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# Untitled
## Mon 13 Feb 2023 09:19:10 AM EST

Had kind of a late start to this morning, unfortunately. I did get up at 5am when the alarms went off, then I proceeded to the kitchen to make the Mrs. some coffee and her lunch for work, then I laid back down in bed beside her and gave her a nudge at each following quarter hour alarm until she rose at 5:45; then, I apparently fell back asleep. So much for that idea of thinking about the dog in the morning to keep me up and moving. Maybe I’ll have better luck tomorrow morning.

Speaking of the dog, she’s still giving troubles when it comes to the ideas of being housebroken. After I finally woke–for real, this time–and had breakfast with the kids, I went to get the dog from her crate to take her outside. After letting the dog loose and putting her harness on I went to grab my jacket–and, of course, the dog urinated in the family room. So, first mopping of the family room is now out of the way. I only had to mop it four times yesterday.

In other news, I fired up weechat for the first in–I dunno, a week?–and it appears that things are working just as I’d hoped. I got dinged with a ton of bell notifications thanks to the buffer playback. I lightly scrolled through to see how it looked; I approve, though I wonder how much larger I can raise the buffer limit. Not that I’d want it to playback a week’s worth of messages should I be away that long–referring mainly to my twitter feed–but that would be kind of cool.

The dog is nibbling on my shoes.

I fired Rivendell back up yesterday evening after having my music machine sit dormant for a few days. Unfortunetely, I discovered that while the machine had been running my Riv daemons had not (I’d thought I’d left the backend stuff running and just not started up rdairplay, etc.). So, after restarting the chain of services I took the time to create a log for yesterday and today; I’m generating logs for tomorrow through Thursday as we speak–the cron job I’ve set for generating day 4 fired without a hitch and has Friday already waiting.

Well, there you have it–one of my random tinkering things that I want to talk about eventually–Rivendell. There’s just so much that can be said about the collection of software that is Rivendell–and so much that I honestly do not know or truly understand. I would love to write something about it from a layman’s sort of perspective, I guess, and introduce it to other people that would be interested. Rivendell is a radio automation system just like the big boys use–actually, the big boys do use it–it is professional software; but it is FOSS! The company that provides it does charge for professional support and installation–and offers (or at least had–I’m not sure of now, as I’ve not looked at that stuff in years) fully installed machines for installtion in broadcast environments. As for me, I just tinker with it, and run my own little personal “streaming radio station” at home. Presently, I’m running one of the 4.x betas on kubuntu 22.04. I think I saw that Fred–chief developer of Rivendell–said that they’re going to stop with further development of ‘buntu friendly versions, so I might have to change distros in the future–we’ll see.

Riv had been running with primary development for CentOS up until it became too dificult to rely upon it after it’s death. I think Riv is now primarily coded for Suse–but they explored Ubuntu due to the high install base. I think Fred said they’re going to explore Mint now (Mint is a ‘buntu variant, right?), which would figure, as I had been running a painful 3.x build on Mint prior to my realization that there was a 4.x beta centered on Kubuntu. I say a painful 3.x build in reference to my experience in getting whichever 3.x version it was to compile on Mint, thanks to having to track down dependencies that were compatible, as the code was centered around a different distro. I did eventually get it to compile, and I did get it to work after a ton of fuss–mainly with JACK, as I recall.

I dunno. Anyway, I’m halfway keeping an eye on what’s coming up down the road for Rivendell and will likely change my setup when they begin playing with pipewire, unless some other new killer feature or change comes along first.

Well, now that I’ve gotten completely sidetracked and attempted to geek out on something that I like playing with, yet know nothing about, I think I’ll abruptly end this post here.

Thanks for reading;

–J

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# Untitled
## Sun 12 Feb 2023 01:26:56 PM EST

A drawback to when I had placed my computer in a very accessible location was that I was constantly able to go back and write anything at any time, which would lead to multiple short posts about nothing, such as this one.

Meanwhile, the kids are playing Ms Pac-Man on the 7800 and I’m about to go sort and fold laundry. It’s a beautiful day outside, and I’ve got blinds, drapes and shutters opened to allow as much sun in as possible. It’s kind of looking like for a few days next week I might be able to open a few windows and let some fresh air into the house. I can hardly wait.

Oh well, back to work, I guess.

Thanks for reading;

–J

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Untitled

# Untitled
## Sun 12 Feb 2023 11:32:02 AM EST

One thing that I used to do that kinda helped me write more in the old days was keep my computer accessible–which really wasn’t hard, considering the bulk of that period had me living in a townhouse-style apartment with the living and dining rooms open to one-another. I took advantage of this layout and had a desk splitting the living and dining room–and on that desk my computer sat. So, for the most part, I would be passing that computer throughout the day as I cleaned–so a quick stop by the keyboard to punch out whatever randome thought I’d had while cleaning house was very, very easy.

It was very therapeutic, though I’m not entirely sure if it did much to help anyone else in my life–especially as I would frequently write without a filter on my thoughts or audience. I did eventually start filtering things…

…and then I started to filter out everything.

…and then I simply stopped altogether.

