One weekend in February I switched over to KDE, but found there were things I had set up in Gnome that I was going to have to recreate in KDE. I didn’t have the time to do it then, so I switched back to Gnome. After working with Gnome for seven months, I’m somewhat used to it. There are still some things that are faster/easier in KDE than in Gnome, but I can still do those in KDE (by choosing KDE when I log in) and use Gnome as my day to day session manager. Switching to KDE briefly only requires logging out and back in.

The first time I was a FTE (full time employee) was a little over 4 years ago. Prior to that, I spent the majority of my work time working on clients’ computers with a typical time range between one week and three months. So, I’ve gotten used to working with whatever is available. Even though I upgraded over seven months ago, I hadn’t taken the time to really settle in. I got the urge to do that this morning. Here is what I ended up with (if you click on it, you can see it at 50% scale):

My rearranged workspace August 2010

• The background picture is of the rose bush that Andrea bought me for my birthday this year.
• The yellow notes are a handy sticky note application that I found this morning. I often have bits of text I want to hang onto short term and these are pretty handy for that.
• The system menus are the equivalent of the start menu in Windows. I’m not sure what the equivalent is called on a Mac.
• The quick icons are single click quick launch icons. Four of the seven are different web browsers which I use for various things. The other three are an X terminal (bash shell), my mail client and NetBeans. One of the things I miss from KDE is that you can set it so everything is single click launch.
• The workspaces are essentially virtual desktops. I started working with X Windows in the early 90s and this was one of the features that I really liked. I think both Macs and Windows have similar functionality although I’m not sure whether in Windows you need to run virtual machines to achieve the effect. Usually I run up to three applications in a virtual desktop. Each virtual desktop has its own Z-order and focus which allows switching desktops (and applications) without losing the focus in the one you are leaving.
• I think everyone has a system tray. The last icon allows me to switch to any active application. The only time I really use that is when I have more than 10 apps running at the same time.

Andrea & I have been accessing the Internet since the early 90′s. Over the years, we have used a wide variety of methods to connect to people. I remember doing things like connecting to a computer at a client’s site via the Internet with remote control software, firing up a text editor and using the text editor as a chat window.

Generally though, the way I’ve connected online with people over the last few years has been through writing in this blog, commenting in other blogs & posting in forums. Recently I’ve joined both facebook and twitter. For the most part, facebook provides an online connect to people that I know from somewhere else. I haven’t particularly seen it as a means to make new connections. On the other hand, I think that’s one of the main benefits of twitter.

One of the things that I don’t do is video & audio connecting. That’s because our Internet connection is via satellite and the latency is worse than dialup.

Anyway, thanks D’Arcy for giving me something to write about.

To a degree we can blame services like facebook & twitter. I use twitter quite a bit because it allows me to keep up with and interact with a large number of people with relative ease. Generally, interaction on twitter provides more immediate response which makes it more appealing. For the people who use facebook daily, I can see how having everyone’s content aggregated together makes it convenient/appealing as well. Since I’ve been using a feed reader for years it’s less of a convenience for me.

I expect there is another side of it as well. Until the advent of the web, most people had no place to talk/write that wasn’t shared by others. I think most of us had built up a large reservoir of thoughts and ideas that had had no outlet. Now that we’ve had a few years to write, most of the ideas and values we hold have had some form of airing. In a sense, we have less to talk about. Many of the things that are important to us have been read and responded to.

I shouldn’t be too harsh on Willingham. He’s not the only one avoiding this particular elephant in the room. Everyone who has ever been to school knows that school is prison, but almost nobody says it. It’s not polite to say it. We all tiptoe around this truth, that school is prison, because telling the truth makes us all seem so mean. How could all these nice people be sending their children to prison for a good share of the first 18 years of their lives? How could our democratic government, which is founded on principles of freedom and self-determination, make laws requiring children and adolescents to spend a good portion of their days in prison? It’s unthinkable, and so we try hard to avoid thinking it. Or, if we think it, we at least don’t say it. – Peter Gray

HT: Carlotta

A few weeks ago I put my name in to be featured as SB’s geek of the week. I got the message through twitter this morning that I was being featured this week.

