Lotta stuff

I don't know if its practical to write about all the stuff that's going on right now, but some things I've gotta get down. Foremost is what's on my mind right now: expectations for the girls. Gloria asked to go to a friend's house and Carolina said she wasn't ready. This prompted me to ask about what the expectations were for her to go. I was told that she needed to make sure her room was clean, and that the house was clean, and that she had practiced music and done her homework. I inquired about what cleaning the house entailed, and I was told that she needed to make some contribution to the house in general--just taking care of her own things wasn't enough. I then inquired into whether these expectations held true for Isabel. I was told that Isabel was responsible for making sure that the upstairs bathroom was neat. Then I was told that Isabel has been allowed to roam free regardless.

This last part is due mostly to me. I have been largely unaware of these expectations on the girls, and so when they asked me about permission to do a thing, I usually saw no reason to say no. Sometimes I said, "Ask your mother" , or "if its okay with your mother" because I was vaguely aware that she might have had some stipulations, but I had none.

So there's obviously been some disconnect. How come I didn't know about these expectations? Because I haven't been involved. There was a time however, where we came up with some mutual expectations. What happened to those? I guess they kind of disintegrated. Or morphed. Or something. At any rate, it is clear that my level of involvement has been somewhat lacking, and I intend to change that.

This exchange took place while I was working on the next budget. It always takes time to figure out where all our money is going and what changes have been made but not recorded. I'm now trying to figure out where the budget is lacking. Because it shows that we should have surplus money, but there has been none. So somewhere we're spending more than we should. But where? That's not easy to figure out.

Wireless bridge for Xbox, a work in progress

Last night I put my Xbox 360 in the living room. When I first got it, it was in my bedroom, and in order to get internet to it, I decided to create a wireless bridge with my laptop rather than buy the expensive wireless adapter. Then I moved it to the office, and didn't need to do that anymore because I could connect wired to the router. Now in the living room I need the bridged solution again, but I can't find the scripts I used before. I've gone through at least one new Ubuntu configuration since then. I saved my files, but apparently not that one. I tried recreating the script yesterday and today, with no success. I recently realized the problem may be I was trying to allow the Xbox to DHCP, but that isn't working. Before it had a static IP. Then I realized that there was a problem with my bridge, because when I assigned it a static IP I couldn't access the internet with the laptop. Have to do some more research later.

And...its working again

Today the problem I had with Kubuntu is gone. Boots with no problems at all. It wasn't connecting wirelessly automatically, but I probably accidentally unchecked 'connect automatically' when I was trying to figure out the problem yesterday. Go figure.

So I spoke too soon...

Today I went to boot into Kubuntu, and I ended up in BusyBox. When I added the b43 drivers to the kernel yesterday, the firmware installer went through the whole process of updating the bootloaders and such. But the perplexing thing is that I did a full shutdown yesterday and tested the new bootloaders and kernel right after I did the install and it worked no problem, but today...grrr!

I was able to boot into recovery mode and then startx with no problems. Haven't done any research on this problem yet, just needed to vent...

b43 not supported?!?

So I decided to boot into Kubuntu on my laptop this afternoon and was surprised to find I had no internet access. Inspection revealed that there was no wireless light, and the network manager didn't even show the wireless card. I am no stranger to this predicament; I dealt with it on a regular basis when I started my Linux journey in the Fedora camp. I'd never had this problem with Ubuntu though. I came across this page, and if I understand it correctly, my particular configuration is no longer being supported? Maybe it was talking about Xen? The weird thing is, I was using this same version with Kubuntu a couple of days ago and it worked with no problems. I didn't do the update to oneric, but I did do a bunch of updates. Was there a kernel update that I missed? I have no idea what happened. Luckily, the fix was as easy as (re)installing the b43 drivers.

sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer

All fixed.

Crazy Weinstein is finally on the web!

I posted more than two years ago about a SNL commercial that kept popping up in my mind from time to time. In 2009, I found very few references to it, but I did a search today, and now its on Hulu. (From what I've seen, Hulu content is not persistent, so the link may not be good after awhile.)

TP Blog?

And why in the heck did I call this thing TP blog? No idea. I think I just named it at random.

Blog?

Heh. I forgot I even had a blog. I just commented on someone else's page and it asked me to sign in. I picked my Google identity, but when it came up, it showed my blogger identity. And it had a link. When I clicked on the link, poof, up comes this page!

Now that I'm looking at it again, I'm thinking that its a good idea to continue with something like this. If for nothing else than a log to remind me of things. I'm always learning some new tech, but then by the time I need it again I've forgotten.

I kinda lost interest in the page when blogger forced me to move the page to their space. Before then, I had all the blogs FTPed to my own server space. Now that I think of it, I haven't done anything with that space lately either. Hmmm...