Sitter night

Up until last night it had been a long time since I’d been a babysitter. We and our neighbors worked out an arrangement where we would take turns babysitting each others’ kids after they’d gone to bed. They stayed at our home while Kelly and I did our ARRRRR! Line Pub Crawl and it was our turn to reciprocate.

I showed up at 8 and had to settle their son once early in the evening, but after that I watched football and edited video on my laptop, all the while within wireless range of my home network. It beats the heck out of hiring a babysitter!

Plane crash

Phantom_Electric

Travis got a beginner’s RC plane for his birthday and yesterday we decided to fly it for the first time. The family (plus dog) piled into the minivan and headed for Horseshoe Farm Park.

Horseshoe is the perfect place to fly an RC plane: a large, open, grassy field with few people around. I tied up the dog to the barn and the kids played nearby while Kelly assembled the plane. We warned the kids that this could end in disaster because it was the first time we flew and they seemed okay with it. We followed all the pre-flight checks, though the wind was a bit stronger than we anticipated. Ignoring this, Kelly hand-launched the plane into the wind as I cranked up the throttle.
Continue reading →

Former Garner mayor Don Rohrbaugh dies

Former Garner mayor Don Rohrbaugh died yesterday after a long bout with leukemia. He was 80.

Don was our neighbor for the five years we lived in Garner. He was kind enough to welcome us to the town the very day we moved in. He also talked me into serving on a town committee, so in a way he got me started with municipal politics.

More than that, though, he was just a genuinely nice guy. Condolences to his family.

Here’s his obituary from the Bryan-Lee Funeral Home:
Continue reading →

Grading Obama’s first quarter

Obama at Dover AFB

Yesterday was the one year anniversary of Obama’s election. Obama was selling change and the people were willing to buy it. So how do I grade Obama for his first quarter performance? Let’s take a look:

The economy: still eeking along. It hasn’t cratered as feared and it may even be on the upswing again but things don’t bounce back as quickly as they crash. He’s probably doing as best as can be expected: B-
Continue reading →

Cheap thoughts: dog park

I wonder if taking my dog to the dog park causes me to lose face with my dog. As the owner, I’m supposed to be the “pack leader,” as the Dog Whisperer would say. If Rocket is getting bullied by the other dogs at the dog park and I don’t do anything about it it may cause me to lose standing as a pack leader in his doggy head.

Still I guess the benefits of the dog park outweigh the drawbacks.

Sublime

I was listening to some Sublime on the way to work this morning. The band’s self-titled album from 1996 is such a great disc with the “What I Got” single making it to number one. Lead singer Brad Nowell never saw it happen, though: he died of a heroin overdose two months before the album was released.

I can only imagine what kind of music the band might have made if Nowell hadn’t been so self-destructive. What a shame.

How I made time stand still

This month I will have gone without wearing a watch for one whole year. While that may sound like some sort of personal goal it was really an act of laziness.

It began when my watch band broke while biking to work. I managed to scoop up all the parts but have not gotten around to getting a new pin put in my watch band. In the ensuing time I found that I really didn’t need a watch.

I suppose I’ll take it in sometime this week, if only to have some nice jewelry to wear every now and then.

Busy weekend

Let’s see:
Thursday: Conn Showcase
Friday: march and Zydecopious at Seaboard Music
Saturday: Sailing at Lake Gaston, Halloween, and hanging out with our cool neighbors.
Sunday: cleaning, lounging, MythTV-fixing, game-playing, bread-making, Trader Joe’s-shopping

That’s a pretty full four days! As for this week, tonight I go to a Parks and Rec committee meeting and that’s all there is on my schedule for the week. Next week I have a Mordecai meeting and the following week I have my East CAC, Raleigh CAC, and Parks Board meetings.

Hip hop, ya don’t stop.

Another MythTV mystery busted

mythtv

For the past few weeks I’ve been puzzled by the significant load shown on my MythTV backend generated by the kdvb-fe-0 process. The server was running at 50% load or higher even when there was nothing being recorded.

I poked around and found that the kdvb-fe-0 process is created by the Linux DVB drivers, which is the driver used for my TV capture card. Because this driver is running so close to the kernel I am not quite sure how to troubleshoot it. The software tools I would normally use may not work at this level.
Continue reading →