Gearing Up

All of the kids’ schoolbooks arrived yesterday, so I spent the afternoon straightening out the kitchen and arranging a shelf for all of their school supplies. I still need to get crayons, glue, staples, pushpins, and a large corkboard, but we’re on the road to being ready when September rolls around. Marcus will be starting a first grade curriculum and Becca will be doing pre-K. I’ll see how she does–she’s a November birthday (and late November at that) but since I’m homeschooling, I have a bit of freedom and can weather the occasional all-out tantrum.

Assuming that I have a working car in time, I’ll enroll to two of them in gymnastics and ballet (or rather, tumbling and pre-dance). There are a lot of schools locally, but I really want to check on their teaching methods before I sign the kids up for anything. The car is also kind of necessary for getting to and from the schools in the first place. So it goes.

I can’t wait for summer to be over.

Tap, Tap, Tap

Right. Long time, no write.

I have an excuse, though. Business picked up. No sooner had I wrapped up a major contract than the kids and I were on a train to visit my parents for a week.

Got back, got sick, signed a new contract. I’m loving the work, since it forces me to manage my time.

I’ve also got a logo and hang-tag design in progress for a friend, and well, I’ll be hopping for the next few months at this rate. Hopefully, though, I’ll manage to update more frequently.

The Third Commandment

MySQL went onto OS X without much of a hitch using DarwinPorts, as did updated versions of PHP, Perl, and various modules therein. PostgreSQL seems to be working, but something about Movable Type causes it to not be accessible via ObjectDriver–a stub program I wrote in Perl can access the data in a test database via DBD::Pg just fine, but MT chokes on the same username/password/database combination in mt.cfg.

Math::Pari can kiss my grits. Crypt::DSA made me cry. I despair of ever making sense of that mess of hacks, patches, and recompiles.

ImageMagick can take a hike. I gritted my teeth and installed NetPBM instead. Maybe I’ll use the DarwinPorts version of ImageMagick and see if it plays nicely with PHP; other than that, though, I’m sick of it.

I’d hoped to get MT3.01D working in a PostgreSQL environment, but ended up using MySQL for it instead. It’s installed, however, and working nicely.

Having root is overrated.

Learning Experience

I will confess, I have never installed software on a Unix system before today. (Content management systems don’t count.) This is largely because I have never had root access, but never mind that.

I am hating every minute of this.

“So, how long is this going to take?”, I asked Matthew as I watched my terminal screen hang a few lines after typing “sudo port install ‘ImageMagick'”.

“Depends… what’s it hanging on?”

“It says, ‘Building XFree86 with target World’.”

“Um… you’re going to be doing that for a couple of hours.”

As Marcus would say, “Dagnabbit.”

Chore Leave

So, on the list of things I ought to do this weekend we have:

* Download and install MySQL, PostgreSQL, and ImageMagick on my iBook.
* Download MT 3.01D, pMachine, Expression Engine, and S9Y to my iBook for later installation.
* Wash, dry, fold, and mutilate massive amounts of laundry.
* Practice reading with Marcus.
* Practice numbers with Becca.
* Clean up hot spot next to the couch.
* Find tiramisu. Buy tiramisu. Eat tiramisu.
* Turn 25.