Linus released a new version of Linux this today. I’m hoping that gentoo will release packages soon since this seems to fix quite a few bugs in the x86 architecture. You can read more about it here.
Dad and I finally got a chance to get together last night to talk about the trip. We’ve set the final dates for Sep. 25 - Sep 30, and I’ve already taken then necessary vacation days. We also extended the trip by about twice the distance. After looking at our original trail selection , we thought about the relatively short distances between campsites, and thought that we might be a bit bored sitting in camp for 5-6 hours every night. The new map looks a bit longer and hopefully more interesting. It will also allow us to venture by Abrams Falls. I’m still hoping that we can hitch a ride back as opposed to walking cades cove loop the entire way. Lets just hope we haven’t bitten off more than we can chew.
I made some changes to the site layout today. I figured this will be better for the user as I’ve tried to layer the sidebar boxes in order of importance. My goal was to make it as easy as possible for the first time visitor to find their way around my site. Please post comments on any changes you think I should make, or things you would like to see. I’ll make sure to personally respond to every suggestion I get.
In addition, I wasn’t overly pleased with the original logo graphics. I needed to get something up and running as soon as possible so I was rather hasty in creating a design. I took a couple of hours today to try out new images and think I’ve designed one that is more my style. Take a look at the original logo and compare it to the one above (remember to refresh your browser to see the new logo). Decide on which you like better then be sure to post your vote in the poll on the left. The first 10 people will be entered into a drawing for a years subscription to Outside Magazine. To make life easier for me, be sure to post a comment after you cast your vote. This way I will know for sure who the first 10 people are.
You can’t win unless you vote!
I found out some new information today regarding my retirement and social security benefits. I’ll have to check into this on my own, but I believe the information to be pretty correct. Because of the job I have, I am not required to pay into social security. I’m not sure if this is because of my hazardous-duty pay or if it is because the city pays into a separate retirement plan or what. Either way, I am not currently paying into social security. However, before this job I payed into social security for 10+ years. Now it is my understanding that because I don’t pay into social security now, the government is going to take 66% of what I should receive when I do retire. Talk about getting screwed.
In other news, its been raining real hard here today. So far we’ve received over 2 inches of rain with some sections of road being more than a foot under water. This is all well and good until we have to work a car wreck in a pond. Add in the lightning and electrical potential and we’ve just stepped up the severity of the incident exponentially. Lets just hope we don’t have to go out today.
Last but not least, I finally received my 40 hour HAZMAT Technician certification in the mail today. I’ve been waiting since May for it. Now that its here I’m one step closer to earning my degree. I’m going to look for a FF I & FF II skills test here in the next few months. I’d rather not wait till next year, but they are hard to come by during the fall due to the numbers of fire schools going on at the same time. Soon enough though.
Everything seems to be coming together rather nicely for the GSMNP expedition. I have been going over various hiking & camping checklists trying to make sure I have all the equipment needed, and feel that the equipment that I have bought already will serve me very well for most all my future back country trips. There are a few more items I’d like to get for winter camping, but I’ll just have to wait on that until I make sure I’m going to be using them enough to justify that expense.
My tent came via FedEx today. It only took me a matter of minutes to clear out the living room, read the documentation, and start setting it up to air it out. The box was so light, I almost thought they were shipping it separately. It wasn’t until I opened the box that I finally became convinced that it was actually in there. At 4 lbs it was feather light and setup in a breeze. It’s a lot easier to setup than my other tent because of its simple design. I think I’ll be happy with this decision for years to come.
I almost headed out tonight for an overnight trip, but I was a little late in getting the gear together. Also, with the price of gas being so astronomical, I just couldn’t justify a trip down to the lake right now. I’ll try to get out of the house next week and down to the lake for at least a night or two.
UPDATE: I’ve found these articles on REI’s site to be rather helpful. Check em out.
I think Kilimanjaro is going to have to wait a while till I get a bit more financially stable. I could shell out half what REI Adventures is charging, but I’d also be looking at a 5-6 day trip instead of a 13-14 day trip. I’m not so sure I want to climb a mountain that high in that time period due to the acclimatization factors. Plus… I’d rather go with a company that is well founded than some fly by night guide service.
Instead of planning a trip overseas, I thought I’d start planning a winter hike through the smokeys. Here is a preliminary map. I figured I’d only get 4-5 days most, and with the snowfall in the area I didn’t want to get too far into the back country.
Apparently my spelling skills aren’t so good as pointed out by a few people that read my blog. I downloaded a live spell checker plugin to help me with my spelling abilities. I hope it helps.
Sorry I didn’t get a post in yesterday. About 1:30 am saturday morning I issued the wrong command and ended up wiping my entire installation out. I had to work on rebuilding it again yesterday and today. I figure it will help me when it comes to writing the installation documentation though, as I troubleshooted a few problems I just couldn’t seem to figure out. God Bless all!
Ok all, time for a little user interaction on the site here now!
