Today I found the office that I was looking for (at a more than fair price). Crown should have no trouble approving the move and I should be moving my desks & PC’s into sometime late next month. The best part is that it is only about 3-1/2 miles from our house, and then another 1 mile to Clark College. Ideal for a little bike ride in the morning to school and then back to work.

Speaking of school, I went to my first debate class yesterday. That was interesting. I witnessed my first Parliamentary-style debate as a member of the peanut gallery. Right now I’m researching for my first speech which I’ll give at my first tournement at the end of next month. It’s an informative speech and as of now my top two topics are how the government and researchers are learning how to control hurricanes through making changes in the surrounding environments, and then my second-best topic is on new research on so-called Goliath Tarantula’s that have been seen eating birds.

Djai had his first taste of cat food today.
>;P
The fingers are quick to the mouth and the mouth is quick to shut!

Well, the server went down again yesterday for no apparent reason. I was doing a routine boot on it and when POST finished I got a screen filled with “L l9 l9 l9 l9 l9 l9 l9 l9 l9 l9 l9 l9″ about 20 lines down. Never to fear though, between the help of LinuxQuestions and Google, I found that this occurs when Lilo is configured incorrectly or corrupted. I booted off of the install CD and then mounted hda1, then ran lilo -M /dev/hda mba to reinstall Lilo to the Master Boot Record. I hoped that it would be this simple.

Then, when I booted without the CD in, low-and-behold, the Lilo bootloader comes up and shows me “Linux”. Problem seems solved except for one more issue: the network is now unreachable. I’m baffled at this one though because Lilo shouldn’t have had anything to do with my network settings and I haven’t updated any drivers or configuration for months. When I ran dmesg | grep eth1 I found nothing out of the ordinary. ifconfig showed the cards with their proper addresses but of course this isn’t really conclusive because I don’t have DHCP enabled on the server; both of the cards have been configured with static addresses. When I ran dmesg | grep eth0 I was presented with a series of errors headed by “NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out”. So, more searching ensued and I found several other users with the same issue (as is almost always the case). One said user fixed the problem by disabling Plug & Play and USB support from his BIOS because of an IRQ conflict with his Realtek card (same card as me). What the heck I say? Done and done.

Server is up and running again after almost 24 hours downtime.

Breanna Rose Gregory entered the world today at 9:59pm mst, born to Natalie and Noah Gregory. She weighs seven pounds, six and a half ounces. She is twenty (or twenty-one? Dad is a little too excited to remember) inches long. She has light hair and blue eyes. Mom and baby are both healthy and happy.

I will post pictures of her after I visit, hopefully sometime next month!

Looks like the workings of an office here in Vancouver is still a strong possibility. Shae and I seriously weighed out a move to Phoenix, AZ again this past week, but although it would be great in the short-term, we don’t think it will fit our needs in the future. There is plenty of opportunity down there for work, even outside my current field, but the cost of a move alone is too great. I imagine we will get a few more years out of Vancouver yet. I hear that Evergreen has some great undergraduate and graduate programs!

We are hoping to get into a new home this year. This house was great to get us into the area and into our own place, now it’s time to find something with a little more foundation. I just hope we don’t run into too much trouble trying to sell the place.

Wow… what a trip. Just uploaded all the photos that we took to. 2 cards worth! AZ Trip.

We’d like to extend our warmest thanks to the hospitality of Jeannie and William Byrne-White for letting us crash their house and turn it into a playpen for a week! It’s really good to be home in the PNW.

Shae and I are off to Phoenix again. I’ll be hitting all of our stores but with much more time this trip, no midnight work, and possibly a weekend off in the middle to visit with family? I like it. The stress with bringing a 9 month old baby along will be bearable and worth it in the end I’m sure.

Went to the doctor again today and now I will be going to see a physical therapist. I’m looking forward to that and also the “thumbs up” for some needed excercise. I’ve been worried about injuring myself further and tried to take it easy for the most part. I’m looking at an office in downtown Vancouver that is close enough to ride my bike to. It’s also only a mile away from Clark College to that will pretty much get rid of any vehicle need for me. I’m very happy about that. I can give my favorite finger to the oil companies!