. A flickrwalk here or there, a few odd shots somewhere, and editing the pictures. I always feel so horrible after I do that because it’s not at all related to the things I need to be doing, but it (helps) keep me sane, so I keep doing it.

By far, most of my time has been spent on my research.

In the last four weeks or so, I’ve been working on one thing: getting Xen working on the laptop I have from the department.

There’s this thing called PAE that allows a 32-bit machine to map up to 64gb of RAM. Awesome! You can use more than 4gb. Just one problem: the Pentium M with a 400mhz bus doesn’t support PAE.

All Linux distributions that I’ve tried have Xen packages, but they all require PAE. I haven’t found anything specifying either way, but it appears (based on paravirt_ops stuff I found) that newer versions of Xen flat-out require PAE.

With that assumption, it hit me that I should try an old version. So armed with Xen 3.0.4_1 and Linux 2.6.16.33-xen, I have Xen booting Ubuntu 9.04 with an old kernel. Win! I’m running into a slight problem though.

Apparently, 1gb of RAM is insufficient for Xen + Linux + default Ubuntu Desktop services. Processes keep getting killed. Specifically, modprobe and python are spawning over and over and being killed by Xen. If I log in, bash eventually gets killed. I asked in ##xen on freenode, but (as with other times I’ve tried), they’re completely worthless to me. My questions always go unanswered there. That’s a whole other rant.

I had about 10 minutes to kill before I had to pack my stuff and head to my meeting, thus a post! Time to go to a meeting then come home and deal with one of those side projects (trying to help a relative turn a GEDCOM file into a book, not going well) again and go back to research until bed. Fun fun fun! Vacation please?

I followed a couple links and ended up at TweetStats. On the cloud tab for a person, there is a link to their Wordle cloud. After fiddling with the font, color, and layout, here’s my word cloud:

Clearly I need more variety in my tweetcabulary. Jesus made it into my list from all of maybe 5 tweets (a series of shows on National Geographic followed by watching the trending topics and seeing Hannah Montana slaughter Jesus in the ranks).

I left town around 14:20 yesterday to head to Omaha and meet Jaime, Micki, and Nic in the Old Market area of Omaha.

We wandered around for a couple of hours visiting a few stores in the neighborhood and grabbing some food, eventually heading to Sokol to catch up with one of Nic’s friends and Nic’s friend’s friend.

Within probably 10 minutes of getting inside, the first band started. “The Ours,” I believe, is their name. They weren’t very good. I need to go find some studio recordings on YouTube of them, as it’s quite possible that they’re horrible live or that the mixer was configured for the main act and anything they played would sound sub-optimal. Last night live, anyway, they weren’t great.

They finished their set and we all stood around for a while; eventually the house lights dimmed a bit. A few minutes later, Blue October appeared. Woot!

I wasn’t a big fan of the first 2/3 or so of their set. They did something I’d never seen done before (except on a live CD they released a year ago): played their entire new album. They even played it in order. There are a few songs on the new album that I’m not terribly crazy about and it took a bit of fun away being able to accurately predict the next song.

After they were done they moved into older stuff. “Congratulations,” “X-Amount of Words,” “Sexual Powertrip,” “HRSA,” “Into the Ocean,” “Hate Me,” and “Come in Closer.” I don’t think I’m missing any. I was really hoping they’d do “Angel.” At least they did “The End” (the last track on the new album); I recorded that entire song on my camera. (I haven’t plugged the card in to see how horrible my pictures turned out or if I can even hear the music on that song.)

Must. See. Again.

Update 1: I put stuff online! I took one video as mentioned; that is up on YouTube. A took quite a few pictures, but most didn’t turn out. The ones that (at least kind of) did are up on Flickr. Also, I missed “Italian Radio” in the list of songs above. I don’t remember what that one fit in. I think there may be another I’m forgetting? *shrug*.

Update 2: The other song they played that I couldn’t remember was “She’s My Ride Home.”