I’m in need of some proofreaders for my Gentoo Installation Guide. Those of you who are already registered can read over the guide, and post a comment in the link directly below this message. Those of you who aren’t registered, you will need to register to the left in order to post comments. Sorry about this guys, but I’d like to keep my blog as spam free as possible.
Don’t be afraid to post an error even if you aren’t sure the word is spelled incorrectly. I understand that there is a lot of technical jargon contained within the guide, and that many of you may not understand what I am trying to convey to the reader. I am merely looking for spelling errors at this point. If you are familiar with linux, understand the point I am trying to get across, yet believe that there is a better way to phrase my sentence, please let me know about that also.
What I will do is post the last date I edited the file at the top of the web page. When you read over the guide, please post all errors, including the previous and following lines, and the date you read the guide. This will let everyone else know that unless the guide is updated, they do not need to waste time proofreading it. I would appreciate at least 3 proofreads from people to catch as many errors as possible. If, however, you are not able to proofread the entire document, please post the last line you were able to proofread so that others know where you left off at. Click the comments line below for an example of what I mean.
Thank you very much all. I am fairly good at writing things out, but not good when it comes to making sure they are grammatically correct.
Well, Father is much better now. I finally have my desktop environment back, my music player, Mozilla is working well, and everything is compiling nicely. I started yesterday morning when I got home from work by saving all critical information and formatting the partition. I decided to use ReiserFS this time to see what kind of differences I could notice. It ran so much more smoothly than last time simply because I had documentation to follow. I’ve only got a few minor tweaks left to accomplish. I’m sure I’ll find little things along the way, but those will be so much easier to deal with now that the major problems are out of the way.
Still working on father, keep your fingers crossed!
Yesterday was not a very good day for Father.
As most of you know, I do not like using M$ products, and feel that Windoze is the worst. I much prefer using Linux. I’ve been using it for since 1995, and although I am not a guru yet I have a good deal of skills with it. I recently started using a distribution of linux called Gentoo linux. It allows me to upgrade my systems with very little effort, is easy to configure, and is probably the most stable distro I’ve used. I’ve been using it for the past 3 years, and my last install was November of 2004.
Usually, I like to completely wipe and reinstall a system every year just to free space, get programs off I don’t use anymore or forgot about, change passwords, and completely clean the hard drive. Its hard for me to do this on my laptop though cause its so hard to configure at times, and usually takes me a month to get things back the way I want them. Unfortunately I’ll be doing this tomorrow though. I changed some settings on my computer yesterday, tried to recompile software, and tried to upgrade but it crashed out for some reason. Took me 3-4 hours just to get the software installation going again. I had to hack around configuration files, and didn’t even get everything I wanted done.
I figure its about time for me to do a reinstall anyway as two versions have come out since I’ve done my last reinstall. Luckily I was smart enough last time to document the entire install process so all I’ll have to do is follow the guide again. This will be a good chance for me to create the install documentation I was working on last time. Now that I have a web page up and running, it will be a good addition to my blog and documents.
Rumor control again…. very reliable sources.
One of our firefighters was injured while working a car wreck a while back. Apparently he was bending over to help move a patient onto a stretcher when he pulled something in his back. Nothing much came about this until a few days later. The city had a “lemonade stand” out at the park to show appreciation for its employees. Our training officer (TO), along with a few other firefighters who heard the conversation, was out there and was asked how the injured firefighter was hurt. Our TO stated that he got hurt working a car wreck. At this point in time the city nurse stated something to the effect of him “doing something he shouldn’t have been doing”, and wondered why the city was paying his workers compensation. When our TO confronted her about this statement the nurse again said he shouldn’t have been doing that, it was the ambulance employees duty to move the patient to the stretcher. Once again our TO tried to correct her, but to no avail. She kept wondering why we were doing stuff like that, why we were helping injured people at a car wreck. She even stated that there wasn’t anyone over here qualified to do that. The TO promptly replied that everyone over here was CPR/PR certified and that there were a number of EMT’s at the department. I assume she has the same mentality a good portion of the city does; if its not on fire, whats the fire department doing there. I sure wish this mentality would change. I’m tired of being limited, and not being able to help or serve people simply because those in authority either don’t understand or don’t care. I didn’t shell out a good deal of money from my own pockets for training I can’t use. It’s funny how they are willing to move EMT’s around to other shifts, or make an EMT go on certain runs yet not provide us with adequate equipment, show any gratitude, or even acknowledge that we exist unless it serves their needs.
I think my neighbor is trying to pull something over on me. She showed up at my door this morning at 9:30am with a package that was supposed to be delivered yesterday. It was one of the two Nalgene bottles that I was supposed to receive from Moosejaw. The thing that I bugs me is the fact that this shipment was made via UPS, and didn’t require a signature. I’ve received 4 packages from them so far, one being an item that cost more than $70 and even it didn’t require a signature. Why would she tell me that she signed for a $8 item that didn’t even require a signature? In addition, she said 3-4 times… “thats what good neighbors are for”. Now when someone emphasizes that fact over and over, it just seems a little fishy to me. Who knows, maybe she was just being nice. I think I’ll watch my back a little more just to make sure though.
