Just finished packing for a camping trip. Heading out tomorrow afternoon. The weather will be dry but cold - 24F. tomorrow night.

Ready for a sing-along? It starts with Jethro Tull and goes from there:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqZmtq5LhFo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlUlFvkQL0k

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYnnmQ9x5tQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ5TajZYW6Y

Woodworker Progress

Tuesday night was the weekly woodworking session that doesn't really meet every week because we sometimes have something, anything, better to do.

Last week, we worked on re-sawing and then planning down some maple boards to about 0.6" The S4S thickness will actually be 2/4" but we didn't know that at the time. Woody says "Plan your work and work your plan." During the planing (not planning) process we had no plan (but we did have a plane), just a vague notion that it was Tuesday. Without a plan, it is hard to plan your work. Without a plane, it is hard to plane your wood. We did have a plane though, so we did plane the wood. Not sure if we were following the plan though. At this point you may be asking yourself about woodchucks and woodchucking.

This week's session was very different. We still had no plan, though we still had a plane. The difference being that this week we forgot to pretend like we were making progress. That means when the guys arrived they sat down and watched as I pretended to clean off the work bench. After spending 15 minutes putting away many of the things that were piled up on the bench, I got tired of being heckled, and perhaps a little disgusted at the lack of benching top that I could see. So I sat down too. And they continued to heckle me. At least for a little while.

The conversation then switched to politics as it often does with these right-wing-wing-nuts. (Make sure you read both wings.) Health care reform, yada yada yada. I think we fixed it all.

Not a single piece of wood was harmed during the creation of this post, nor in the events that led up to the creation of this post. What does that make our average cuts per minute per person fall to? Don't answer. Speaking of numbers, I had no takers on a 40.

Swapped out the battery on the Tahoe today. Hopefully that will be the last battery to replace this winter. Two was two too many.

PyCon[2010]

I was in Atlanta Thursday through Sunday attending PyCon 2010. It was a great conference. I learned a lot, had a good time, and enjoyed some good food with great people.

More Snow this morning. We have already had more snow this year than we have had in the last 5 years combined and I believe we have more forecasted for night. It has been really nice so far because it has been pleasant to look at and then melted off very quickly.

Working!

Abyssws, PHP5, MySQL, and WordPress on Ubuntu 9.0.4. (And on AndLinux 2.6.22)

I got an email from blogger a couple weeks back that said they were ending support for FTP. At this point I decided I needed to look at other options for posting my blog.

I looked at a few and decided to continue hosting it on my own server but to switch to WordPress.

After making the decision, I spent a couple days running through a trail setup of WordPress, Php, MySQL, and Abyssws on my laptop using AndLinux. (AndLinux installs on top of Windows and can cooperatively carry a coconut. The Linux applications run along side the Windows applications on the Windows desktop. It is really nice. Check it out.) I took notes as I performed each step during the installation process. Once I had it all working, I was ready to do the install on the web server.

But first I decided to upgrade the OS on the server. I was running Red Hat 8 and had been for many many years. Re-installing the OS would require me to tar all my files and back them up. I decided to upgrade to Ubuntu 9 so while the tar files were being backed up, I burned an ISO of the Ubuntu install cd.

At this point I said my farewells to Red Hat 8, put the CD in the drive, and sudo'ed reboot. An hour layer I had a clean install of Ubu. Shortly thereafter I had my new web server up and running - I went with Abyssws this time over Apache. I never liked Apache. It was a pain to config' it.

I have all the aforementioned software installed and running now though I am still currently posting from Blogger.

As I was writing this, it occurred to me that the word support has many meanings. Did they mean they were turning off their FTP clients? I am using SFTP - are they discontinuing it also? Did they simply mean I could keep using FTP, but they weren't going to answer questions any more? What did they mean?

Did I waste all that time getting the new stuff working? I guess I should go read the blogger blog and see if I can shed some light on these questions.

Regardless, I am now ready to make the switch. First I have to import the blog into my database though. It will wait a few more days or weeks though.

Tuesday evenings wood working session reminded me that some of the tools don't get used very often. Starting with a piece of rough cut maple, I had to ask myself "where do I start?" to get a nice S4S board (surfaced four sides) .

After thinking about about it for a minute or so, it all came back to me. Surface an edge with the jointer; surface a side with the joiner with the surfaced edge against the fence so the two surfaced sides will be a right angle; using the table saw, make the second edge parallel to the first edge; and then using the planer, make the top side parallel to the bottom side.

I intended to resaw the boards on the bandsaw after the second step, to have a few pieces of thin maple instead of converting them directly to saw dust, but unfortunately the board was so twisted that it would not be feasible. So much for trying to plan ahead.

So, anyway, the current project is to make a few small boxes, approximately the size of a cigar box. Notice I did not say a jewlery box as these will be far to nice for storing silver and gold. The plan is to make two apiece, the first being maple with purple heart accents and the second being black walnut with maple accents.

We should be done in, oh, a year or so. Don't ask.

Tax Day was yesterday. The taxes have already been completed and e=filed; and rejected; and e-filed again.

Hopefully I am done with them until next year.

Well I have been working through getting Word press working on Linux (AndLinux) using php5 and MySql using Abyssws. Once it is functional, I will work through the same installation process on my web server but until then I am leaving it along.

AndLinux is based on CoLinux and Ubuntu so I will actually be putting Ubuntu on the server, but working with AndLinux is convenient for now.

Once it is all working, I will make the swap and probably write up a few things that I identified as confusing during the process.

My favorite part of this is that in order to import my blog from Blogger into Word Press, I have to reconfigure blogger to post the blog on blogspot, because the importer does not support FTP. The is the irony, because if Blogger hadn't announced their discontinuing of support for FTP, it would all be moot.

And the word moot reminds me of ...

"Who gets the car? The question is moot! I get the car" - Rev. Jesse Jackson playing the host of a fictitious game show "The Question Is Moot!" from Saturday Night Night (many years ago).

I received an email from blogger today announcing their discontinuation of FTP support in the very near future. Because I am hosting this blog off my own server, I use the FTP feature to transfer the material to my server after generating each post.

So it appears I have a choice, either let them start hosting my blog, or migrate to another blog provider. I am leaning towards the second. Looks like I may becoming acquainted with word press in the near future.

We, the Madison County Woodworkers Guild, started our 2010 project tonight.

You might think we are getting a late start, it being February already, but we are not. We are fast workers so we will make up any time we have already lost. As an example, we actually made an average of 1.6 cuts per worker tonight in a 3 hour period. That is about 0.55 cuts per person per hour. Not bad considering we were using power tools. When you average that out over the past four weeks the numbers get unbelievable.

The wood we have selected for the project is a maple with purple heart accents on the first, and black walnut with maple accents on the second.