I installed Vista on a machine a while back. UAC and massive reorganizing of things aside (I can certainly live with those), I hated it. The computer I put it on is a 2ghz system with 1gb ram. It ran soooo slow. A cold boot took 5 minutes to get me to a login screen and then it took a minute or two after entering my password to get to the point where I could start doing anything. Want the start menu to be displayed? Click and wait roughly 30 seconds and you’ll have it.

Being next to unusable, the machine generally sat around. I decided a few days ago that I should put Windows 6.1 on it (“Windows 7″ in marketing speak; unless they pull a Slackware or up the version number from 6.1 to 7.0 for release, it’s going to be confusing when version 7.0 comes out).

I downloaded the 32-bit install for the beta last night as well as a fresh copy of OpenSolaris and set about installing them this morning.

Both installs took quite some time. Windows is getting to be quite hefty, and the beta is the Ultimate edition with everything, so I expected that. Solaris is…Solaris; it always takes forever to install.

Windows took some time to boot the first time (I actually haven’t booted it a second, but there’s a lot of initialization the first time so I expect subsequent boots to be much snappier), but a few seconds after I had a desktop and taskbar I could do things. I clicked the start button and instantly saw my start menu. Same exact machine. Very very pleased about that. I might actually be able to do some C# development on that machine again. I’ve been stuck with using my Server 2003 machine because Visual Studio is all but unusable on that specific machine under Vista.

The only problem I’ve found with the new install is that I have no wireless. The device isn’t supported on the default install of the beta. Neither is the wired network. I’m running a beta, so I can’t fault them for that. It could be space, stability, or a complete lack of drivers. I’m not sure which, but I’ll go visit Intel’s site soon and see if I can get the thing online.

OpenSolaris works great. I don’t know about audio (as I don’t care about it on that machine), but everything else looks to be working. It detected both the wired and wireless interfaces, I have a nice high resolution, everything looks pretty. I did have to do some voodoo to get the wireless connected, but it’s up and running.

OpenSolaris is much better than the last time I ran it. I was an early adopter running it back in 2005 when you had to install Solaris Nevada and build OpenSolaris on top of it. I liked it back then. I installed a copy of the first standalone release in a VM. The package manager had a handful of packages and I had problems installing them. The package list is much larger now, containing most of the programs I want to install. Pretty good list of packages in the base install too. (Not unlike OS X, where you have a lot of what you need but aren’t quite there yet.)

I can’t say for certain whether I’d recommend OpenSolaris for the average geek (Solaris is a far different beast than, say, FreeBSD), but it’s getting to be a nice system. The next version of Windows is looking very promising; I might finally stop telling people to get XP.

Update: I also used this post to set the OpenSolaris install up. I forgot that you have to edit /etc/nsswitch.conf to actually query DNS.

I run across (or am told of) neat projects all the time. I found two today I really like.

The first is Starcraft on the Stick [sic]. Some guy put Brood War onto a 128mb flash drive. The entire Windows install folder for v1.12b is 135mb. I wonder if both Windows and Mac versions could be put onto a 512mb or 1gb drive. Play Starcraft wherever I’m at!

The second is USA American Characters. USA (the television network) sent 11 professional photographers out to various parts of the country last summer to “capture the character of America.” Film crews followed them around as they shot in the various locations. Check out the galleries; they got some great shots.

It really, really is.

I participated in the Overnight Website Challenge this weekend. I left Lincoln around noon on Thursday (missing classes to avoid a dangerous drive; turns out the bad weather had come and gone by the time I got anywhere near it) and headed up to Sioux Falls to see Jaime (and Gretchen, as it turned out!). A few hours later I left for Brookings to get a haircut. I left the next afternoon and got to Bloomington around 7:15 and to some friends about 10 or 15 minutes later.

After eating supper, Curly and I headed back to his place to meet Fernholz. Some email checking and talking later and we were off to bed while watching Iron Man. A few too many hours of sleep, a shower, and a drive later, we were at the contest.

My team, the Code Cowboys, were paired with Access Press (at the time of writing, the old site is still active). The organization creates a monthly publication centered around the Minneapolis (and surrounding) disabled community. The existing site is hard-coded HTML and a new page is created for each individual article.

