Wired the living room in a fit of activity this evening. Turns out that it's quite easy to drill through carpet and floorboard, and I was reasonably sure that I wasn't going to hit a joist (by measurement -- I guess I could have used the studfinder instead.) Then just ran the cable through the office wall into the furnace room and up through the hole into the living room.

There's enough length to plug in a laptop anywhere along the windowed wall -- from my chair, to the couch, to Danielle's chair on the far end. Next step: the kitchen.

Our old server is failing. It has an old AMD chip with the sig 11 hardware error. I believe there's also some sort of a bus fault where the motherboard kicks off. Possibly also hardware problems with the memory. /dev/hda is failing quickly. /dev/hdc may be failing slowly, or not, but anyway occasionally hangs when I'm trying to write data to it, necessitating reboot.

I have a backup device: /dev/hdb, a CD-RW. When I try to mount it using ide-scsi, the system hangs. Clearly, I am not meant to back any of this data up.

The main inconvenience caused by the hardware problems is that compilation often fails with signal 11. I've written a batch script called 'repeated-make' which runs make until it finally succeeds, pausing between re-runs. It's tedious and annoying. But sometimes there are bright spots:

{standard input}:1594: Error: no such instruction: `pus'

No, that's only an instruction on the Cthulu processor, from HP/Compaq/Digital/Lovecraft.

I like things with few ingredients. Notably, beer: hops, barley, yeast; coffee: ground roasted coffee beans, water. Here's another one: Sunny Boy Cereal: wheat, rye, flax.

The correct way to cook Sunny Boy in my microwave is as follows: boil 1 cup of water. Mix 1/3 cup cereal with 1 c. water in a standard cereal bowl and stir. Place on saucer in microwave and cover with small plate (e.g., luncheon plate). Cook for 6 minutes on 40%, interrupting once to stir.

Prairie Sun Grains, makers of Sunny Boy, also sell barley. I wonder if they do retail.

So I'm working on running, with the ultimate aim of running a marathon before I hit thirty and get too smart to inflict serious joint damage on myself. I'm using a book, The Lore of Running, by Timothy Noakes, M.D. (Leisure Press: 1991), which includes a starting program for novice runners in addition to detailed discussions of running physiology. And it includes a stretching program.

I never realized this before, but stretching has to be tailored to each individual. Another brilliant flash of the obvious.

It sounds stupid to say it that way, because of course all exercise should be tailored to your goals, muscle strength, flexibility, and endurance, and stretching is part of exercise, right? But in fact, stretching is usually done en masse at the beginning of group exercise -- as a warm-up, and also to kill a little time to absorb latecomers.

Of course experienced amateur athletes do their own stretches beforehand, stretching the muscles they find important -- but then they participate in the group stretching program too.

Anyway, this stretching program in Lore of Running is good because it lists two to three stretches for each muscle, and recommends that you try various exercises until you find ones which stretch the appropriate muscles.

And it says you can expect results "after weeks or months."