Stan’s Obligatory Blog

We got to see an advance screening of “10.5”, a made-for-TV disaster movie today. Overall, it was pretty cheesy. The screenshot below pretty much sums up the whole movie. Didn’t the writers have a dictionary?

Tonight we went down to Flor y Canto to see Keith Knight. He talked and showed some slides of his work. He was very funny. We also bought a copy of his latest book, which he signed for us. Overall, it was a fun little adventure.

We just got the letter today that Lucinda got in to Don Benito Elementary. This is the public magnet school here in Pasadena, and it is generally well-regarded.

Lucinda and Mommy went to the zoo today. While they were there, Lucinda spent some time playing on the playground there. Today she finally was able to do the monkey bars. She learned to brachiate like her ancestors.

A couple of things were broken from yesterday’s follies with the sound card. The new kernel was out of sync with userland, so some random things like the ‘ps’ command were broken. I had to do a ‘make buildworld’ and ‘make installworld’ to bring the whole system up to rev.

Put the old ISA SoundBlaster card back into moe. Had to put these lines into the kernel config:

device          pcm
device          sbc0    at isa? port 0x220 irq 10 drq 1 flags 0x15

Also, I had to go into the BIOS and tell it to reserver IRQ 10 for ‘legacy ISA’.

Then, ‘dmesg’ showed:

pcm0:  port 0xe400-0xe403,0xe000-0xe003,0xdc00-0xdcff irq 11 at device 7.5 on pci0
pcm0: 
sbc0:  at port 0x220-0x22f irq 10 drq 1 flags 0x15 on isa0
pcm1:  on sbc0

Note that the SoundBlaster is on pcm1. Now I checked it:

moe# cd /dev
moe# cat sndstat
FreeBSD Audio Driver (newpcm)
Installed devices:
pcm0:  at io 0xdc00 irq 11 (1p/1r/0v channels duplex)
pcm1:  at io 0x220 irq 10 drq 1:5 bufsz 4096d (1p/1r/0v channels duplex)

When I tried ‘sh MAKEDEV snd0’, nothing worked, but when I noticed that the SB was on pcm1, I did ‘sh MAKEDEV snd1’ and then it all started working.

There is a crew filming a movie in front of a house on San Pasqual near Caltech. I guess that it’s supposed to be set in some place that’s not Southern California, because they’re wrapping sheets of rubber fake bark on the trunks of the palm trees to make them look like ‘regular’ trees.

Abiword was broken this morning. It was complaining that it couldn’t find:

libintl.so.2
libexpat.so.2

Both of these were present in newer versions, so I just made soft links so that the old name would resolve and the program could run.

In a what’s-wrong-with-this-picture moment, there is a bus parked near our house. It’s painted in New Jersey Transit colors. Maybe this is like those stories I’ve read about migrating birds being blown off-course by storms. But the route marker on the front says “Beverly Hills”. Maybe NJT has a new Weehawken-Beverly Hills route going…

  

Lucinda learned to ride her bike today. She practiced up and down the driveway. Later on, we went to an empty parking lot up the street and she rode around for a long time. She is able to balance, as well as to start and stop by herself.

Also, this afternoon, we made a fire in the fireplace and toasted marshmallows. This was Lucinda’s first time to have toasted marshmallows, and she liked it a lot.