Erkkila.Org

Couple updates..

We’ve had to escalate the fox battle a bit, there are 6 leg hold traps out on the property. Try not to get caught!

We picked up a matching pair of t500s to replace our aged out r40s. This has been the easiest linux compatibility install in a while. Kubuntu for epe, and Gentoo for me.

We’ve been seeing a great deal of wildlife in the field areas we cleared two years ago. It’s been nice to see the field grasses/clover fill in, and even nicer to see the animals seems to like it. Some (Godzilla cam) videos up on TY.

We just had a tank-less water heater installed as well. We’ll let folks know how that works out.

Rather than post more tattoo pics here again, you can find them either in our gallery, my facebook or myspace pages, or CheckoutMyInk. Since the last post I’ve had done a Jack Skellington arm and a small ladybug on my foot.

On Friday I sat for the first of two sessions on another tattoo, this time with Jana at The Iron Quill in Palmyra:
This part wasn’t too terrible…
This part hurt way less than I thought it would…
She said this would be the worst but it was a breeze (possibly because slightly higher up than achilles)
OW OW MAKE IT STOP…made a lot of faces and tried really hard not to whimper like a girl.

I go back for color in about a month. In the meantime I have another thing scheduled with TeeJay at White Tiger. Fortunately NOT on a foot this time.

We lost black and tan last week =/. She died right near the feeder though, so for her that’s probably the way to go ;p.

Providence one of the RI reds looked a bit sick the next day and that got us a bit worried, we separated her out and she’s perked up quite a bit. She didn’t eat or drink the first day but we went with the secret weapon (bananas) and she changed her mind about not eating.

Senior got his ass handed to him by the guineas. He’s recovering in the old coop. Anyone want a roo? I think he’s too stupid to stay.

You tell me…

-pee

Anyone know how to get a pin helper working with bluez 4.x?

Grep is still walking in circles to the left, she is also peeing quite a bit so is wearing diapers (she’s thrilled). She seems a bit less obsessive about it so that’s good.

(Also testing the wordpress to facebook plugin)

If anyone feels wants/needs a garden to help out and doesn’t have room for whatever reason ( renting/no room/hallucination/we really don’t care what the reason is ) feel free to get in touch with me or epe and we’ll see what we can do for you =). We have several idle acres near the house/barn that have water and storage available, and if you’re completely insane we can always set you up in the western field :).

(No you can’t grow weed ;P)

-pee

Friday the 13th for those of you who believe in that kind of thing.

AND!

1234567890 day for those of us that live in UNIX :). Probably the last great timestamp until the world comes to a crashing halt in 2038 or so. 32bit numbers are more then enough for anybody :).

Back to work tomorrow. Wahhh! But at least we’re all set to start a new year:

• Tree and inside holiday decorations are down (outside lights…well, eventually)
• Stale Christmas cookies flung into a ravine
• Taxes and bills all paid
• Fridge and freezer are full of food so I don’t have to think too much about dinner choices for the next few weeks
• Ellie’s home with Kendra

Today was one last big cooking day; made a batch of Good Eats beef stew (ate leftover stew) and Confit Byaldi, the Ratatouille dish from the Pixar movie with the rat chef. Wow, was that good…you’d think bland because of the vegetables involved, but the piperade really contributes a lot and the little bit of vinagrette drizzle really brings it together.

Surprise to nobody: the producers of Expelled purposely conflated social and biological Darwinism in order to create controversy. You know, like the artificial ‘controversy’ they’re supposed to be teaching in science classes, despite the fact that there *is* no scientific controversy, only a philosophical one (at best).

Happy new year folks.

H0 H0 H0!

Also happy linux 2.6.28 for you huge nerds. <3 <3 <3

-pee

You’ve taken all the fun out of my Dick Cheney jokes…

http://www.tricountytrappers.com/

-pee

Squeeeee…an Ameraucana pullet hit puberty

I was delighted to find that our new Kodak digicam (Z1015 IS) has a stitching mode. This was something I remember playing with back when I worked at Kodak. It lets you take 3 pictures (with an assist overlay to let you know how far to pan) and then stitches them together into one panoramic picture. Here are a few:

Sorry it’s a mess :)

OK, could be worse…

Out the back door

Front yard

towards the barn

towards Palmyra

How far can one genre of children’s movie go?

So the other day I’m using my work phone to test something (ip phone with communicator–don’t ask, our company LURVES the microsoft)…I was using my directory to find Paul’s number so I could call his phone and not bug someone in the office. With this, you type in the letters of their name using the number pad (one press per letter; you don’t have to multi-press to get to the actual letter; it figures out possible combinations for you). So I type in E R K K and look at the number echo on the display. 3755, which is our house number on our street. How could we have lived here for 10 years and never noticed that?

Our new plasma showed up early! The Stereo Shop said it would take a week, but the guy left me an email on Wednesday afternoon so of course we had to go get it. We settled on the Panasonic TH-50PZ850U…decided against the Pioneers since they’re selling off their plasma business to Panasonic, and decided that the tv having ethernet is pretty cool (for firmware updates and such), even if we don’t use the youtube and picasa features. We were a little bit torn about the Pioneers since they support DLNA, but oh well, maybe it’ll be more established next time we upgrade. Since we are switching up to blu-ray and needed everything to be 1080p, that meant a new receiver as well (so that we can switch HDMI)…this time we went up a level to the Denon 4308ci (our last was a 3803). We were going to wait for Black Friday on the blu-ray, but the Stereo Shop offered us their black friday price on the Sony BDP-S350, which we were going to get anyway, for $199 (I think we could’ve gotten it for $179 from Sears or K-Mart on Friday, but figured why not). He tried to sell us Monster HDMI cables too but we came to our senses, there. The TV had to be unboxed to fit in the Subaru and it was like Tetris trying to fit the receiver and blu ray boxes in there too.

OK, I ALMOST came to my senses about HDMI. We had ordered HDMI cables online for like $5 each but they are being shipped ground from California. This was fine when we thought the TV wouldn’t be here until next week. But the sight of a blu-ray player sitting there on the shelf was bugging the hell out of me. In the interests of marital harmony, Paul suggested we go buy 2 cables from Wal-Mart…the minimum we’d need to hook it into the receiver and hook the receiver to the TV. $60 for impatient geekdom. But man, Wall*E and Nightmare Before Christmas looked and sounded great…when we finally figured out how to get the blu ray player to pass through the audio as bitstream (had something to do with the bd live or additional content audio setting; we had it on ‘Mix’ and we needed ‘Direct’).

The other thing was, the TV came with a stand but not bolts for other mounts (we have a low A/V shelf with pole mount)…had to go to Lowe’s to get them.

So now we’re just waiting for HDMI cables so I can eliminate component/optical for the cable box and one DVD jukebox, which frees up enough component connectors on the Denon that I can finally eliminate the manual switchboxes…yay. Next up, new motherboard and/or video card for Mooby so we can hook that up HDMI as well.

This is the first time we bought A/V equipment where everything had an ethernet jack. First thing we did with all three was get firmware updates. Can’t wait to see how the Sony blu-ray jukebox will turn out–will we finally get a complete disc title listing without having to type them all in?

MG, it’s a CC.

heeeee