Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Figured out how to set up automatic recording with Coaster on Lucinda’s Mac. For thresholds, I set -28db and 1500ms for the stop, and -22db and 200ms for the restart.

The computer was making a ‘fan going bad’ noise. After opening it up and poking at the fans, I figured it was the chipset cooler fan that was going bad. I replaced it with the one from the old main board, which was the one that I recently bought from the Soyo web site. Now things sound normal again.

We went to see “My Blue Sky” at The Project in Downtown L.A. today. This was an art installation of sound recordings from various places. Very strange. After that, we went to the Museum of Neon Art to see the “Bumfuzzle” exhibit.

Lucinda is learning to ride her bicycle without the training wheels. This evening she achieved the equivalent of the Wright Brothers’ 12-second first flight. She rode down our driveway far enough to show that she now understands the concept of how to balance on the bike. She still needs to practice to train her reflexes, but now she knows what to do.

Today we took Lucinda to the Skirball Cultural Center to see the exhibits there. She was curious to learn more about Chanukah and such, so this was a chance for her to see a bit about Jewish culture, even if we aren’t actually Jewish. [Despite having a Jewish-sounding name.]

We went to see “American Originals: Treasures from the National Archives” today at the Central Library in Downtown L.A. It was an interestingly random collection of stuff. Among the displays they had President Kennedy’s inaugural speech, Benedict Arnold’s letter to George Washington, and the speech that President Nixon would have given if the Apollo 11 astronauts had been stranded on the moon. It was a pretty wide-ranging sampling of documents.

We got Lucinda a printer for her computer today. Most of her games and kid web sites have things to print out. So now she can print things for herself.

We went to “Merry Member Nights” at the L.A. Zoo this evening. They had the zoo open after hours. We saw some animals, but a lot of them had gone to sleep when the sun went down.

We also walked the Griffith Park Festival of Lights. It was impressive in a weird sort of way. And Lucinda had fun looking at it.

The computer has developed a new quirk. Now if I tell it to reboot, it goes down and stays down. It hangs in the hardware reset phase. Then if I pull the power cord to cycle power, it seems to usually self-test and boot after about six or eight power cycles. So far it has done this on Sunday morning, and then twice this evening.

Installed XFree86 4.3.0 and Mozilla 1.5 on Bort for testing today. The only catch was having to add ‘cd /usr/local/linux-mozilla’ to the ‘run-mozilla.sh’ script.