Heron's Perch

A little history first. Keysight is a large company that, primarily, makes testing equipment such as oscilloscopes and other electronics. They bought a company a few years back named TestPlant. Prior to that, TestPlant bought a company by the name of Redstone that produced a product known as Eggplant. Recently, I was laid off for economic reasons (at least that's what they said). It occurs to me that nothing in this world lasts forever. I was so depressed when I was let go because Keysight was the perfect home for me... they used GNUstep deeply. So, as you can imagine, I was deeply upset when things ended... but all things do. 

It's funny, but this article here really cheered me up today. I've always, personally thougth the exact same thing about GNOME. It is butt-ugly. Nice to see someone else in this world has some sense.

This entry is dedicated to my Father, who passed away today at 11:15AM. He was the best man I ever knew. He had his faults, but in spite of them he was a good man. My relatives and I are making the final arrangements for him and the funeral will happen next Tuesday.

There were many things I didn't tell my Father before he died. It's taught me one lesson. If there's someone you care about, tell them now, if there's something you want someone to know, don't wait. Don't leave it until tomorrow... or the next day, do it *NOW* because sometimes you may not have tomorrow.

Near the end of his life, my father went into renal failure. His renal failure was brought on by his heart attack and his aneurysm before that. It came to a point in his life where he was fighting to live, not living as he once did. My Dad always used to be active, and loved to travel in his earlier years. He would sing and dance and do all kinds of things. I hope that now he can do all of those things, because wherever he is, I know he's happier.

I love you, Dad. Until we meet again...

Getting a new machine is really fun sometimes, but it can also be a royal pain in the butt. I despise the "burn-in" period (as I call it). This is the period where you need to adjust and tweek and frob every knob and adjustable piece of the machine until you get it just right.

Ironically, however, I find that this burn-in time really only happens with PCs. Particularly desktop machines. Especially expensive PCs. It seems as though the more a machine costs me, the more I have to frob with it. :/ Why is this? :) There's got to be some law of nature which makes it this way. :) Whatever the cause, there's nothing like the day when you can finally declare yourself done with all of the frobbing.

This of course, all begs the question: Why didn't I need to frob with my Mac?

After some hassles with Comp-USA's check writing service, I've got the new box!!

It's really sweet:

P4 630 w/ EM64T and Hyperthreading @ 3.0GHz.
2GB of RAM
120GB of HD
etc...

The challenge now will be getting GNUstep to run on the 64bit processor. Please see http://wiki.gnustep.org for more.

Well... my computer broke because of a power surge. It seems as though the MB was fried, so I simply replaced it with the old motherboard and put in a sound card I had lying around. I realized however that, this machine is on it's last legs. I uses Socket 423, which no one makes anymore and it also uses RAMBUS memory which was fast back in the day, but is not relatively slow when compared to more recent technologies and is also hideously expensive. I've decided to get a new machine.

Sometimes you have to wonder. They called me on Thursday, right after Verizon fixed their problem. I really think they must have known or something.

Anyway, the guy is supposed to come today to set things up, so I'm here waiting for him.

Verizon really needs to care more about it's customers. My DSL went down on Sunday morning at 1:30AM and stayed down until yesterday. It has been intermittent since then. While it seems solid now, the experience has shaken my confidence on Verizon greatly.

I'm wondering if it might not be time to switch to a cable modem.

It wasn't all that bad. I really need to go down there more often. I take back some of the things in my previous posting. The kids had a great deal of fun playing with both my brother's kids and David's kids. We should get them together more often.

We found out a month ago that my Uncle has stage four cancer. Bummer. He's my favorite uncle. I have yet to really deal with the fact that he's sick because he looks okay to me.

Also, I need to work from home today to finish some things, so it makes packing a pain.