of mice and presistance

Well it's Sunday night a little after 10 PM and I'm re-installing Solaris 9 on my Sun Ultra 5 workstation. I just couldn't get the network card to work so I'm hedging my bets that a complete re-install may do the trick. It's been quite the ride with this workstation so far, I purchased it for a song, upgraded the memory only to find out that maybe the NIC is shot! I won't give up yet, have much more research to do on the net to get this puppy going. This little baby is going to be my web server to house a myriad of web pages on all my projects, interests and so forth. I also have my Linux box running Mandrake 10.1 which I'm currently using to blog at this very moment. It is very stable, never gives me any problems, but has to be configured properly as I can't get a few things working on it properly. I think eventually I may go with a Shuttle for my Linux box. I'm not a gamer nor am I a super power user. I'm going to occasionally do some video editing and audio recording, but mostly just coding and web page development. I just would like a very quiet machine that is very very stable. My nephew gave me a bunch of books on UNIX and web programming which just floored me, so in the next few months I hope to get some things done in that department as well, which will mean many late nights as I only get to hack at night after my little girl goes to bed. That's it for now, I'm heading off to bed to do a little work and then hit the hay as they say!

On February blahs, cars, and inner-peace

I had promised in my last entry that I would write about my upcoming trip to go and pick up my EV conversion candidate. The planned trip never transpired as my pick-up truck was diagnosed with a severe allergic reaction to actually being reliable. In truth part of the fuel system was leaking and I decided to forgo repairs and get rid of the truck once and for all. Following a friends suggestion I dontated the truck to the Quebec Kidney foundation where they partner with a salvage company and sell vehicles for parts and recoup a percentage of the funds to help kidney research, finally my old pick-up truck will be put to good use. The car I purchased up at my sister's was in better road condition than we previously thought so I took the bus up last Friday morning and my sister and I returned in the Festiva the next day, the trip was memorable, mechanically un-eventful and provided my sister and I some 8 hours of much-needed catchup time. Needless to say the travelling sapped the energy out of me and so I find myself rather light-headed as I type this entry.

It is the latter, trailing end of February, my little girl is now 2 years old as yesterday was her birthday, where has the time gone? I always find it difficult to deal with the end of February and begining of March, the lack of sunshine and the general slowdown after the busy frenetic pace of the holidays is always a downer. Although I don't partake in the hectic pace, it's always energizing watching people go to and through during the day, now everything is rather calm. You would think that the calmness would actually be welcoming, but somehow it has the adverse affect, or maybe I'm just dealing with my SADS (Seasonal Affective Disorder Syndrome). I'm just restless and eager to get on with a few things, more on that in another entry of course. All in all I'm at peace with myself for many things, life is good over all, my little girl is healthy and so is my wife, my own health is ok, although lately I've been feeling a bit anxious which is causing my heart some troubles, nothing serious, but my heartbeats have been a bit off.

That's it for now, hopefully I'll have more soon.

Once an ECHO driver always an ECHO driver

Well I brought my Toyota ECHO today to our local Toyota dealer to have them evaluate it . You see as part of my upcoming electric car conversion I will need funds and I was hoping on selling the car back to Toyota and getting some funds to pay down the car loan and put some towards the EV project. Well, they evaluated my car and the offer they made me was laughable, so I've decided to keep the car at least until the Spring and see what happens next. I'm not totally disappointed as I do like my ECHO and it runs really well, I registered my truck this week as I'm going to go pick-up the EV candidate up in my sister's town of Rimouski, Quebec. I'll have more on that trip as I near the date of departure of Feb 18th.