Linux, musical road-dogging, and daily life by Paul W. Frields
 
Turkey in the brine, turkey in the pan.

Turkey in the brine, turkey in the pan.

Holiday cheer.

Happy Thanksgiving day to you and yours if you’re celebrating this US holiday. I just put our turkey in the oven after its leisurely and customary morning soak in brine. Eleya made a beautiful batch of casseroles, side dishes, and pies. Evie is going to help her make some buttermilk biscuits later this afternoon.

Fedora fun.

Last night I made a quick and dirty Emacs package that uses libXft for anti-aliased font support. I did this for personal use for FC6 and F7, and used my packages throughout both releases without problems. Nevertheless, I built them from a CVS capture of the unicode-xft-2 branch and they could therefore eat your spouse, children, or chihuahua.

Update: Fixed the URL above.

I also did some early trimming (in the Christmas sense) of our Docs toolchain’s help targets, to make it easier for our new CVS users and maintainers to find out how to do useful things. Having a make help ought to be a law! I also sent some additional string patches to the system-config-firewall maintainers via Bugzilla.

Music madness.

Over the past week or so, I got a hold of some pre-production roughs for Laura’s new tunes on which our guitarist has been putting the finishing touches. They sound great and have me really excited, especially since we may be recording a new album starting in March. I believe she’ll have one or two of the demos up on her MySpace page soon.

I also got to see old friend and production mastermind Kevin at his studio the weekend before last, when I sat in on recalls for Leah’s “Volume 2” EP, the follow up to our previous CD. It was fun catching up with Leah too, since she’s up in Ithaca now working on her PhD at Cornell — we all had a great sushi dinner together as we took a break from the labor of critical listening. You wouldn’t think sitting around with your ears open could be so exhausting, but it’s quite a lot of mental work to be concentrating across a wide spectrum of instrumentation at once. I imagine this is why good conductors are so highly sought after, and why high school band teachers aren’t getting paid enough.

Family fiesta.

Last weekend we had a 60th birthday party for my mother, and struck emotional gold (Ha ha, made you cry!) by giving her a big, framed blow-up of a portrait we had made of all eleven of her grandchildren together. I missed the first part of the party because of work, but managed to get there in time to wolf down some awesome BBQ and watch the gift opening. A good time was had by all!

DVD roundup.

Disturbingly pedestrian pickings this time through. I promise I’ll find something foreign, obscure, and snobby for the next round.

  • Transformers: Beautiful cinematography, awesome CGI, but little else to recommend this vapid, emotionless, cardboard wreck of a movie.
  • Live Free or Die Hard: Like all the sequels, a lesser film compared to the first in the franchise, but some exceptional action and stunt work — once it gets into gear — and a small part played by Kevin Smith make this a worthy viewing. I was surprised not to see what’s-his-name pull out any Apple gear, though.
  • Ratatouille: Enough can’t be said about it, and it holds up to multiple viewings, which is good given the fact that the kids watch it over and over.
  • Sopranos, S6 part 2: Finally seeing how everything winds up. Yes, the show may not be what it was in its heyday, but watching acting this good, we’re still captivated.
  • Shrek the Third: The jokes and the conceit are starting to wear thin, but the kids will be able to take away a clearer moral, that the courage to do good is what defines heroes, than they could from the meandering, muddled script of the second entry in the series.

All right, enough rambling for one post, but I hadn’t dumped core in over a week, so now I can start thinking about other things instead. Happy Turkey Day!

2 Comments

  1. Kai

    The URL of your SRPM directory is missing the “pfrields.” part at the beginning (Google’s “site:” keyword came to the rescue). In any case, thanks for the Emacs SRPM, I’m looking forward to trying it out!

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