Thanks for reading;

–J

=> ../ Go back to the main site

Untitled

# Untitled
## Sun 12 Feb 2023 10:24:35 AM EST

I’m not getting to write as frequently as I would like to. Honestly, I would like to try and write something at least once a day. I’m halfway hoping that with the introduction of the pup into the family [see footnote] that I can alter what has become the everyday timeline and establish a new routine and new habits that can include me sitting down for a little bit and writing things.

With the pup in the house I’ve got to get myself up and take care of it–and beginning that much earlier than when the kids wake makes things a lot easier. So, if I were to begin waking at around 5am, I should be able to take the pup out in the morning before the kids wake–so that they don’t end up begging to go outside with me–and then have a couple of hours in which to fully wake and get my morning rolling with a few cups of coffee and the news followed by my commentary on the news or life in general.

I mean, that’s essentially how I did things long ago–minus the taking care of a dog part.

I think I can do this.

blah.

Thanks for reading;

–J

[footnote]
=> 2023-02-12-we-got-a-dog.gmi We got a dog…

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We got a dog…

# We got a dog…
## Sun 12 Feb 2023 08:57:17 AM EST

So, we got a dog. And it’s in the house. And I hate dogs in houses.

It’s been a few days since we brought the dog home. I can’t remember what day it was.

I can’t think of much to say that won’t make me sound like a total ass.

[*sigh*]

So, the other week the Mrs. sends me a message saying that she’s going to visit with an associate of hers to she the pups that the associate has been raising. I think nothing of it because, yeah, ok, associate has pups and is proud of them and has a want and or need to show them off in order to re-home them, yada-yada-yada; we ain’t getting one, she’s just checking them out. I would say I should’ve known better, but, no, I really shouldn’t have–the Mrs. doesn’t typically do anything on a whim, nor does she usually do any of the stereotypical girly things of falling for baby animals, and so on. Well…

So, later that evening when she’s retelling her day, the pups do come up, of course. I’m asked in a kind of cutesy and excited voice if I want to see pictures. Quickly, I say no–because I really don’t care what a mess of pups that I have no connection with looks like. Yeah, well…

After two nights of having to deal with a depressed wife and us rehashing our plans to get a dog later this year, I cave and say we can go ahead and get a pup.

…and now the dog is sitting at my feet, under the kitchen table.

…and I hate having dogs in houses.

[*sigh*]

The plan was–or the *original* plan was–to perform maintenace on the fence dividing ours and our direct neighbor’s property and then construct a fence in the back yard in which to 1.) contain / restrict our kids when we’re outside 2.) keep the pack of mutts our varied neighbors have out of our yard; after the fencework was completed, we’d look for a pup to become the family mutt. The timeline for this was to be hopefully no later than late summer, so that the pup would be able to grow and be prepped for an outdoor life come winter.

Well, that didn’t happen, obviously, as we haven’t even gotten to spring yet. So, we’ve got a pup inside the house, as she’s too young to fend off the other dogs and it’s too cold outside for her.

[*grrr*]

So, we’re hoping to speed up plans on fencework once funds come available. I need to keep those murderous sons-of-bitches out of the yard. Yes, murderous. They killed our cats.

It’s kind of to be expected that a family of cats might need to take some time to adjust when moving–hey, this window is mine, that corner is mine–whatever. Okay, let me back up a second and define the plural family as two in our case. Anyway, the cats had a nice time trying to adjust to our new home and had left many markings and protesting gestures all over the house. I finally saw an end to cleaning up messes about a month or two later, and then; spring came and for whatever reason they started leaving messes for me to clean, again. One day, shortly after cleaning up a fresh mess, I get presented a new one in the exact same spot. That’s it–cats outside for the day. One came back that evening; the other scared us and came back a week later. Regardless, both did come back, and did so unharmed. The one actually began to ask to go out, which wasn’t surprising, as he’d always had an interest in the outdoors and would slip out whenever he’d gotten a chance.

Awesome; these cats are seemingly cool with being indoor/outdoor cats–something I’d loved about the cats I’d had as a child.

Well, unfortanetely, that didn’t turn out. Several weeks later, the one that started asking to be let out regularly disappeared. A week or so later I’d found a part of an animal in the yard, but didn’t connect it to my missing cat as it didn’t resemble my cat.

A month later, I’d let the other cat out–he, too, disappeared. I found him–or most of him–a couple days later in the barn surrounded by dog prints. And no, I don’t feel as though I’m not jumping to conclusions, as I’ve chased the neighbors’ dogs out of my yard and out of my barn ever since we moved in.

Anyway. I need to keep those mongrels out my yard before putting any animals out there.

[In the somewhat near future we also plan to raise a few chicks for egg production; and an interesting little thing happens whence we raise chicks–we’re given permission, per state law, to fire upon dogs that are suspected or guilty of agitating or harming livestock. I’m planning on putting a camera on our coop after we build it, and getting some sort of non-lethal weapon.]

[*sigh*]

So, yeah, we have a dog.

…and it’s in the house.

…and I hate dogs in houses.

…and I can hardly wait to be able to move it outside.

Thanks for reading;

–J

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