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Another Day In Shell

I woke up several times during the night to the sound of steady rain. I haven't been sleeping all that well lately. Don't know if it's time to flip the mattress, or what. When I woke up, it was still raining. Solid overcast, and rain. Not a good thing, because the Quito plane was to leave muy temprano with a DAC inspector, as Dan and Dave were to do check rides. Also scheduled for the day was a flight to bring five of the MAF high school students down from Quito. A number of years back, some MAF pilot came up with a little saying, that if it rains before seven, it'll be done by eleven. If it rains after seven, it'll rain all day. Of course that doesn't always hold true, but today it did, and by about 9:30 AM or so, the plane from Quito landed with the DAC inspector. The way it turned out, only Dan did the check ride, and Dave will take his later. He's on vacation this week anyhow, so I'm sure he didn't mind. By early afternoon, it was a beautiful day--sun, blue sky, clouds, nice temps, and Dan had passed his check ride. A great day in Shell. By 5 PM Dustin and I were headed up to the swimming hole on the Alpayacu with our kayaks, for a little relaxation. As we pulled into the driveway a little after 6 PM, the thunder and lightning were rolling in. The variety of weather during this day was quite interesting!

I started my day looking at an old PC from up in the attic. I was looking for something I could install SuSE linux on and play a bit with dynamic DNS, as I need to learn a bit about that so I can use that to remote admin the SuSE box in the Quito office. That turned out to be a dead end, so I gutted the machine of useful things, like HDD, CD-ROM, RAM, NIC, and video card, and tossed the case with motherboard and power supply back in the attic. Not sure what I'll use it for, but one never can tell in Shell. That project then got put on hold when Fred came in with his notebook. He was not able to start it up, so I told him I'd work on it. More by happen chance than anything, I got it started, and he was able to back up photos and a few other things. Then we re-booted and went at it again. Turns out that there were some problems with the RAM memory modules and the sockets. By moving them, and starting with one at a time, we found a combination worked. Next, I got a PCMCIA network card installed in Miriam's old Toshiba notebook. Her newer laptop is acting up, so she's going to use her old one for a bit to do e-mail. After lunch I made a visit up to Rick and Sharon's to help them with a few computer questions. The first one related to our MAF e-mail service, and then I helped with several other questions they had. By the end of the afternoon I was back at my desk, installing SuSE linux on a different machine, and running an incremental backup on the server.

After dinner Taylor wanted to play some basketball, so we walked over to the school, turned on the lights, and played on the cancha. After a while we were joined by Luke, who is over at the house tonight with a sleepover with Taylor.