We looked at the list of requirements and requests from the organization and all instantly agreed that the site was begging to be done in WordPress (or any equivalent system; we had plenty of experience in different aspects of WP so we went with it). 24 hours later, Access Press had a new web site. One member of our team said he was going to go take a nap; I don’t know if he did or whether or not anyone else did, but I think most (maybe all) of us lasted the whole 24 hours.

My specific tasks, in addition to helping out with small things here and there like we all did, were importing old articles and exporting any arbitrary article to PDF. I spent many hours working on importing, and stole Fernholz for many of those to help me (I work best when I am bouncing everything back and forth off of somebody else in real-time). In the end, the existing articles (the only way we could read them all was to use the HTML files directly from the site) were all inconsistent, even down at the month level, so an automated import is near impossible and we had to give up on that effort. With an hour to go, I finally got the PDF export (using FPDF) working. Once Derek added support to our theme, I fixed a small issue and walked away from my computer to avoid typing for the rest of the contest. Of course, at that point, “the rest of the contest” was something like 8 minutes, but still…

The event was stocked with an endless supply of coffee, a fountain pop machine, and endless Red Bull and Red Bull Cola. (The latter is basically sour flavored Coke.) I figure I had somewhere on the order of 12 Red Bull/Red Bull Colas, quite a bit of Barq’s root beer (which is caffeinated), and four chocolate covered coffee beans. I wish I would have kept track of it better; I’m curious exactly how much caffeine I pumped into my body. Caffeine has a negligible effect on me…until I’m just shy of zonking out. By starting with a Red Bull about 15 minutes into the competition and going strong on the caffeine until about 6:30am the next day, I only had a few weak moments where I was ready to sleep.

In the end, didn’t win the contest. I’m pretty sure we were basically guaranteed to lose. Given our non-profit, we had to worry about Section 508 and WAI. While other groups were free to do all sorts of fancy stuff like jQuery and Flash, we were heavily restricted to make the site usable by disabled people. But that’s okay. We created a site that meets (and hopefully exceeds) their needs and they seem incredibly happy with it. That’s what matters.

We didn’t walk away empty handed though. In addition to free breakfast, dinner, supper, midnight snack, and somewhat of a second breakfast, we all got a swag bag! Inside were a t-shirt, a blanket (with velcro and a handle for easy transport; looks like that anyway, haven’t touched it), a neck pillow (which worked GREAT with the chairs that were nowhere near tall enough for us to use them without going elsewhere), a travel alarm clock, a box of Nerds (logically), a nice water bottle, and a travel toothbrush (with toothpaste of course); it was all packaged in a standard cloth tote bag too. Yay environment! They also raffled off some prizes. Curly won a book and I managed to get a copy of Lightroom 2.

24 fun hours, a bag full of goodies, and $300 software. Woot.

Derek left very shortly after the event ended. Curly and I hung out for a few more minutes and finally headed back to his place. An hour or so later I finally got around to showering (way past needed). A few hours later I packed everything into my car and left.

Having spent 7pm Friday until 5pm Sunday with Curly (and much of that with Derek), I decided I’d take Lisa up on her offer to spend the night with her and some guy. I hadn’t seen her since June (I believe), and hadn’t seen him since July. Much too long.

I got to their place just after 7:30pm. After some awesome dessert and smoothies, we moved to the living room to watch a movie around 10:00 or so. I didn’t last long.

Got up this morning and charged my phone and iPod (having forgot to do that last night), ate some food, said bye to Lisa, showered, talked to Lukenbill a bit more, and once again packed my car and started driving. This time it was a 7 hour drive from Rochester, MN to Lincoln, NE. I stopped once in, uh, some place. I don’t remember what it was. I’ve been there though—I think I was there with Jaime at one point? Maybe when we went out there in June?

I got to spend many, many hours with friends old and new, help make something for a group of very deserving people, got some awesome goodies, won some expensive software that I’d been wanting to play with, and got to spend a few hours with other friends I had been hoping I could swing down and see. Amazing.

Sleep is for the weak. Goodnight.

I discussed my computer interests last, so what about other interests? Read More…