The Vent and Rant Thread

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Hugs Dennis!

Thank you, but don't hug me. Hug someone you know, just to let them know you care and are glad they're part of your life. We take too many things for granted, and friends tend to be one of them till they're taken from us.
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Dennis

[desertgrandma]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

One of my repeated comments has been that the people I love are like precious cut gems, always displaying a new facet you hadn't known was there. Sometimes people are "diamonds in the rough" and you have to look beneath the surface to see the quality below.

It reinforced my resolve to treasure those I know, as they might be taken from me unexpectedly, and to have patience with those I find annoying, as there might be unexpected depths hidden behind the things that annoyed me.

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Dennis

What a beautiful way to remember your friend, posting what you did here. It gave us a tiny window and glimpse of a person we might have liked to know.

I'm sorry for your loss, all of you.

I especially like your last statement. How very true.

[phenomshel]

Thank you Dennis. I had just come here to post that again, Facebook has become a mixed blessing. While reconnecting with someone who was in my class in high school, and his mother was my English teacher (yes, it was a small town), I found that his wife works for Hachette. Now - Hachette seems to be one of the publishers that is a 'worst offender' for ebook related idiocy, so I was going to complain about how now I'll need to censor my comments on FB about publishers and idiocy. However, after reading your post I think I'll be more thoughtful about how lucky I am that I can reconnect with distant friends and family.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by phenomshel

Thank you Dennis. I had just come here to post that again, Facebook has become a mixed blessing. While reconnecting with someone who was in my class in high school, and his mother was my English teacher (yes, it was a small town), I found that his wife works for Hachette. Now - Hachette seems to be one of the publishers that is a 'worst offender' for ebook related idiocy, so I was going to complain about how now I'll need to censor my comments on FB about publishers and idiocy. However, after reading your post I think I'll be more thoughtful about how lucky I am that I can reconnect with distant friends and family.

Hachette is like everyone else in publishing, trying to scry the possible futures, and figure out what they have to do. People complain about "greedy" publishers. In most cases, the motive isn't greed. They aren't rich and trying to get richer. They're trying to survive.

I know a couple of folks at Hachette. TimeWarner spun off the Warner Books division as Grand Central, and Hachette picked them up. These folks worked at Warner. The have nothing to do with Hachette's annoying behavior. They are probably just thanking whatever diety they still have a job.

And even in cases of genuine stupidity, I'm selective about who I knock. For example, a year of so ago the well respected publisher at Little, Brown got the chop. Little, Brown was under pressure from the conglomerate it was part of, and the Group President she reported to was pushing for "more best sellers". Little, Brown had historically been a "literary" house, known more for high quality than high sales, and she saw herself as under pressure to dumb down the line to a point where it wouldn't be Little, Brown any more. She resisted, and finally got fired. But I can't really blame the Group President. He was under pressure from top management to improve results for his group. I suspect he was as unhappy about having to fire her as she was about leaving, but...

Sometimes there aren't any good answers. But meanwhile, the stupidity comes from the top, and I'm careful not to tar the folks I know, who are mostly editors, assistant editors, art directors and the like with the brush I wield for CEOs and Boards of Directors

I'm on Facebook and find it a mixed blessing. I'm bemused by the number of Friend requiests from folks I know in passing, at best. Er, I didn't know we were friends. And it's an infinite time sink that requires management to keep properly prioritized. But with 300 million users, yeah, an awful lot of folks I knew are probably there. Fortunately, only one of my exes seems to be, but she's the one I didn't get over...
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Dennis

[vivaldirules]

AAARRRGGGGHHH!!!

I don't mind work, really, but why does it have to eat into my recreational and nap times?

[kindlekitten]

gosh darn it! one of my cats just passed. not kindle kitten, one of the other ones. I had adopted her, a sister and a brother from a vet 17 years ago. they had been born in the dryer vent of a woman's house. the vent was being worked on and the kittens fell out. they were about three weeks old. the woman who owned the house had them taken to the local vet to be euthanized. at the time I had a rather old fussy cat and a relatively young active one and wanted a companion for the younger one. I was coming back from out of town (I worked for the phone company and would be out of town for a week at a time) and decided to stop by the vet and see what they had. all three kittens were caged together and I was ready to leave with just one of them. when I asked what would happen to the other two, I was told they were to be put down as they didn't have the staff support to hand raise them. I gritted my teeth and decided I could deal with the flack at home and took all of them.

the brother dissappeared years ago, we figure to coyotes. we almost lost this one 10 years ago while on an extended vacation. her kidneys were shutting down. every day since then has been a gift for her. her sister is very healthy for such a senior citizen, still plays and everything! this one was sitting on the inside stairs (she almost never went out anymore) when I got home from my trip just whining and looking miserable, got her into the vet last night where she went onto an IV to rehydrate her and warm her. they just called to say she had passed.

Bast has called one of her own home. farewell Maa-Lii

[desertgrandma]

Sorry for your loss, KK......

