Just a quick note to announce the release of fido 1.0.0 Beta 1. It's definitely a beta, there are definitely bugs in it. Let me know about them as you find them, and I'll fix them. Have fun, and be careful - I'm pretty sure I didn't code "rm -rf /", but hey, the nights get long...

Friday, August 17 - Free at last, free at last...

Whew. Made it to Friday. This has been one of those weeks where the issue was definitely in doubt.

I spent some time last night priming the rockets; that went fairly well, now tonight I'll sand and smooth the finish, then paint tomorrow at Sue & Jon's shop. So far, they're really looking pretty nice. Progress is being made on the report page as well.

I also spent time at MINERVA, updating KDE to the new 2.2 release. That did not exactly go smoothly; I had a lot of dependencies unsatisfied for some reason. The updated packages required were all available from Cooker, Mandrake's "beta" or "unstable" distribution; here's the final list of all the packages I needed to complete the install:

• apmd-3.0final-19mdk.i586.rpm
• libpcre0-3.4-3mdk.i586.rpm
• libpcre0-devel-3.4-3mdk.i586.rpm
• libsane1-1.0.4-2mdk.i586.rpm
• libsane1-devel-1.0.4-2mdk.i586.rpm
• pcre-3.4-3mdk.i586.rpm
• xanim-28010-14mdk.i586.rpm

Overall, this is definitely a good upgrade.

Ooops, now it's time to hit the road. See you later...

Thursday, August 16 - August 16? Really? You serious?

How on Earth did that happen?

Didn't get anything done on the rockets last night, since Keri and I spent the evening at the University of Washington at a Seattle Astronomical Society meeting. Yes, another new/old hobby. I have rocketry, we're both doing astronomy, and Keri's got quilting. That's enough for now. Not including saltwater fish, computers, programming, reading, painting... we needed a couple of hobbies, you see...

Work went OK; a couple of "uh-oh's", but no more than the usual amount. All dealt with successfully. Tonight, there's nothing planned, so I'm hoping to get a coat of primer on each rocket, work on the report page for them, and maybe - just maybe - relax with a book for a while.

Until then...

Tuesday, August 14 - Quick Image Links

Just a fast update; I'm working on the report page, but when I was working on the rockets I didn't realize just how many steps there were. <G> So, anyway, the images are dumped to a directory or two here. Sorry there's no text to go with them yet, I'm working on a report page. Both kits are complete, except for finishing; I'll start that tomorrow night, and post pictures of the finished rockets later. Incidently, the larger rocket - the kit "Phobos" from Public Missiles, Ltd - is the <SEG>, and the smaller is... is... well, it just is right not. It'll probably be the <g> since in many ways it looks like a smaller version of the other, but I'm not entirely certain yet; I'm not as happy with it as I am with the <SEG>, since I used it as an experiment to get my building skills back in-line.

Anyway, they're there. Report page later. See you later...

Tuesday, August 14 - OFIM Well, no, not really. Monday, I mean. It's Tuesday.

Sorry about the long silence, but it's been an... interesting few days. The end of last week was consumed by a massive argument here at work; you see, one of my jobs is to evaluate designs from engineering, assist in their implementation, and operate them once they're in place. It's another of my jobs to define and document the operations standards for Microsoft-based systems in AT&T Wireless's production network.

Now, the problem I faced was a project, dumped on us with no warning, that did not meet our standards. This is complicated somewhat by the fact that not all of the standards are properly documented as yet; this is one of the problems that will be (I hope) assisted by the hiring of my new team, which I should complete today.

Now, I have yet to see a project come in that's completely acceptable on the first try. That's not entirely the fault of engineering - part of the problem is that they don't have a lot of experience with Windows operating systems, and the rest is the lack of documentation. So projects usually require a bit of tweaking before I sign off on them; the process varies in length somewhat, but it's usually not that difficult; I make recommendations, they get modified and discussed in a couple of meetings, and we move on. In this case, however, the first notification I had of the project's existence was the appearance of some rather skimpy documentation, listing a due date only a few days away and mentioning that the systems were already purchased and being racked. To make a long story short, the design's crap and the project team is trying to force me to accept it anyway - after all, once I accept it, it becomes my responsibility to fix any problems.

Rather than accept that they'd been caught, the project team, including the head of the engineers involved, decided to fight it out instead. Bad move. I was right, I had documentation to prove it, and I had the documented evidence of the engineer on the project - who got shafted as badly as I did - supporting my conclusion. In short, I won. Still, it wasn't pleasant, and it left me a bit too tired and stressed to do much of anything else.

The weekend was planned to be split between working on the fish tank stand and a new/old hobby - more on that in a moment - but things didn't go as planned. Saturday was spent relaxing, with no motivation to do anything resembling work, withJon and Sue on Camano Island. Sunday was going to be "work" on the stand, but both Keri and I came down with something that appears to have been mild food poisoning - we didn't do much of anything on Sunday, really.

So, the old/new hobby. Well, I've decided to get back into rocketry. I started pretty young, and enjoyed flying Estes kits and scratch-built rockets off and on into high school. I slowed down in high school because I'd pretty much hit the wall; there just wasn't anything else I could do with the materials available. College killed it completely - when you're working on a team to build a rocket to go fifty miles straight up, a 1000' max cardboard tube doesn't hold much fascination.