purg.atory – a personal blog by elyograg

My wife has been telling me about the nasty nasty weather at home. I haven’t seen any of it at work, 25 miles away. Click on the thumbnail below to see the nasty weather I get to face: I work in Research Park, near the University of Utah, which on the picture is somewhere northwest…

I was reading the Jordan School District’s newsletter, which they call Windows. There is a copy of this month’s edition online. The PDF looks exactly like the paper copy I have in front of me. On the very lower left corner of page 3 is a paragraph that made me laugh. There is a school…

I think I really ought to dust off my carboys and other paraphernalia and see if I can brew up something greater than 3.2 percent. Haven’t touched it in years.  Good thing I have a nice powerful outdoor stove – I don’t think Kathy would want the wort cooked up in the house. According to…

There was another Groklaw article today that I felt was worth sharing. It’s a very long article, sprinkled with links to other content. Read the article, and then take another look at the right to read article I referenced a few posts ago. That’s pretty scary stuff, in my opinion.

Most of the articles on Groklaw make little sense if you haven’t been keeping up with the site on a daily basis. Today there was an article with particular clarity. That article references a position paper from the OSI, or Open Source Initiative. The President of this group is Eric S. Raymond, who wrote most…

An interesting question was posed in my daily chatroom. It has caused much debate. At first I thought it wouldn’t work, but as I heard some arguments the other way, I changed my mind, and the more I think about the more sure I am that it will indeed work. A plane is standing on…

I don’t know if any of you have noticed, but I love and use a lot of open source software. My interest is only partly because of the cost of such software – “free as in beer” is not as important as “free as in freedom.” I do use Windows as my primary desktop OS,…

I need the power! Last week I ordered some wireless access points, which were a really good deal for the feature set. I did not notice that they came sans power supply until the next day, when I promptly ordered those as well. The access points arrived at my house this afternoon, but the power…

A while ago I asked everyone what they thought about X10 and other home automation technologies.

My wife Kathy wrote a LiveJournal post about our experience at The Mayan restaurant last night. You really should go read her post before continuing with mine. I had started to write my own post about it, but hadn’t gotten very far before sleep claimed me. Rather than come up with my own original work,…

My office has been using Exchange 2000 running on Windows 2000 Server. It was installed sometime in 2002, long before I got there. Since then, Microsoft has come out with 2003 versions of both of these products. Upper management gave us the go-ahead a few weeks ago to pay the Microsoft tax to get it…

Today I learned about the death of a recently acquired friend. Thanks go out to Julie for tracking down information about what happened. I met Ritsuo in the daily AIM chat room that I join every day. He was invited to join by Julie sometime in January. Julie’s LiveJournal contains the entry linked above. He…

from the “get the Internet to do the groundwork” department: I am interested in some X10 hardware, or in some hardware that accomplishes similar tasks. I would like to be able to put replacement light switches, power outlets, and such in my house and control them with my Linux server. I’ve done a little bit…

I’m flying to Oklahoma today. I’ll be attending a meeting this afternoon in Oklahoma City with an existing customer. After the meeting, we’ll drive to Tulsa for a meeting tomorrow with a potential customer. The second meeting is the reason I’m there – to get a look at their network traffic so we can give…

I really need to install a weblog parser. Something that will let me know what kind of bandwidth my webserver is using, and where the traffic is coming from. There are a lot of choices … analog, awstats, and so on.  I’m using apache 1.3 on Debian Linux. Does anyone have any experience with these…

As soon as Kathy uttered those words, I lost it. She was a little bit annoyed at me for laughing so hard and so long, but it tickled my giggler. Tonight she set up her sewing machine and serger so she can work on a new project. After that came the process of opening them…

Since so many people have added me to their LJ friends list, I need to remind everyone to open the blog URL before adding a comment. If the comment is posted on LJ, I will probably never see it. In case you’re wondering, I’m hoping to see a comment or two on my next post.

I just can’t seem to get it out of my system. Here’s another moon pic: I did get some other pictures today … but again they are of things I already have in my gallery.