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

gosh darn it! one of my cats just passed. not kindle kitten, one of the other ones. I had adopted her, a sister and a brother from a vet 17 years ago. they had been born in the dryer vent of a woman's house. the vent was being worked on and the kittens fell out. they were about three weeks old. the woman who owned the house had them taken to the local vet to be euthanized. at the time I had a rather old fussy cat and a relatively young active one and wanted a companion for the younger one. I was coming back from out of town (I worked for the phone company and would be out of town for a week at a time) and decided to stop by the vet and see what they had. all three kittens were caged together and I was ready to leave with just one of them. when I asked what would happen to the other two, I was told they were to be put down as they didn't have the staff support to hand raise them. I gritted my teeth and decided I could deal with the flack at home and took all of them.

the brother dissappeared years ago, we figure to coyotes. we almost lost this one 10 years ago while on an extended vacation. her kidneys were shutting down. every day since then has been a gift for her. her sister is very healthy for such a senior citizen, still plays and everything! this one was sitting on the inside stairs (she almost never went out anymore) when I got home from my trip just whining and looking miserable, got her into the vet last night where she went onto an IV to rehydrate her and warm her. they just called to say she had passed.

Bast has called one of her own home. farewell Maa-Lii

Sorry. {{{{{HUGS}}}}}

[badgoodDeb]

So sorry for your loss KK. And in light of Dennis's posts, I'll go home and hug my own doggie extra.

[ShortNCuddlyAm]

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

gosh darn it! one of my cats just passed. not kindle kitten, one of the other ones. I had adopted her, a sister and a brother from a vet 17 years ago. they had been born in the dryer vent of a woman's house. the vent was being worked on and the kittens fell out. they were about three weeks old. the woman who owned the house had them taken to the local vet to be euthanized. at the time I had a rather old fussy cat and a relatively young active one and wanted a companion for the younger one. I was coming back from out of town (I worked for the phone company and would be out of town for a week at a time) and decided to stop by the vet and see what they had. all three kittens were caged together and I was ready to leave with just one of them. when I asked what would happen to the other two, I was told they were to be put down as they didn't have the staff support to hand raise them. I gritted my teeth and decided I could deal with the flack at home and took all of them.

the brother dissappeared years ago, we figure to coyotes. we almost lost this one 10 years ago while on an extended vacation. her kidneys were shutting down. every day since then has been a gift for her. her sister is very healthy for such a senior citizen, still plays and everything! this one was sitting on the inside stairs (she almost never went out anymore) when I got home from my trip just whining and looking miserable, got her into the vet last night where she went onto an IV to rehydrate her and warm her. they just called to say she had passed.

Bast has called one of her own home. farewell Maa-Lii

Sorry to hear that

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

... one of my cats just passed: ...

Amazing how members of another species work their way into our hearts until they become like family. Sorry for your loss, Kindlekitten. It's been a year since we lost our pit bull, Cain, and it still hurts. He was the best friend of our cat (Christian), as well as Norton's (our pug) "big brother."

[ShortNCuddlyAm]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

My SO Kat and I got a call from his wife Naomi this morning that our friend Michael had died.

______
Dennis

Sorry you had to go through that

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Thank you, but don't hug me. Hug someone you know, just to let them know you care and are glad they're part of your life. We take too many things for granted, and friends tend to be one of them till they're taken from us.
______
Dennis

Did that this evening

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

Bast has called one of her own home. farewell Maa-Lii

I've had to go through that.

My late cat Dizzy suffered kidney failure. The problem with that in cats is that by the time the cat shows symptoms, it's too late to treat it. The vet said "You can do things like force fluids into him to flush his system and keep him alive for another 6 months, but I don't think that's a good life for him or you." I agreed, and had him euthanized. It was years ago, and I still miss him. Seven years old is way too young for that.

Our late cat Bugsy the Part Time Cat was a somewhat different story. He got his name because he was more or less the floor cat for several floors of my building, spending part of his time with an assortment of tenents.. He had a nominal owner, but made the rounds getting attention and handouts. He wasn't a mooch, however: handouts were payment for services rendered, as he was an expert mouser, and I live in an older building that has them. He was neutered, but not till well after puberty, so he retained typical tomcat behavior, including prowling the neighborhood and getting into fights with other cats, until he got on in years and started losing them.

He seemed to decide we were his people, and stayed with us when not making his rounds. He'd bring us catches to show off his prowess. Sometimes they were still alive, and would occasionally get away from him. He didn't normally eat them, but would when that happened and he caught them again, in an apparent mood of "You won't get away this time, you little @#$%&! I'm gonna eat you!" He once left a mouse carcass on Kat's pillow. She was unmoved by my protests that "Hey, you're his person! He loves you! If he had two dead mice, he'd give you one. In fact, he did!"

