On 2004...

I posted a bit about Cliff Yablonski and the people he hates in January, having no idea how close to home it would wind up being.

Remember that jugularjaguar's birthday falls on February 32nd.

The result of a bit of timely scheming came to long-distance fruition in March. I'd rather remember that than the furnace exhaust fan and server failing.

Later, and more pleasantly, irpooh showed up on LiveJournal. It wasn't too long after that foolscap001 appeared on LiveJournal as well.

I skipped the Des Moines Spring Faire for RCFM and didn't regret it, save for not seeing ginafae and the rest of RST and some other folks until Fall. jmaynard and I both went to CONvergence and decided we won't bother doing that again. I went to MFF where I met some folks that I'd met earlier at RCFM, and met some others as well. I'm not sure I'll go to furmeets other than RCFM and MFF, but those two will likely become annual trips for me. And not just to see what's going on with the jaguar and raccoons, either.

I briefly toyed with the idea of running for President but didn't have all the required prerequisites. At least I wasn't all wet like many were.

The year wasn't the best for renfaires. I didn't go to the one in Des Moines in the Spring, which had to be moved due to flooding. Another, in Waterloo, was canceled, as was one in Osceola, Iowa. One of the fission products of Rosenthorne happened, after a fashion, while the other didn't happen at all. Jay didn't get to spend that much time at MNRF with all his travels, and I was getting less impressed overall. We decided not to bother with season passes for 2005. We'll go when we feel like it, rather than feel obligated to "get our money's worth" out of the season passes. I went to the Des Moines fall faire more to meet folks that I know than to see a faire, which is just as well, there wasn't much faire there. It's telling to compare that to Siouxland. Siouxland puts show first and generally does well with the rest. The other puts money first and struggles to have a show.

There were unpleasant parts of the year as well: There was the initial harf of Jay's sudden and unexpected fame such as it is, as well as CONvergence which is right about the CON part but would be more accurately named DIVergence. I got to experience a kidney stone, something I don't recommend. Also, I now have only one living grandparent.

I asked about things to do with older computers and got a few suggestions. I wound up playing a little bit with Vector Linux and more with DeLi Linux which was enough to get jmaynard to consider a change of distributions for the iOpener. I also played with the rhapsody IRC client. I found one real problem which surprised the developer who thought he'd fixed that one. It's also likely to be my gateway into learning C for real.

My big accomplishment for the year seems small now. I finally got COLT up to date. For a while it seemed it wouldn't end, now it's hard to get back into again - and I need to, since #122 will be out next week and I've only barely started #121.

I have some plans for the new year. A faire or two or three, maybe one Jay and I haven't yet been to but have heard about (Bristol? Jubilee?). Of course, that also depends on just how interesting things stay or get for him. While I've seen some complain that his "fifteen minutes of fame" are up, I've come to appreciate Andy Warhol's later comment that "In fifteen minutes, everyone will be famous." is rather closer to reality. I plan to be at RCFM and MFF again, though MFF will likely be by a rather different route. I'm even considering doing/getting a partial fursuit. One thing I didn't get to but wanted to last year was more telescope/mirror making. Somehow it always gets put off for a while longer and then not happening. I hope to rectify that.

Breton and I are both happier now.

2005 is starting better than 2004 ended. I wound up pulling all (two) cards from breton and moving the motherboard partly out, still leaving it mounted onto the side of the case, and could get at the memory slots more easily. The memory sticks snapped right in as they should. Now breton has 64 MB and is quite happy, as am I.

How happy is the machine? Let's see, I have four desktops on IceWM and I'm using them all. Spread across them, one xterm shows top. Another is just a shell access. And another is running rhapsody IRC. I have three Dillo web browser windows open, as well as the Pathetic Writer (that really is its name) word processor, a PDF viewer, and a file manager.

The top monitor reports:

CPU states: 3.4% user, 1.8% system, 0.0% nice, 94.6% idle
Mem: 63088K av, 58504K used, 4584K free, 41332K shrd, 2100K buff
Swap: 62492K av, 0K used, 62492K free 24604K cached


All that, and DeLi has yet to start hitting swap.