Year: 2009

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett
The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett

Note: This review is based upon an uncorrected proof which I received via a giveway on GoodReads.

I don’t, as a rule, read True Crime; I do enjoy a good mystery. So when I saw this book being offered in a giveaway over at GoodReads.com; I felt I just had to enter.  Then when I was home sick the other day, the book arrived in the mail. Given I hadn’t yet noticed I’d won a copy it was a very pleasant surprise.

I moved the book to the top of my to-read list and once I started on it was glad I had done so. It’s strange; there’s no quick paced action,  no tense drama yet I couldn’t put it down. Maybe it was the author’s fasincation with Gilkey (the theif)  & Sanders (the “bibliodick”) or maybe it was the author’s own fascination with this private world of rare book dealers. It certainly wasn’t the characters that drew me in. Gilkey was given the most “pagetime” but he wasn’t very interesting. Simply an unrepentant crook (all protestations to the contrary) who choose credit card fraud as his easy method of living the good life, which happens to involve owning rare books. Sanders was slightly better but seemed too angry/bitter for much of the book.

While I’m still not sure why I enjoyed this book, it’s safe to say it was an good read.

While I’ve been out on furlough this week, I accomplished a few things around the house (though not perhaps as much as I would have liked) and in the process I learned a few things about myself.

  • I handle hot weather now about as well as I did when I was twelve, which is to say I handle it badly.
  • My hands do not have the same steadiness when painting a room, as they had 10-15 years ago.  While the overall job doesn’t look too bad, some of the trim work was done to less than my old standards.
    • Along those lines, I have to say I do not particularly like these foam brushes.
  • Honey-suckle bushes produce a lot of pollen.  Pollen that sticks really well to the leaves on a honey-suckle bush and which you won’t necessarily notice until you’re trimming the honey-suckle bushes and pulling out large branches.  Naturally the branches of a honey-suckle bush tend to intertwine themselves, so you have to pull really hard to get them out and yes, pulling them that hard also flings the pollen up off the leaves and directly at you.
    • While I’ve never been officially tested, I think I can safely say I am allergic to the pollen of a honey-suckle bush.
    • Also, if my wife ever convinces me to be the one to trim those bleeping bushes again, I will –at the very least– have to wear some sort of dust mask to keep the pollen from my sinuses.
  • I still hate plumbing projects.
    • Especially unexpected ones, like having your toilet break.
    • On the bright side, the toilet didn’t leak all over the floor and it was a repair simple enough I could do it myself.
    • But I still have plumbing.
  • All programmable thermostats are not created equal.
    • In particular, having one that divides the day up into 4 blocks that do not match your schedule just as bad as not having a programmable one.
  • A bike that has been reasonably well cared for and put in storage (e.g. hidden in back of garage) for a few years does not cost very much to be put back into ridable condition.
  • Riding a bike around my neighborhood is just as enjoyable now as it was when I first learned to ride.
    • After building up a good amount of speed, you start to coast along and it feels kind of like you’re flying.
    • While my knees & legs certainly don’t care for all the various hills around my neighborhood, those hills will help me get into shape as I ride around more.
    • And since Cedar Rapids is trying to be more “bike friendly” maybe some day I’ll be able to ride my bike to work.
      • That won’t be happening this year as: a) I need to get into better shape first and b) I still would have to get across Collins Rd during rush hour. *shudder*

So far this year, the weather has been just incredibly mild; we’d only hit 80+ degrees once prior to this week. Naturally this long string of lovely weather inspired me to save up some household tasks for this week, when I’m out of the office on furlough. And naturally enough, Mother Nature decided to punish me for that decision by making this the week that summer-style weather kicked in. Rather than those upper 70s to do my painting of the bathroom, cleaning out the garage, trimming the hedges, etc… I get upper 80s with a high enough humidity to make it feel like upper 90s. Of course, that’s just in the morning; this afternoon the prediction is for the temps to reach 95 degrees.

Blech.  This is like the North Carolina summers of my youth. I didn’t handle hot weather very well then and I don’t handle any better now. Double blech.

Being something of a linux/technology geek and with the recent-ish release of Ubuntu 9.04, I decided to upgrade my home desktop PC from Ubuntu 8.10.  Like the last time I ran through the upgrade, I was surprised at how smooth the upgrade process went.  Unfortunately 2 new problems appeared after the upgrade was complete, with once again one problem being rather minor and the other one being much bigger.

First up the minor problem, after rebooting into the new hotness of Ubuntu 9.04, I was greeted with a pop-up windo telling me “There was an error while performing indexing : Index corrupted.” The pop-up gave 3 options: “Ok”, “Cancel” or “Reindex all contents”. I tried all 3 but the pop-up kept coming back even after multiple reboots. The only thing I could initiall figure out to do was to kill the tracker
ps -ef | grep tracker
kill -9 XXXX XXXX XXXX

Yes, I know that’s probably a horrible idea but I rarely use the tracker’s search on my home PC so pbbbhhhhttt! A quick Google search later, I found a bug report on LaunchPad about it under which I found these instructions:
sudo aptitude install tracker-utils
tracker-processes -r

I apparently already had the tracker-utils  installed, so the first didn’t do anything for me. The second command above however shutdown the tracker and removed the indexes, so the tracker was able to recreate them cleanly. Since running those commands, the pop-up hasn’t come back.

Now on to the fun with the major problem. This was a case of network failure, specifically wireless network failure. While this is a desktop PC, I live in an old house without network cabling and my PC sits too far away from the ideal location for the router to run a cable. So I have a D-Link PCI wireless NIC in my desktop.  The NIC is based on the Atheros AR5413 chipset, Network performance has never been as good as a wired connection but it had been acceptable until this upgrade to 9.04 when the wireless stopped working.

I had been using ndiswrapper to load the windows driver for the card but that suddenly stopped working. I could see all the wireless networks in my neighborhood, but couldn’t connect to any of them (either networks secured with WPA or wide open ones). I started doing some research into the problem using other computers with working internet connections. I found that my router was getting blacklisted while my desktop was trying to connect and then it would timeout without ever making a network connection.

Also while researching the problem, I found out that there was now a new, open source driver which should be working with my wireless NIC (ath5k).  So I removed ndiswrapper, and tried out this new driver. Alas it wans’t particularly stable, dropping connection ever couple of minutes. However since my wireless NIC uses an Atheros based chipset, I had another option. I installed the madwifi driver via jockey-gtk (Ubuntu’s tool for installing restricted modules/drivers).  For whatever reason, activating the driver via jockey-gtk didn’t actually get it up and running. To test it, I used:

sudo modprobe ath_pci

To actually get the driver to load on every boot, I edited my /etc/modules file to include ath_pci.

The madwifi driver doesn’t appear to make as strong a connection as the ath5k did; the gnome network manager applet shows the connection under madwifi usually has ~45-55% signal strength (under ath5k & ndiswrapper I could get as high as 70%). However I’ve yet to lose a connection to my network while using the madwifi wrapper whereas ath5k would drop connection every couple of minutes and ndiswrapper would usually drop the connection at least once an hour (back on Ubuntu 8.10 where it actually worked for me). Also the madwifi driver allows me to connect to my network on boot-up; unlike ndiswrapper which always took some time to connect after I was booted up and signed in. So overall, I’m pleased with my new networking setup but would have been more pleased if the changes I made could have been done automagically by the upgrade process or if the upgrade process at least warned me that it might break my networking setup.