Thu Jun 19 06:17:58 PDT 2008

Flu sucks. I've been down with it for the last two days. Today I'm feeling a bit better — a little bit, mostly with lots of drugs. We'll see if I make it in to $WORK today or not.

What else have I been doing? Let's see…

• Our Roku SoundBridge M1001 has died after just over a year, which turns out to be a semi-common thing. Fortunately I've found a local electronic repair store that I'm hoping will fix things up. Other than that I've been fairly happy with it; it's definitely a lot handier with the SoundBridge Commander, though.

• Started playing with Xen on my web server. I'm going to try setting things up more complicated than they are now, but hopefully more secure: one instance to serve files, with /home (where all the sites are) mounted read-only; one with a database server; one for mail; one for SSH access; and one with the bag of passwords (LDAP, probably). Yeah, it's hopelessly baroque for a home server with, what, 8 websites, but it's a work in progress and it's fun to play. :-)

• Installed the Awesome window manager after reading about it for the nth time. Happy so far, but I'm still exploring.

• Tried making bread that rises overnight. I got into the habit of making my own bread at the beginning of the year, and I really got used to it. But two kids means much less time, and half an hour to mix and knead the dough is getting hard to find. So the latest trick has been using the KitchenAid and its dough hook (I did it all by hand previously), and fiddling with the amount of yeast so that, in theory, it'll rise overnight and be ready to bake when I get up at 5:30am to go to work. This used to work, but now I'm having problems with it collapsing. That may be because I'm using instant yeast rather than the regular, active stuff. Updates will follow as events unfold.

And that's that. Time to put together some lunch and see about going to work.

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