That took me over an hour and at the end of it all, I had over 100 burns that are now in the trash. It was nothing short of absurd how many different burns of Debian I had - I probably had every release since Potato for both x86 and sparc32. A few burns of early Ubuntu. A few revs of NetBSD/Sparc. Solaris Express. Even some old IRIX stuff. Lots of old divx movies before I had a dvd player and (more importantly) before anybody cared about it. An incomplete backup of my mp3 collection.

Most of it I had some memory for how I got it and what I used it for - lots of it was stuff I burned in college - which means that I not only drug it across State College a few times, but also across the United States and then a few times round in Washington. All for me to throw it away now.

So after about 4,000 pages, I'm less than a third of the way through the whole thing with about 20% of it still unpublished.

Shit. This may have been why I held off on reading it for so long. Oh well... They're not bad.

Well, that's not exactly true. In some ways they are bad. Like, what's up with "trollocs" rather than Orcs? And I could do without everyone being beautiful - I mean, it's a book... not a movie; eye-candy doesn't work that way. And it's so long! But I guess not bad.

A coworker, who coincidentally is about 5 years younger than me, has a Sun Blade 2500 that he loves to toy with similarly to how I used to be with my u80. He recently took it upon himself to install Opensolaris on it - and didn't have the best of experiences. He tracked it down to some trouble with the version of openfirmware he's got and more or less came to a standstill. That sucked. I didn't quite pay attention to the crap that he was going through to get the install to work though - but after looking at the site this morning, I'm nothing short of bewildered by Sun. Get this - to install Opensolaris 2009.06 onto a Sparc system, you first have to download the x86 release and use that on a supported piece of hardware to start the installation on a Sparc. That process then involves netbooting the Sparc.

So you're telling me that my Sun system - which has a DVD drive as well a CD burner in it along with USB and Firewire - not only has to be booted via the network (which by itself is fine, though sometimes a little painful) but that I have to use an x86 box also booted into Opensolaris to do it? Are you kidding me? I don't have an x86 system with an optical drive, but I do have a half-dozen Sparcs. I guess I'm out of luck without borrowing a laptop or dragging the machine somewhere else.

On one hand, it's impressive that it's even supported to install onto a system that's end-of-life. But on the other, this is Solaris on Sparc and it doesn't "just work"? Oh, how the mighty have fallen...

So anyways, I didn't really do anything. Well, not really. I drove Linda to work late this morning because it was raining pretty hard.

I took the opportunity of having the car out during the day to park underneath the office (the first half hour is free!) and drop off my SPARCStation 20 and 17" Sun monitor. I had been meaning to do it for a year probably, as I haven't turned it on in at least that long, and in my lab at the office I'll be able to give it something to do, but yeah - the last of my sparc32 gear is out of my condo. I've got everything for it - the 8MB VSIMM for 24bpp graphics, fast ethernet, wide SCSI, a video capture board, and a PCMCIA adapter (that I've never even used). There is definitely a void here now.

Then I came home and did some model painting. And read a book. And made a chicken salad sandwich.

I'm feeling sorta antsy now. This is how I like to spend my Sundays, but rarely get to do so. It's kinda strange going into a weekend already relaxed. Neat.

I won an award at work and they're sending me and Linda on a 5 days, all expenses paid, 5 star vacation to Mexico in February. This news came at just the right time, as I've been starting to feel the stress of my position quite a bit in recent months and some good news for my efforts is just what I needed. If I can make it a few more months, I'll get to enjoy a week of sitting around by the pool drinking iced drinks with absolutely nothing to care about. That'll be nice.

I finally got around to applying for a passport. From what the lady said, they're getting turned around in about 3 weeks which was way faster than I figured. Cool.

Iowa beat Penn State today, ending any chance that we had at a national championship. That totally sucks.

I this I might be taking it worse than last time. It's at least not as bad as when the Yankees lost to the Diamondbacks in the series a few years ago. Still, this feeling sucks.

Linda has this piece of graph paper with our entire week planned out. She is always saying "let's go to XYZ this weekend" but never has anything for us to actually do there, so I tend to veto these requests. She hates this. So she took this matter into her own hands and micro-planned the entire trip. I've got my work cut out for me next week to live up to the tourist expectations that her calendar has me scheduled to do... and just think: all I wanted to do was see a couple of Yankees/Redsox games at the stadium before they tear it down...

Saturday of next week, we're catching a train to Erie to see my family for a few days. I haven't been home in about 4 years so this is long overdue. Then we're flying from Erie back to Seattle. Well, that's not really true, we're flying from Erie to Cleveland, and from Cleveland to somewhere in New Jersey, and from there back to Seattle. That day is going to be pretty nasty. Then a full day off after I get back to Seattle before I return to work on Wednesday.

And that's my plan.

It was tough.