Sunday, December 19, 2004
Patrick and I almost died last night / this morning. I woke up and the apartment smelled funny / bad. We thought it was the trash, which had some old chicken bones and other food substances. Patrick tied up the bag and left it by the door, but after a few minutes it still smelled bad, so I took the trash out and dumped it in the outside garbage bin. Still, it smelled funny, so we opened a few windows. As we were preparing for breakfast, Patrick noticed that the burner was on but the flame had gone out. Fortunately, it was only on the lowest setting. And, fortunately, I didn't light the pine-scented tea lights like I had thought about doing. It reminded me of the time I got home from clubbing and was really hungry and started some french fries in the toaster oven but fell asleep before I could take them out and eat them. Patrick dreamt last night that Chris De Lay had come to visit us again and they had a disagreement about ginseng. Dishes. Breakfast: bagels and cream cheese. Today we made plans for Christmas Eve (dinner at 2223 Restaurant), Christmas morning (dim sum brunch at Harbor Village followed by ice skating), and New Year's Eve (5-course tasting meal with 5 fresh crop whole leaf teas at Samovar). Reviews start coming back for Lodestar—they are mostly simple changes. House chores: dishes, laundry, floor cleaning. Nap. Patrick and I started making some holiday cookies using a recipe we found at sfgate.com. Dinner at home with Patrick: orange, shrimp, and peas risotto. I began rebuilding frankfarm.org which has been offline for about a month (I haven't been keeping track). I'm installing OpenBSD 3.6 and I'll tell you right now they say it's easy but it's just not. I grew up with Unix but this was a pain and took several hours just to get the install finished and connected to the net. The first problem was that I didn't order the CD from the website. In retrospect, I suppose I would order it for a future install. The second problem was having to read all the pages and pages of how to correctly partition the disk during installation. So time-consuming—they need a wizard for this decision process. The third problem was their confusing terminology. When they ask for "DNS nameserver?" I thought they meant what IP address do I want for my nameserver? Instead, this question means: what is the nameserver IP address given to you by your ISP? Since I accepted the default of "none" (because I didn't want to run DNS on this server), I was later unable to complete the FTP setup—the ISO they give you doesn't come with all the files you need. I tried creating the ISO cd with all the required files, but everywhere on the net people have instructions for Linux and BSD but I had to piece together instructions for Windows from a couple of different sites. Essentially, the idea in building that ISO is to download all of the files separately, then use a Unix utility called mkisofs to create the ISO. There were a number of stumbling blocks along the way, such as mkisofs requires Cygwin, and the newest version of it isn't distributed as an exe so you have to get a compiler working. All these things were more trouble than it was worth—I tried but could not get everything to work. Instead, I downloaded the files I needed and just burned them to a blank disc in Joliet format then insert it at the point where they were requested. Another terminology problem is the question of "Default route?" I guessed correctly—the correct answer to this question is to respond with the gateway IP address of your ISP or your net connection. I resolved the missing DNS setting by creating /etc/resolv.conf and adding the IP address with "nameserver " in front of it on a single line. The fourth problem I had was that my cdrom somehow didn't get added to the default mount points. I used dmesg to figure out what the device name for it was, then edited /etc/fstab to include it so that it could be mounted with the mount command. Still haven't figured out how to see USB drives, though I suspect it's similar. I downloaded and got Gunnar Wolf's tepatche installed and running (after more separate downloading and burning of the sys and src files), tomorrow I'll be attempting to rebuild the kernel with patches. We got a beautiful photo holiday card from Brian and Kelly today—a close-up of winter persimmons and chiles taken from a cart at the farmer's market.