free as in blog

For me, Christmas is one of those strange seasons. On the one hand, it’s a joyous time where the best of fellow man can shine through the dark night. Smiles on children’s faces, families together and enjoying each other’s company, seeing the world anew after it snows, etc.

There’s also this under part. The darkness that the light has to shine through. Think more melancholy. Not necessarily evil, but maybe sad (my wife may say ‘moody’). Days are shorter, uncertainty about the year ahead, looking back on the year that just passed, parties to attend, cards to write, presents to buy, and dang it’s cold out.

For some reason, the two work together well. Maybe the pagans that came up with the solstice and the Christians that adopted Dec 25 were on to something by inserting a holiday here.

Anyway, there’s two CDs that for some reason define Christmas for me, at least the season as a whole. They combine both of these parts together in a unique way.

First is the soundtrack to Charlie Brown Christmas. Guaraldi was able to put together a number of really fun and happy tunes (most notably the theme you think of when you think of Peanuts), along with some rather haunting tunes like the title of this article. He was even able to put the two together into a single song in his version of ‘O Tannenbaum’. Don’t bother with the 40th anniversary edition - get the original. You can usually find it in a Starbucks.

The other is John Denver and the Muppets. My parents had this as a record for probably 20 years now, and I was able to find a CD of it a few years ago with all the tracks (there was a version in 2000 that was missing a number, go find the one with 13 tracks on it!). I normally don’t listen to John Denver, but he was able to insert the haunting parts in amongst the Muppet fun you expect from when Jim Henson still roamed the earth.

Honorable mention (for Christmas Day itself) goes to this batch of other records my parents had that were sold by Firestone in the early to mid 60s. They’re more religious and celebratory, which would be almost unheard of now, but hey, that’s progress(?). I found a number on eBay a few years ago and copied them to CD - hey, maybe I can use that to get back to the actual intent of this and write technical stuff again.

My happy Thanksgiving came to a crashing halt for a while when my brother (who is serving in the Navy) informed me that he’s being shipped off to Iraq. On December 15. For a year.
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It’s been a good trip, but I’ve almost had enough. At least on my portables.

I recently got a shiny new X61 tablet laptop with the kick-butt 1400×1050 screen, all in a 14″ frame. Oh, and the 4GB of RAM, 160GB SATA at 7200 RPM, core 2 duo, and wifi/bluetooth/fingerprint and it’s a tablet, so there’s a stylus and rotating screen.

I also have ‘ol sturdy, the X41 (non-tablet) that I’ve had now for about three and a half years. I upgraded it to Fedora 8 a few days ago and it’s mostly worked, but there’s a few dingleberries in the upgrade that I haven’t bothered to figure out what the problem is. For example, new applications start with the title bar underneath the top panel, so I have to move or hide the panel before I can move the new window. Also, my Fn-F5 key (which should power off the Bluetooth radio) suddenly stopped working. Some ACPI think that decided to stop working. Wireless with the atheros chipset is always finicky when coming back from resume, and bluetooth integration is still pretty sub-par, especially with my Treo 700p. It doesn’t help that the Treo itself is pretty finicky when it comes to bluetooth connections.

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I have only a slightly green thumb, but I try to get a garden growing every year. As you may expect, some years are better than others, mostly depending on how much time I devote to the garden. This year was not as much time as I’d like and thus things did not grow all that well. Got a few cucumbers, almost no hot peppers, and the cabbage…well…best not to think about that.

I had one unexpected success though - three pumpkins. Unexpected because I didn’t plant any this year. The place where they grow is an area that is somewhat shaded due to the wood fence on two sides of that area, and it’s to the side of our compost pile, which I don’t go near very often.

Sometime last season after hollowing out our jack-o-lanterns, we chucked the seeds into our compost pile in the back yard. Some of those seeds must have survived and thrived in the nutrient-rich compost that surrounded it. I looked out about a week ago and found three small yet unrotten pumpkins sitting in that area.

I’ve scooped out two and have enough for a few pies. Yum.

It’s not real money laundering, but here’s what happened.

I was at lunch yesterday with co-workers Kris and Andy. Kris and I are out of cash and the place we’re at doesn’t take plastic. Andy gives me $20 to pay for Kris and myself to buy lunch and then it’s easier for me to pay Andy back, since I just give him a $20.

Today, Kris comes in and offers his $6 to Andy, who passes the money to me. I still owe Andy $20 and I forgot to go to the ATM.

I hate ATMs. In my case, I pay $.95 per withdrawal plus whatever the ATM fee is, usually $1-$2. So to pay Andy back, it’ll cost me another $2-$3, or about 20% of what I needed to borrow from him at the time.

Andy and I went to JP Licks today for a post-lunch coffee and brownie. I had cash for me today since I had the change from Andy’s $20 plus the $6 Kris gave me this morning. So I offer Andy a deal. I’ll pay him back his $20 now, but I’ll do it as a JP Licks gift card. I could then pay for the gift card with my debit card and not have ATM fees. Andy gets JP Licks whenever he wants and doesn’t need to carry around cash to do so. He agrees. I tell them I want a $20 gift card. They tell me if I get a $25 gift card, I get a free 1/2 pound of coffee. They have great coffee, so I agree. I give Andy the $25 gift card, Andy give me $5.

We’re now even and somehow I walked away from that entire deal with free coffee.

I’m not sure how I thought of this new name, but whatever. Noone else was using the name, so I’m still relatively unique. I really should be putting random things here instead of hackrag.