About a week ago both Andrea & I were nominated to the WP Rockstar Showcase. We have been sitting in our current position of being on both the highest list and most rated list for the last few days. We wouldn’t object to you stopping by and giving us a boost tho’

I have also been sharing the writing with Andrea over on the WPMU Tutorials blog which is definitely one of the reasons I’ve been writing less here.

I’m not expecting to be less busy over the next few months. But, Andrea & I are considering a westward bound weekend trip in July. We just have to firm a few things up before we say too much about it.

About 44% of what I paid for the gas today was various taxes. At the high price I paid a few months ago, only 27% was taxes. Removing the taxes from both prices means that the price today was approx 27% of the high price I paid only a few months ago.

A few years ago I read an article which said that one of the big 3 was making an average of $11-12,000 on its top of the line gas guzzling SUV. So, IMO, the place the big 3 need to look for their lost profits & potentially assistance is big oil because once that gas guzzler was driven off the lot, the folks who have been making out like bandits from it have been big oil.

Again, just my opinion, but if the government is interested in bailing out the economy long term then the place where they should be investing is in green technologies. Investing in green technologies would reduce oil demand & consumption. An ongoing investment in that area would stabilize the prices of oil based products. What that should do for the big 3 is increase their sales enough to give them an opportunity to retool themselves to produce economically viable products.

Andrea sent me a link to some maze design research at the University of Waterloo, one of Canada’s prominent universities. I’ve always enjoyed mazes. What I find a bit amusing about the article is that in one of the programming courses I used to teach, I gave the students an assignment where they wrote a maze solving program.

Currently, comments on my blog are not working unless you are signed in. I haven’t had a chance to figure out why. In the mean time, if you want to leave me a comment, you can do it here.

Everyone in our house has the occasional tendency to start talking out loud midway through a conversation/train of thought going on in their head. Emma is no exception. There are times when she shows how astute she is.

Earlier this week Emma and I were in the office: her at one computer and I at the other. She asked me if we had any money left from selling the green house. I did explain that although we had spent most of it, we didn’t have to pay the bills for the green house anymore. She said nothing in the 5 minutes before or after that. Nor did she give any sign that she heard my explanation. But I’m sure she did. Prior to the sale of the green house she was aware we were running under a tight budget. For the last couple weeks the belt has been loosened a notch or two. Since last weekend we were planning on a shopping trip to Fredericton for this weekend. It may take a few months for her to realize that still having the green house was why we had to run on a tight budget, but I’m sure she will eventually.

Last night while sitting at opposite computers from the last story Emma asked, “Doesn’t war makes them bigger?” with a hint of don’t be silly. Again this came out in the middle of a good spell of silence. I looked over at her screen. She was watching the Schoolhouse Rock DVD. I had to watch the video for about a minute (the volume was low enough I couldn’t catch all the audio) before I figured out what this particular episode was about. It was explaining DEFICIT using a household budget to illustrate spending exceeding income. If we were a household that watched the nightly news, news channels, read the daily papers, etc. then I probably would have expected something like this from her. The truth is that we DON’T buy newspapers, watch news channels or the evening news. I’m still thinking through where she might have garnered the information for this conclusion. Out of the mouths of babes.

When I wrote the Part 1 post, I had already learned that I was missing an adapter to connect the vent to the pellet stove. I am going to Fredericton in the morning to get it.

The story behind the story on that is that when I ordered the pellet stove I also ordered a vent kit for it. The pellet stove came in 2 days after I ordered it, but the vent kit did not. The folks at the store where I ordered the stove spent 2 days trying to find a kit somewhere in Canada in their distribution channel and failing that, when some might arrive in Canada. They were not able to find that out, so, I told them I’d see if I could find one over the weekend and I’d let them know on Monday whether or not to cancel the order. I did find one via the telephone over the weekend and arranged to pick it up locally on last Thursday.