Our neighbor across the hall had a delicate neutered male Siamese named Maxie. Maxie was dainty, pretty, and extravagantly stupid. He'd been observed to retreat in confusion from a mouse. He and Bugsy were friends, and I could only describe the relationship as "They're a gay couple, and Bugsy is the top and Maxie is the bottom." Maxie needed regular discipline from his top, and would do things to provoke it. One afternoon Bugsy was napping on our bed. We left the door ajar for the cat, and Maxie wandered in, looking for Bugsy. He hopped up on the bed, pasdded over to where Bugsy was sleeping, and yowled loudly. Bugsy levitated about two feet. He then frog-marched Maxie into the hall by the scruff of his neck and proceeded to mount him, while Maxie yowled and frantically tried to lick Bugsy. Then they broke apart, with Maxie staggering off like he'd just been screwed bowlegged, Bugsy with a look of "Guess I showed that bottom!", and both suddenly started licking little pink erections. This happened again every half hour or so for the rest of the afternoon, as Bugsy recalled again just how his bottom had misbehaved this time. Maxie actually acted like a cat for about 20 minutes after a session of discipline.

Bugsy developed a growth on his belly. The vet said, "If he were a younger cat, I'd open him up and look, but he's about 14 and it's risky. Feed him his favorite treats, give him lots of affection, and when he declines too far, bring him in." We did so, but he did not go gentle into this good might. A week before being euthanized, he caught and ate his last mouse.
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Dennis

[Patricia]

My daughter has a cat a bit like that. He too has been neutered. He goes very strange whenever he sees the pink snuggie I bought her at Christmas. Out comes a part rarely seen in a neutered cat; then he bites a bit of the blanket and attempts to hump it.

[DMcCunney]

The joys of computer upgrades.

One of my machines is an old Fujitsu Lifebook P2110. dating from 2001 It was a gift from the mother of a friend. She loved it, and wanted it to go to a good home, but had upgraded to a newer, faster machine. She commented it was "slow slow slow".

Well, no surprise. It had an 867mhz Crusoe processor, a slow even for the time 30GB HD, a whopping 256MB of RAM, and came from Fujitsu with Win XP Pro SP2 installed. XP Pro wants 512MB minimum, and according to Fujitsu, the maximum the Lifebook could take was 384MB. You grew old and gray waiting for XP to boot, and older and grayer waiting for programs to load. It was spending more time swapping pages in and out of RAM to make memory available than it was doing useful work.

It looked like a good candidate for Linux. So I swapped the original HD for a 40GB Fujitsu unit with similar specs from a dead laptop of my SO, repartitioned, and set it to triple boot Win2K Pro, Xubuntu, and Puppy Linux. Win2K Pro is slow as a frozen snail, but runs somewhat better than XP on the box, and is there for when I need Windows. Xubuntu runs, but it too is arthritic. Puppy itself and the bundled apps are fairly sprightly, as they were all chosen for small size. Other things, like Firefox 3.5 and Open Office 3 were different stories. FF, for instance, took about 45 seconds to initialize. The CPU is fast enough, and 256MB of RAM is adequate. The problem is a slow hard drive with low transfer rate. The main Firefox program is small, but it must load and link against an assortment of libraries, and gets killed by disk I/O. In contrast, Opera 10 loaded in about 20 seconds. It was built "static", with all the needed library code compiled into one big executable, so Puppy could simply find the start of the file and continuously load till it reached the end, instead of having to seek multiple locations on the drive to find the pieces. (Unfortunately, current Mozilla apps can't be built static. )

Puppy got to a state where it would hang on shutdown, requiring a power cycle, and hang on boot, never running X-Windows and loading the GUI. I was still running the 4.12 release, and there was a 4.21 and 4.31 release since, so I downloaded the ISO, burned a CD, and installed. I chose to wipe the existing installation after preserving stuff I wanted and install from scratch, because among other things, Puppy was built with the latest kernel and supported the ext4 file system, which had performance improvements I wanted to investigate, and would require a reformat.

Installing Puppy itself was painless. The fun started when I started adding back the other things I'd installed. I have an SD card where I keep copies of the Puppy packages I run, and I stared installing them.

Most of the applications that run under Puppy use the Gtk graphics framework, and link against a Gtk library. One of the apps I installed broke that. Graphical stuff already up was fine, but anything I tried to run after would die with an undefined symbol error trying to link against the GTK library and not seeing what it needed. The Gtk library itself hadn't been touched. It was the same working version from before. I had no idea what was going on.

After a couple of iterations of wipe, reinstall, and try to find out which third party app was the culprit, I discovered it was a package of the Gimp paint program that was newer than the one in the official Puppy repository. It had worked just fine in the 4.12 release...

So I installed the most recent version in the repository, and all was well.

I'm still rebuilding my former configuration, but it's substantially back to where it was. And the ext4 filesystem seems to be a lot faster than the previous ext3 version. FF 3.5 now loads in about 30 seconds, and Opera 10 comes up in a bit over 10. The new release is also better developed in areas like detecting missing dependencies, and telling you if there are missing pieces needed by what you're installing. But it still has a way to go before matching Ubuntu, which does a much better job of preventing the issues I had.

Maybe it's time to wipe and redo Xubuntu, and use ext4 for it, too...
______
Dennis