I’ve been down for the last few days with a sinus cold and pressure. Afrin Nasal Spray and Aleve Cold and Sinus is fantastic, and my voice returned this morning. If I am able to get out from under all the snow I’ll be back at work tomorrow.

Late this weekend I got a bug in my butt to re-discover Linux. I had run Fedora Core 5 on my MythTV, but I had heard a lot about the Ubuntu distributions that are out and about right now.

My upstairs Dell that I purchased in 2001, has been sitting mostly dormant since I got my laptop. I decided it was a good candidate to test-drive these distributions so I began the arduous process of downloading the Ubuntu installation.

I got it installed successfully but quickly learned that it didn’t do a great job of detecting wireless networking cards, specifically the Broadcom based Linksys wireless card I had in the Dell. It took me a few hours, but I got the networking going. All I had left to do was to set up the samba shares so I could get to my printer from the network, but I was getting fed up.

I followed the guides for configuring things, those files were right where they were supposed to be. However, the last step was restarting the process and the command wouldn’t work. I tried everything to find out where it was but I just couldn’t work it out.

So I decided that I would go back to familiar country… Fedora Core. I downloaded the DVD iso, but ruined two DVDs trying to get one that would boot fully. It didn’t work out. So I tried the new Fedora Core LiveCD route. That worked, I could get booted into the LiveCD but had no option to actually install the distro. And it didn’t like my network card either.

So now I’m going to download the classic, full distribution. I know what to do about the network card, so that part doesn’t bother me. What does bother me in the slow download speeds and the waiting around to get my upstairs computer back in action.

Not bad for a snowy evening home! 🙂

Teddy thought it would be a good idea to ingest an entire bottle of Tums, including the bottle. Strangely, he has exhibited no ill effects from this amount of Tums… it probably would’ve made me blow up by now.

What will he chew up next?

We started out the workout on Saturday with three sets of the seven black belt katas required for the Sandan test. After the last set, asked everyone to do the kata that they were working on for the test, of course mine was Sochin. It was very amazing how easily it came back to me… everything felt put together and strong. After that, it was three to five time attack and some slow sparring, followed by the obligatory stretching and strengthening.

I did 100 abdominal exercises and 50 arm exercises, and by the time that was all said and done I was very, very tired.

Sparring felt good during the workout, this whole stalking thing is working out quite well for everyone and is making for some really interesting matches. 🙂 For further details, see ‘s photo set of the proceedings.

I hope our exploits get documented in similar fashion more often.

This is called wing-suit jumping, a subset of BASE jumping. As you can see at the beginning, these people wear suits that resemble Wile E. Coyote and then jump off of mountains and glide great distances. It looks awesome, however extremely dangerous.

I have to question how you find out you can do this and not die.

1. YOUR REAL NAME: Joshua

2. YOUR GANGSTA NAME: (first 3 letters of real name plus izzle.) Josizzle

3. YOUR DETECTIVE NAME: (fav color and fav animal) Red Chihuahua

4. YOUR SOAP OPERA NAME: (middle name, and current street) Robert Fifth

5. YOUR STAR WARS NAME: (the first 3 letters of your last name, first 2 letters of your first name, last 3 letters of mom’s maiden name) Daljodut

6. YOUR SUPERHERO NAME: (2nd favorite color, favorite drink). Blue… Soda? Diet Coke? Bawls?

7. YOUR IRAQI NAME: (2nd letter of your first name, 3rd letter of your last name, any letter of your middle name, 2nd letter of your moms maiden name, 3rd letter of you dads middle name, 1st letter of a siblings first name, last letter of your moms middle name) Olbular

8. YOUR WITNESS PROTECTION NAME: (best friend’s middle name) Damon

9. YOUR GOTH NAME: (black, and the name of one of your pets) Black Joe

10. YOUR PORN STAR NAME: (your first pet’s name and the first street you lived on) Brut Oakhill

I have decided to set some February goals.

I intend to:
* Go to bed before 12:30 am every night.
* Bring my lunches to work as often as possible (the only exception is going away lunches, or other work-related outings).
* Get back on the debt-repayment wagon.

These things are in addition to my normal karate goals and other New Years resolutions. I haven’t slipped very much on #3 there, but I want to keep it at the forefront of my vision as we get going this year.

The others… are just common sense. I’ve been feeling terrible lately because I haven’t gotten as much sleep as I need to, and going out to eat so often is just a waste of money. I will probably add this back after the month is over somewhat, but I need to get out of the habit for awhile just to see how it impacts things.

Keep me honest people!

After our showers today, Tasha noticed that yet again the bathtub drain wasn’t working. It got to the point where I’d be standing at least ankle deep in water, so I decided to try to fix it.

First, I tried Drano. It made things drain a little better, but it was still so far from satisfactory that I feared having to make an expensive call to the plumbers. I decided to investigate further (after flushing the drain with hot water as instructed).

I unscrewed the little drain cover and after I pryed it out of there I immediately saw the problem. Just under the cover there was a giant hairball around the size of my fist (ew!). It took me a few minutes to liberate it completely from the crossbars that the drain cover screwed into, but by this point I was sure that this would solve it.

I was right!! The drain now happily gobbles up any amount of water that I throw at it! I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised with the amount that both Tasha and I lose hair, and the fact that we used to give Teddy his baths in that same shower. I have to say that I feel like I’ve gained a few ranks in handyman today!

Last week, had stopped by my desk for some reason and during the discussion it was pointed out that my iPod was scratched up again. Someone (possibly ) suggested that I use the Brasso Method again to see how it does.

Well, I just spent almost an hour working on my iPod and it looks good. Not perfect, but much better. The back is where I notice the most benefit but there are still a few lingering scratches on the front (severely reduced, but still there).

I am pleased with the results. I have heard that T-Cut (a scratch remover made for car paint jobs) also has much more dramatic results on deeper scratches, but I’m not sure I want to put any more money into the aesthetics of a 2.5 year old device.

If anyone wants to try this on their iPods, let me know and I can loan you the can of Brasso that I have left… it doesn’t take much to get good results, I could probably do this amount of effort another 8-10 times with the Brasso that I have remaining.

Aside from the workout, Saturday was a very lazy day. After getting home, I elected to take a several hour nap while Tasha did some running around town that she had to do. After that, we went out to dinner at Ruby Tuesday (triple prime burger == nirvana) and then went to Best Buy for a bit.

After having to resist several impulses to buy a pair of new iPods, we decided to make our way back to Pekin to see Epic Movie with , , and Eric. It was pretty funny… probably should’ve waited for the Five Buck Club but it was worth it to get to hang out with my friends for awhile.

Since then I’ve played a little more with AJAX and JavaScript… I now have a dynamic slider that draws a circle centered at a specific point (thanks to some debugging help from one ). I really enjoy tinkering with this stuff… its actually fun programming for a change.

I’m trying desperately to break out of a blogging lull… I don’t seem to have too many interesting topics right now except for back pain and stupid blog memes.