When I called on Last Friday to ask about the adapter I was expecting that I would just be able to pick one up on Saturday. The folks where I bought the vent were not familiar with it and I had to get Andrea to look up the part number. They looked it up, and I was able to arrange ordering. The line of pellet stoves that they sell are designed to connect to the vent without the adapter. So, that’s something to keep in mind to check about the pellet stove since most of the ones that I’ve seen pictures of have the same exhaust outlet as the one we purchased.

Even though I knew at the beginning of last weekend that I would not be able to completely install the vent, the missing adapter did not prevent me from working on the install at all. Prior to the weekend, Andrea and I had moved the pellet stove (weighs about 230 lbs) into what would be a rough guess at its final location. This is somewhat dictated by the vent requirements (at least 4′ from any door or window, at least 18″ above grade, etc.). And once it was there, it looked right, if you know what I mean. In it’s rough position, we haven’t pushed it close to any of the tolerances (i.e minimum distance to walls, etc.) so we will be able to adjust it to a good fit for the vent. I did a bit of math to ensure that I would be in a position to make some final adjustments. but I’ll save that for another post.

Last Saturday, I was away for about 8 hours which put a bit of a dent in the work time for the weekend. But I chose Saturday for that because it was supposed to rain most of the day (which it did). On Saturday night I removed all of the remaining plaster needed to install the thimble and remeasured using the partially assembled vent to ensure that I was on target.

Installing the thimble requires that the opening in the wall be framed in. The issue that I wanted to deal with before I started framing the hole was keeping the cellulose insulation above the opening from falling into the opening while I worked. The interior wood wall made this easier, but the same approach could be used with the sheathing on the outside of the house. This is the basic process I followed:

• I drilled 3 3/16″ holes above that square that I was going to cut out.
• Using a spade bit, I drilled a 1″ hole at each upper corner of the square to be cut out.
• Using a reciprocating saw, I cut a rough 1″ hole across the top of the square between the 2 holes made with the spade bit.
• I cut 2 pieces of double strength corrigated cardboard about the length of the hole (9″) and 1/4″ narrower that the depth of the wall cavity. (This implies that I measured the cavity to see how deep it was.)
• I put the first piece of cardboard in through the hole and pushed it lengthwise until one end of it was up against the stud on one side of the opening.
• I put the second piece of cardboard in and pushed it against the opposite stud.
• Finally, I pushed the cardboard up above the 3 holes drilled in the first step and pushed a 4″ spike into each of the 3 holes drilled in the first step.
• The result looked like this:

On the inside wall, the 9″ opening was cut out of the middle of a single board which is at least 12″ wide. I lucked out in choosing this this spot for the vent because the board had a crack near the bottom where the opening was going to go. So, for the next step I did not have to drill the bottom corners with the spade bit. Following the template I’d drawn on the board, I cut the sides of the opening down to the crack and removed the rectangle of board. The insulation behind it looked like this:

To complete the framing in:

• I removed the insulation to about an inch below the bottom line of the template and about an inch to the left of the opening and put it into a grabage bag. (The opening is deliberately about 1/2″ from a stud on the right.)
• I cleaned up the hole using the reciprocating saw to square up the 3 sides already rough cut and cut the bottom line.
• I cut the 3 pieces to frame in the hole.
• After dry fitting the frame, I pushed the top of the frame up against the 4″ spikes and pulled the spikes out of the wall.
• After getting the top frame piece in its final position, I drilled 2 pilot holes above the opening and used 2 wood screws to secure it in place.
• With the bottom piece of the frame being held roughly in place by the insulation under it, I secured the side using 2 pilot holes and wood screws.
• Note: I added a temporary wood screw to the side and bottom to make it easier to maneuver them once they were inside the wall cavity.
• Finally, secured the bottom piece of the frame using 2 pilot holes and wood screws.
• Once the opening is cut in the outer sheathing, the framing will be secured to that, the existing stud and to the other pieces of the frame.
• Here’s the final result of the weekend’s work: