As you may recall, neither Fred nor I are singing with the full chorus in the upcoming show. We are doing the smaller ensemble, though, and had our first rehearsal last night.

The show’s theme is movie songs, themes and otherwise, and as a smaller group we get to chip in cool little extras. We’ve done two of our three numbers before: an up-tempo version of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” and a rhythmic, nonverbal accompaniment to “Circle of Life“. Our third number is a medley of James Bond songs, including the best of ‘em all, “Live and Let Die“, with the ensemble doing the Paul McCartney part and the chorus singing “You know you did you know you did you know you did” and syllables for the major instrumentation. (I’m a little sad; I really wanted to do the chorus’s “nah nah nah! nah nah nah! nah nah!” bit.)

“Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” is going to be a cakewalk; we’ve performed it a jillion times. The James Bond bit isn’t that difficult, and should be exciting (graphics of Daniel Craig in that little swimsuit notwithstanding). I’m a little concerned about “Circle of Life”, though; not only is everyone singing a different part than they had before, and not only are we taking a dramatically different tone this time (boisterous and celebratory instead of soft and insightful), but we also have to break more than a few people of their longstanding overdone-vibrato habit.

Ah well. Should be a good show anyway.

OK, so yes, I am posting more on my ongoing dental saga. It’s a notable situation in my life at the moment, though, so tough cookies.

Last night was the initial wave of treatment on #12. After a very bitter topical anesthetic and some injected lidocaine the dentist and his assistant got to work scouring out infected portions of tooth. (Even though I couldn’t feel a thing, I could hear every scrape through bone conduction; this was rather unpleasant.) Because the infection has reached the pulp as well, a simple filling is inappropriate, so I have an appointment on Super Duper Fat Tuesday to get started with the root canal.

There is a temporary filling in there now to protect the exposed tissues. It feels a bit weird, mostly because I had just gotten used to the minor gap left when the original tooth broke. It looks natural at first glance, though further examination reminds me of the germ at the center of a kernel of corn.

More on this later, as things develop further.

+++

I have created a monster…

We’ve been looking at houses lately, thanks in part to the price cuts that result from poor sales and in part to a super-sweet benefit of the ol’ employer (forgivable loans for down payments!). Sadly, though, just when we find a neat place in our price range in a qualifying neighborhood, it gets sold FAST. (Aside: we should so market this. “Find a buyer! Just pay us $X; we’ll feign an interest in your place and somebody else will snatch it up!”)

In discussing our situation the other day, we considered that maybe it just isn’t time for us to buy just yet. I attempted to be facetious and sent Fred a link to the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, saying “let’s just buy some cheap land and get one of these”.

I didn’t expect him to fall completely in love with the idea.

Granted, those are brilliantly efficient designs, especially on the mobile-sized plans that don’t waste a single cubic inch. They don’t cost very much, their energy efficiency is just sick — one woman averages $5 PER MONTH for all of her cooking and heating fuel needs — and they can theoretically go just about anyplace. I would love to have one of these (the Weebee!) as a vacation home or as a little writing studio or something, but I don’t know that I could stand to live in one full-time.

Fred’s coming around. We’re still thinking small — it’ll save us heating, cooling, and electrical costs, plus it’ll be easier and faster to clean and it will prompt us to ditch a bunch of stuff we don’t actually use — but he’s no longer talking about chucking all our furniture and moving into a hundred square feet.

+++

Yeah, writing studio. What of it?

+++

New server is running pretty well as long as I remember not to emerge world very often. (After all, it IS only a 333MHz processor.) I’m still kinda sorta maybe thinking of installing distcc and having my work box do the heavy lifting on behalf of the home server.

That said, I see that Apple’s Time Capsule — you know, the OTHER bit of hardware Stevie introduced the other day — would consolidate storage and all network infrastructure into one pretty pretty package that maxes out at only 30W (less than either the drive enclosure or the laptop). I just don’t think I’m ready to drop $300 or $500 on it, though.

+++

Time to go; have to eat my very soft lunch.

Just as the pain and swelling from the one tooth subsided, another tooth elsewhere in the mouth started making trouble. In a lovely little bit of placement, though, this one is on the jaw itself and has a sharp edge that scrapes up the left side of my tongue. Scraped-up tongues tend to swell, and that has made the sharp edge even more difficult to avoid, which causes further scraping, further swelling, etc. Swollen tongues also make ordinary speech very difficult to understand, so I’ve had to get wildly exaggerative with my facial expressions and the non-lingual bits of consonants.

A friend of ours gave Fred a great suggestion for a temporary fix, though: melt candle wax, let it partially set, and pack it around the sharp bit. It’s an odd taste and an even odder feeling, but it works, as evidenced by my mostly-coherent speech and my renewed ability to chew and swallow without pain. I’m being extra-cautious about the temperatures and textures of my food, though, as I don’t want to melt or mangle my improvised crown.

I see the dentist tomorrow morning and again next Wednesday. Hopefully we can work out something a little more permanent.

+++

Nigel is still out of service; apparently his tires would have to be ordered from a warehouse, which delays things somewhat. I don’t really mind riding the bus to and from work, but it would be nice to Just Go sometimes without all the extra planning for transfers.

+++

Speaking of work, it was eerily quiet these past few weeks, but now that the winter break is over it’s picking up again. The quiet was kind of nice — made a bunch of patch cables and got a few other large-ish projects done — but it’s even nicer to stay busy with “real work”.

+++

Did the bulk of the whole Yule thing with Fred’s family on New Year’s Day. We had had a preview showing a few days earlier when my father came by to have me check out a computer issue (isn’t that how it always is?); he brought a couple presents, including a Roomba, which will be the first member of my robot army once it finishes the living room rug. Fred’s folks outdid them, though, giving us (among other things) a bread machine and electric grill which will need to find a home in our crowded kitchen.

+++

The Powerbook named rupaul got rebuilt with the Gentoo “hardened” toolchain and a different file system. Unfortunately, hardened is very very shaky on PPC, so I’ll probably go back to the regular toolchain for now and switch again later once the herd stabilizes a bit. Sticking with XFS, though, as it mounts faster and seems to perform better on this hardware than reiserfs.

I have a PCMCIA USB 2.0 card and an external hard drive enclosure en route. Once they arrive, the old server (”pangloss”) will be going down, and all of its data will be backed up off-site (woo-hoo rsync and a fat pipe) before the big drive gets re-partitioned. Since pangloss manages DHCP and DNS for the local network, though, the transition will require a little more reliance on the sometimes-flaky VOIP router (which is going to get replaced soon, just you watch). Since pangloss also hosts a local mirror of the portage tree, the transition is also going to stall some tree updates on my work box until I can get rupaul settled.

Also, I’m very tempted to sing “you bettah WORK!” every time I reboot rupaul to try a newly-modified kernel.

+++

Chorus rehearsals started Monday for the spring show. We weren’t there for the big chorus, but we will probably be doing the small ensemble again once that starts in a couple weeks.

School also started again Monday. This semester I’m taking a sociology class and a short fiction class. I’d much rather be taking something more major-specific, but there was nothing available that I hadn’t done and for which I had all the prerequisites. (boo.)

+++

So, caucus and primary season is upon us. I find it fascinating that the turnout so far is a smidge higher on the Republican side and a whole fucking lot higher on the Democratic side, yet all our “liberal” media can talk about is “HILLARY WAS EMOTIONAL THEN SHE WON OMGWTFBBQ”.

That said, it is extremely tempting to look into being a delegate to the DNC this summer, if only to see for myself how it all goes down.

+++

More later, I think.

Well, between the dental drama, a few other money-type commitments, and the sometimes-iffy availability of the hardware itself, I think I’ll wait on the Kurobox. Still looking for something smaller/quieter/more energy efficient, though.

Today, while digging through shelves at the office I stumbled across an unused “bronze keyboard” Powerbook that appears to be in good condition. The wheels got turning, and I got to thinking about converting it to a home server. To do so, I will need to purchase a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card and either an external enclosure for the existing PATA drive, an external enclosure + new SATA or PATA hard drive, or a new external HDD.

Big advantages of this approach (relative to the Kurobox) are a lower necessary startup cost, a bit of flexibility (to change something, just open the lid and type), built-in power protection (batteries), and a surfeit of packages for the PPC platform.

Drawbacks relative to the Kurobox are the fact that the laptop batteries won’t protect the external drive from power loss, and the fact that the laptop on its own has a maximum power consumption of 45W compared to the Kurobox’s 17W. (Much of the laptop’s theoretical max would be devoted to using the CD-ROM, using the internal hard drive, and powering the LCD backlight; I intend to pull the CD-ROM after installation, and I plan on using the other two as little as possible. Doesn’t affect power usage on the external HD, though.) But while the Kurobox beats the laptop on those two fronts, the laptop is still a far cry better than the current system. Additionally, if I really want to take a Kuroboxy approach later on, I can do that and just put the laptop/external drive assembly someplace else as my offsite backup (duplicity, w00t).

of course, first i need to see if i can even have that laptop.

+++

Crunching with BOINC on a couple systems: my home laptop, Fred’s Mac mini, the home server, and my office workstation. Fred’s is the most recent addition to the mini-cluster, and so far I don’t think he’s noticed any difference in performance.

Also have MacFUSE and sshfs going on his computer. Essentially, now we both have secure wireless access to the home server — from home or elsewhere — and I can probably turn off netatalk and save a port and a few cycles.

+++

I have a post brewing about energy efficiency. Light bulbs are the easiest way to describe the economic benefits of efficiency, but I want to expand beyond how CFLs will save you money on your light bill. Since I’m not 100% certain how I’m going to achieve this, I’m going to set it on the back burner.

Where to start…

+++

Had the chorus show. It turned out a hell of a lot better than I expected — apparently a lot of guys had been cramming lyrics ‘n’ tunes all day both Friday and Saturday — and the audience was very responsive. The snowstorm kept a lot of people home on Saturday night, though.

We won’t be able to sing with the full chorus for the next show, though we may be able to go with the smaller ensemble. The same interim director will be conducting, though, which should help stabilize a few things.

+++

Nigel had a flat on the way home from the chorus dress rehearsal! We managed to make it home (it was very late, the streets were slick with rain, and we were very close anyway) and got him in his usual spot that night. Then it snowed 8 inches or so, and things were unpleasant enough that we delayed changing the tire even further. When we finally got to it, we discovered that the tire had multiple large-ish breaches and would therefore need to be completely replaced. At this point, between shop closures and year-end financial obligations, Nigel is going to have to wait at least another week before he gets a new tire. It continues to make me sad.

In the meantime, I’ve been getting rides from Fred or taking the bus or train to work. I haven’t done that regularly since the pre-Nigel days, and I have to admit I sort of missed it a tiny little bit. If I catch the right bus, it takes roughly the same amount of time to get to work; it gives me a chance to unwind afterwards without having to deal with too many idiot drivers; and the University sprang for a Metro pass for me, so the bus/train doesn’t cost me anything. Finally, running for a bus is wonderful exercise — I get lots of cardio, and my motivation is built right in — and at this time of year a morning jog is invigorating.

+++

As of the day of the chorus’s opening night, though, Fred drives a slick 1997 BMW, in gorgeous condition, with purple leather seats. (It’s a very dark purple, such that it appears black except in direct sunlight.) This is not the first car we were eager to buy, but in retrospect it’s better that we got this one instead: it’s cheaper, it’s in better shape, and unlike the first one that was too insulated for my tastes this one lets the driver feel enough of the road to respond accordingly. As we discovered the night of that snowstorm, though, the new car (named “Klaus”) has rear-wheel drive, and though it does beautifully on virgin snow, when it hits ice it fishtails rather nastily until somebody sits in back.

+++

Said snowstorm was more wind and fury than actual precipitation. That said, we still got 8 inches. (Actual inches, not gay.com inches. cue that rimshot.) Most fell Saturday evening during the chorus show, so while the roads were so-so on the way to the theater, they were atrocious on the way home. (This is mostly because the city didn’t plow anything until Sunday morning.) The extra-sucky part about our trip home from the theater was that all of our available routes involved some combination of bridges and long uphill grades, which are rough going in any sort of wheeled vehicle. We insisted that Fred’s mother stay the night

+++

Had finals in both classes, and nailed ‘em both. I kinda sorta broke the curve in the programming class (101%, sorry). Didn’t do quite that well in physio, but I won’t complain about that. (Physio was one of those “lecture four hours straight” sorts of classes, which I actually enjoy in a perverse way. It’s the virtual labs that made me groan in disgust.)

+++

The departmental holiday party was the night of the programming final, so I didn’t get to stick around. The food looked amazing, though I couldn’t eat much of it (time was short, also the tooth was starting to flare up), and it was refreshing to see everybody there with their spouses and partners et al. and kids. The music was a little interesting, though; one of the postdocs from the dept chair’s lab (who bears a striking resemblance to Justin Timberlake, no fooling) and another postdoc who had once been in our department sang and played guitar. Apparently they switched to karaoke later on, once the booze kicked in, but I’m not sure how I feel about that. Great moment, though, was attempting to explain the Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun” — WHICH THEY ACTUALLY PLAYED AT THE DEPARTMENT HOLIDAY PARTY, this obviously still blows my mind — to those unfamiliar with that song.

+++

You know about last Wednesday. Swollen cheek, broken tooth, new gay dentist, etc. Been on those meds ever since, and though the antibiotic occasionally gives me a headache (especially in the presence of fly food) I haven’t had any further problems. I can chew again, which is a relief even if I do have to go easy on the left side of my mouth.

+++

Thanks to the dental condition, we postponed holiday observations until at least after the New Year. Don’t ask me what I got, because I really don’t know yet. We spent both the Solstice weekend and Christmas Day at home, putzing around and watching “Labyrinth“, “Elf“, episodes from season 2.0 of “Battlestar Galactica“, and snippets of “A Christmas Story“. (No vacation time for me yet, so I had to work on Christmas Eve. I did cut out a bit early, though, because nobody was there.)

+++

Food and geekery posts to follow.