Last weekend marked the five year anniversary of Darrell’s successful cancer treatment. Brandon took the opportunity to arrange a surprise outing to the Metolius River Lodges. It was fantastic. I took some pictures and, well, here seemed as good a place as any to make them available to the group. I apologize to those of you who will have little idea what’s going on in the photos, but I can’t find the energy to type up compelling commentary.
I finally sat down and took a stab at getting Xen going on my laptop. As this entry’s title may have lead you to believe, it didn’t go particularly well.
I was pretty excited to have an army of virtual machines that were suited to kernel development. Especially after foolishly wasting time working with some machines at work that I knew weren’t up to the task.
The User’s guide got me in the mood. The Fedora wiki also has a helpful Quick start page.
I installed the RPMs, rebooted, and ran immediately into an existing bug. I tried Rik’s newer Xen RPMs for FC4 and they did much better. X started up and things were going pretty well. Then it tried to talk to the network and the screen went blank and the machine was dead. Dang.
I guess it’s not quite as polished as I was hoping. I imagine it might be fun, of a sort, to hook up a serial console and debug it with some Xen guys. I’ll get right on that just after my employer stops demanding my services in exchange for letting me funnel their money to the bank that holds our mortage.
I have to sing the praise of The Energy Trust of Oregon. If you don’t own a home in Oregon you’re probably not going to be overly excited by this. If you do, dig this.
A few days ago I was listening to some piece on OPB that was discussing rising energy prices and the result it will have on people heating their homes this season. The Energy Trust was mentioned because they perform free evaluations of a home’s ability to conserve heat. I gave them a call and scheduled a walk-through and the service guy came out this morning and took a look at the house. It was a blast.
He honestly seemed to enjoy the science of heat flowing through a house. It was fascinating stuff. I came away with a list of tasks ranging from five minute tweaks to ambitious insulation installation. Oh, and a handful of compact flourescent bulbs. That alone makes it worth the effort, I think. It was reassuring to hear that the nice man felt that, for a budding centenarian, our house is doing remarkably well.
All this for the low low price of.. well.. the percentage my utility bills that has funded the trust for as long as I’ve been paying for energy in Oregon. All the more reason to take advantage of their services!