Following the style of two of my favorite authors (being Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett), I've decided to include asides in the form of footnotes. Mostly because they make the text itself easier to read: otherwise I'd have all sorts of appositive phrases offset with nested brackets and braces and parenthesis and dashes. You know, [something like this {or this (or even this - though this one may be a touch ridiculous-)}].
Weight Update
I've not been keeping up on writing this, and that's alright. But I hit a milestone weight this last week. I'm down to 290, which is pretty much the lightest I've been since I moved back to Kinsley. Five more pounds and I'll be as light as Chel has ever known me.
She, on the other hand, has hit a bit of a mental plateau. Not that I can blame her though; between running the Girl Scout cookie sales, troubles at her job, and me being well, me; stress has become a major part of her life. That and a major setback to her weight loss - an ongoing medical problem which is going to limit her somewhat.
All in all, I've got about 15 pounds to lose before the second weekend in April.
Computer Update
Used the cash I got from my birthday to buy an upgrade for my tinkering rig. Jumped from that 256MB module I had left (see my last post) to a full GB of RAM and plugged in a 80GB second hard drive. I installed Xubuntu [1] on the new drive, so now I'm dual booting between that and WinXP.
Also trying a neat little XP program called VirtualCD (it's not freeware, btw). It lets you emulate a DVD/CD burner. Which means I can burn to CD [ending up as the 'image' of a disk] without actually using a CD. Will be very useful for getting those nice Apple proprietary files to work on A's media player. Which was the entire reason I put WinXP on in the first place!
Vacation Updates
Spring and summer is the time for vacations. And night shifts' Vacays start the first weekend in April. Nothin' like pulling a 7 on/7 off to start a month, eh? Not that I'm complaining too much, mind you. That mid-April paycheck should have 122 paid hours on it[2]. Combined with the dispatch-wide raise we got[3] will make sure anything I put off before our first trip to KC will get paid for. The next one will have 96 paid hours - still a boost compared to my normal 88.
I get more boosted checks for June: the one coming right before BOM will be another 122, mid-June will be 128. Since I'm taking Vacay to take Aubrey to Worlds of Fun over the 4th of July weekend, I won't get holiday pay; but if I end up working like I've offered to, that's 140 paid hours to get me from the 21st into August.
Sometimes, I just love working the system.
Hobby Update
I'm of the firm opinion that every man needs a hobby[4]. You know, something that he can be passionate about[4]. An activity that he can grab onto with both hands and really get into[4]. One of my coworkers actually has two: motorcycles (which didn't surprise me) and photography (which kinda did).
Mine is computers - if you hadn't guessed. I've got my tinker rig going pretty well, and over the next year or so, I'd like to save up the money to build my own computer. You can help. Click the Donate link to the left, and help me get the money I need to build my own computer.
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[1] That's the Xfce desktop environment on top of the Ubuntu distribution of Debian Linux. If you're willing to switch to a Linux environment, Xfce is fantastic solution for working on a computer with a slower processor or limited memory - in other words, a rig that chugs trying to actually do stuff on WinXP. I've since installed the K Desktop Environment. KDE a bit more of a memory hog (still pales in CPU usage to XP), but since I like the interface and workings of a lot of the KDE programs, I figured I'd go ahead and switch over.[a]
[2] I consider a 'paid hour' the amount of time worked to earn an hour's pay. For time and a half overtime, every 40 real minutes, you are paid as if you worked a full hour. [b]
[3] Our sheriff convinced the commissioners that it would be
- Cheaper than training a part-time newbie
- Cheaper than paying benefits for a new supervisor; and
- Much cheaper than paying the Deputies time and a half to sit in dispatch
[4] Other than the obvious.[c]
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[a] Not that you can't run K* (most KDE-based programs) under XFCE. In fact, I did for a while. But when you "apt-get install" a program (the preferred way of doing things) in a Debian distro (such as Ubuntu), all the program's dependencies - the files containing the instructions and other programs it needs to run - are installed as well. In Linux, the libraries (instruction files) are shared between programs[A]. Which meant by the time I had installed the few programs that I really like using (Kontact for email, Konversation for instant messaging, Amarok for tunes), I had pretty much installed KDE anyway. version 3.5, at least. I'm not in the mood to help beta-test 4.0.
[b] Which makes paid holidays kinda suck. The county awards holiday pay equally across the board: everyone gets 8 paid hours. Even if you work a 12-hour shift that day (like I have to when I work), you get 8 additional paid hours for the holiday; for a total of 20 paid hours [holiday pay does not count toward the 40 hrs/week OT start]. Which means that on a holiday, the exchange rate is 36 real minutes::1 paid hour.[c] Masturbation.
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[A] This makes patching some security issues much easier. If you fix a problem in a shared library, that fix extends to everything that uses that library. Compare that to Windows where nearly every program ships with its own sets of drivers and libraries.
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