“Gwnewch y pethau bychain mewn bywyd”*

“Be joyful, and keep your faith and your creed. *Do the little things [in life] that you have seen me do and heard about. I will walk the path that our fathers have trod before us.”–reputed to be the last words of St David–Dewi Sant— patron saint of Wales (the only Celtic patron saint native to the land of which he is considered patron), said to have died at age 100 on March 1, anno domini 589.

See the (surprisingly) decent short bio at Wikipedia for more on this remarkable man, and wear a leek or daffodil in his honor today if you will. (A day of bread and water–and “herbs” if you like–wouldn’t be out of line, either, in honor of the monastic rule he established for his order. :-))

Tomorrow, St Non’s Day–another Celtic saint, also Welsh, and St David’s mother.

Update: this short hymn I wrote several years ago, hymn tune DEWI SANT, in honor of the early missionary work of St David and his fellows. Just click on it for a larger view:

DEWISANT-1.jpg

(For fun, take this short quiz at the BBC website. You already know how I scored, right? ;-))

“I do these silly things…

…so you don’t have to.” That may be Jerry Pournelle’s well-known comment from his days writing for Byte, but I’ve kinda adopted it here at twc.

Recent “silly things” @ twc central.

1. Lesson learned: attempting to install a peripheral/software combo intended for a Win98 environment in compatibility mode on a Win7 machine is… not recommended. That Win7 install is now well and truly FUBAR. Unbootable. Unrepairable. Dead. Toast. On the last train to its final reward. Gone. Kaput.

*heh* (“I love it when a plan comes together”)

Oh. Well. I’ll reinstall the OS later, but right now I need to screw things up on this Ubuntu intall. Now, how can I manage that….. Oh! I know!

2. Running alphas (alphas!?!) of Opera 10 on my “mission critical” Ubuntu install. Two of them. One is the Opera 10a build 4166 for Linux, and the other is Opera 10a build 1285 for Windows. Each of the builds is the latest for its OS. So, any “issues”?

Ya think?

On the Windows build, not such a biggie so far on this, my third Opera 10 alpha for Windows, build. Fired up quickly and… “*huh*?!? Can’t read the toolbars or menus! Need a microscope to see the teeny tiny print. OK, Tools>Preferences>Advanced>Fonts and change the font and font sizes. Now it’s readable. So far, that’s the only issue on this build of the Windows alpha (running under WINE). Why this “upgrade” of the previous alpha decided to change the fonts/sizes is beyond me. I’ll have to check the Desktop Team site later and see if others experienced this. Could be a regression that now has a fix.

On the Linux version. *sigh* I can reliably crash the thing by simply CLICKing in the compose field to write a post in WordPress. Every. Single. Time. That’s a non starter.

Oh, well. “I do these silly things… ” etc.

OTOH, doing something as silly as running Ubuntu 9.04 in a VM hosted on Ubuntu 8.10 hasn’t wreaked havoc on my machine. Yet. *heh* Still kinda silly, but no negative impact yet.

On the gripping hand, finally a FIrefox upgrade that didin’t force me to reinstall/reconfigure VMWare Server! Yipee! My need to join The Hairclub for Men is averted (just barely)! At least this time I’m not tearing my hair out by the roots over another Firefox/VMWare tiff. Now, if only installing VMWare’s VM Tools in an Ubuntu client would go as smoothly, but no. The open-vm-tools alternative is almost as good, but just not quite.

Oh, well. It’s a silly thing to do anyway–Ubuntu client hosted on Ubuntu. At least it’s not a Wubi install of Ubuntu on a Win2K or XP client hosted on Ubuntu… *heh* Now that was really silly.


Non-compgeeky silly: got some whole, raw milk at a Mennonite dairy near America’s Third World County (over the state line in America’s Third World State. No, not that one. The other one. ;-)) and had to freeze the stuff to get the cream to separate out. *sigh* Why separate the cream out? Silly. Want to make cottage cheese from the almost-skim that resulted. For my amusement. (And enjoyment–I like cottage cheese). Then, see how much ricotta I can make from the whey. Then make bread using what whey is left from that. (I really just wanted to hear “what whey” in my mind’s ear.) Shouldn’t take too much time away from brewing another batch of beer. I hope.

Meanwhile, enjoying real cream in my coffee. Not going to waste the stuff making butter, although I do have fond childhood memories of “churning” the butter. (Didn’t use a churn. We made such small batches, my task, when I was assigned to the butter-making chore, was simply to shake the cream in a jar until I had some butter. Mom would salt it to her taste and we’d all enjoy.)

On second thought, maybe I will make some butter.


Notice no curmudgeonly griping about politics or society in this post? That’s cos I’m weighing whether to move to Norstrilia when the U.S. sinks under a load of political B.S. Sure, Norstrilia is a fictional place, but at least it makes some sort of sense.