Another Opinion Among Many

Yesterday was the last day of school for Caleb.  It was cute when he came home and burst through the door, exclaiming, “No more school!” yesterday.  You know they’re growing up when…

So, he’s going to his grandparents in Nova Scotia for a few weeks (that means play it by ear but at least 2).  Abby and I will take him over (Ange gets to stay and feed the neighbors chickens and turkeys).  We’ll be leaving in a couple of hours and I won’t be on the net until tomorrow or so.  Have a nice weekend, all.

This seemed to be scary movie (or fake scary movie) weekend for us.  Ange and I watched Scary Movie 4 this weekend as well.  This was funny in the same way as the previous 3 incarnations were.  The story is either getting a bit weak, or I’m just not getting the joke any more.  It didn’t seem to have the “oomph” that its predecessors had.  Nevertheless, this movie is watchable and won’t leave you wishing that you’d kept your money (as long as you go to the matinee or cheap night).  As John says, ” If you enjoy mindless slapstick humor as much as I do, then you’re going to like this.”

Synopsis, from IMDB:

Anna Faris and Regina Hall are back as the lovable, dim-witted Cindy Campbell and her self-serving, sex-crazed pal Brenda respectively. They are joined this time around by Craig Bierko as the cute, but utterly clueless, Tom Ryan. Together, they battle to save the world from a ruthless alien invasion. Cindy Campbell moves in next to Tom Ryan because she’s taking care of an old lady. She finds out the house is haunted by a little boy and goes on a quest in the village to find out who killed him and why. Also, Alien “Tr-iPods” are invading the world and Cindy has to uncover the secret in order to stop them.

I have to agree with John.  Watch this if you want to have a laugh or two, and for the references to other movies of yore.  Don’t watch it if you want to see a horror.

So, I was all ready for work yesterday, and quite proud of myself, as I’d used the time that Caleb was home (teacher development day) to help him out a bit more with his homework before work.  With that accoumploshed, I had my acket on and was ready to go out the door.  Just before I left, Abby came to me and said, “Daddy, I can’t get the seed out!” I asked what she meant, and, with a small tear, she pointed to her ear.  I looked in, and, sure enough, she had put a popcorn kernel in her ear, and then had tried to fish it out with her little finger.  This just resulted in her jamming it in farther - to the eardrum, actually.  I saw that this would be a delecate extraction and made the decision to take her to the ER and see if they would be able to take out the offender.  After 2 hours of waiting, mixed with about 10 minutes of trying, we were sent to the Regional Hospital (DECH, for those who live around here) to see the ear specialist there.  Another 2 hours of staring at the ceiling went by and we got in to see him (he was quite busy yesterday, actually).  After a quick flick with a pointy scary instrument, the kernel was extracted with no damage to the eardrum.  None of this digging was without pain, so I hope that bby has learned her lesson with ears.  first the hair and now the orifices.  This one’s gonna be trouble.  Don’t let the cuteness decieve you (I know, its hard, isn’t it).

As Tyra Banks has a belching contest on the TV in the background, I’m reminded that I’m not at work today. How about that. This zany mini-post exists so that something new has been posted to shake up the database. Spring break starts now for Caleb. His teacher will not be returning after, as she’s going to have a baby. She made a cute collage of pictures with win movie maker for the kids. It was cute. Oh, and its warmed up considerably. Its only -6°C right now.

BTW, I’ve noticed that Bad Behavior has blocked an extra 20 spam attempts in the last 2 days. If any non-spam comments didn’t get on the page, please email me about it.

I was looking at a few loose pictures (that’s most of ‘em, as I have a 4 and 6 year old), and came across one where I was helping Caleb stand up. He’s about 6 months old in this picture. Isn’t he a cutie?

That’s my boy (he even behaved back then!).

This posts sole purpose is to test patched execute-pings and functions-post files on post response times (and fix a trackback problem).

As you may have guessed, my username at Linuxquestions.org is Vectordrake. Why? It just so happened that I had Vector (3.0, I think) and Mandrake (9.0) installed on my system. I’ve been following Vector for quite some time - long before the days of broadband for Corey. It had a romantic draw because of its small size and the promised lean completeness. At that time, www.linux.org’s distribution list touted Vector as “A slimmed-down but complete Slackware.” Well, they were sorta right. I found that installing Vector and then trying to upgrade packages with Swaret from Slackware sources simply broke my nice default install. So, I didn’t get Slack without pain, for sure.

Life goes on and so does everything else. Vector recently release SOHO Version 5, which is a gorgeous default install with KDE and lotsa goodies, making it ready to use on most office workstations out of the box. That was nice, but I didn’t have enough disk space at the time to really explore it to its fullest (and Gentoo was missing me).

Well, now I have 4GB free for a spare OS adn there has been a recent release of Vector Linux Standard Edition version 5 (beta 1). I couldn’t resist. Here I am, posting to this blog in Firefox, decked out with all the plugins, on VL5.0 standard. I must say, its pretty well put together, as far as I can tell so far.

The default desktop is IceWM with a really nice theme along the same lines as the SOHO version was. Windows users would not feel to far out of place, as there is the familiar taskbar with a “menu” button, off of which various programs can be launched. I haven’t booted to the XFCE or Fluxbox desktops yet, but I’m sure that they are as polished as in previous versions. The login screen is simply fantastic, by the way. You are greeted with a windowmanager/task/user login chooser on a background that ripples like water if you mouse over it. There are also cute little penguins flying around on the screen (we won’t tell Vector, etc that penguins don’t fly…)

Here is a screenshot (click for a 1024×768 version):

There is nothing in this shot that isn’t in the default install. Cool, eh?

So far, I am impressed enough to play around in it between my interludes in Windows (gotta get through that MSOffice tutorial!). As I use it, I may come up with a better review, but, for now, I think this thing is pretty groovy!