After being away from work for over a week now, I’m more than a little ready to go back. I really enjoyed the time off, and it helped me get a lot done that I needed to finish. Unfortunately though, I have a tendency to lose track of days when I’m away from work too long. The only thing I am dreading tomorrow is getting up at 5am to head to Fitness Formula. I promised myself that after Abby went back home I’d get back into the gym regularly. I figure tomorrow is the start of a new cycle at work, it might as well be the start of my gym commitment.
Oh… and Kristie…… You owe me big!
I’m finally getting a chance to sit down and enjoy the comfort of my couch for a while. The last few days have been a little hectic. Yesterday Kristie, Kendall, and myself went to church . At the end of the service, during the alter call, there were more than a few people on stage praising Jesus. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I used to have a problem lifting my hands, singing out loud, and jumping & dancing around. I always thought this was for “bible bashing” christians, and “Jesus freaks”. The problem is, I am a Jesus freak. He has done wonderful things in my life, so why shouldn’t I praise him. It was explained to me like this once: when someone comes up to you trying to mug you, what do you do? You put your arms in the air… this signifies that that person can take whatever they want. Its the same for Jesus, he can take whatever he wants from me, thats why I’ll put my hands in the air and praise him. In addition, wasn’t it God who created dancing and singing? Why is it ok for society to go out to a Metallica or Keith Urban concert and dance around, but not dance around in the name of Jesus? Why have we let the world steal our joy, telling us its ok to dance at a secular event, but not a christian one. I for one am going to dance, sing, raise my hands, and praise God when ever I feel moved to. I’m tired of just being a “sunday christian”. I’m tired of sitting on the fence. Its time to move!
After church we went to mom & dads to have dinner with them and Danny & Susan. I figured since I blew my diet this weekend I would just eat healthy, but whatever I wanted. It was so nice to have some potatoes and hamburger buns. It had been quite a while since I’ve gotten to eat any breads. However, the vanity is worth it. 
I have already started back on my diet today by eating salads and meats rather than all those starches and carbs. I don’t think the last few days hurt me, after all it is changing your eating habits that matter, not simply starving yourself for a few months to lose weight. If you don’t change your habits then you will just gain the weight back… right?
I had to take the server down last night for a while. Those of you who were unable to connect will hopefully understand. With all the thunderstorms in the area, I needed to make sure lightning wouldn’t fry my computer components, bringing the web page down for quite a long time. I figured it was better to bring it down for a little while than to take the chance of a surge destroying everything.
On a side note, we ordered the sleeping bags yesterday for the trip. The only high dollar item left to buy before the trip is the tent, and hopefully I’ll have enough money in the next few paychecks to order it.
Hope you all have a wonderful day, I’m headed back to my Aliens Movie Marathon! God Bless!
Sorry all, lots to say, going to be a long post tonight I think.
Lets start with friday. I wasn’t feeling all that well friday morning, didn’t sleep all that well thursday, and had to call in sick to work (cough-cough). Anyway, I started feeling better about 8:00am and decided I’d best get out of bed and walk around. If I was going to make it to PK, I’d have to see if I felt up to it {snicker}. It turns out, it was just a temporary feeling, and I was doing much better after walking around for a bit. I ended up going to dads to pick him up for the conference and run a few errands around town. Wouldn’t you know it, but I saw almost everyone on my shift. Steve even blew the air horn on the firetruck as F-16’s crew was going to the bank next to my church.
Dan, dad, and myself headed out to Nashville around 10:00am. We had all decided to meet up at the condos that we were staying at, then determine where we were going from there. It was a very nice drive down there and I really got to know more about Dan and his family. I’m glad it was just us rather than a bus load of people.
Shortly after we arrived at the condo dad and I decided to go out to a few sports stores. We hit Sun and Ski sports in the Opry Mills Mall first. We both wanted to get a few prices worked out, and check the clearance table, before heading to the REI store in Brentwood. At REI, dad got a new pair of boots, and a whistle while I got to dream. Just the opportunity to walk around the store and see the tent I was getting, see the sleeping bags we were getting, and see some of the other equipment I may get for my trips was a joy. It just got me more excited about this trip.
After REI we went back to the hotel to unload our luggage before we headed out to Promise Keepers. Dad and I were among the first group of Covenant Community people to arrive at the convention. Dennis, his sons, and a few others also showed up at the same time as us so we all saved about 35 seats for the rest of the people who got tied up in traffic.
All in all, the conference was great! There was a lot of praising God and learning how to be better fathers, husbands, and men of integrity. There were many great speakers who were there, but one stood out in my mind: Dan Seaborn. His message was so powerful, moving, and inspirational. His whole point was about putting your family up on the shelf where you put your prized possessions. His example was about how he puts a basketball signed by Michael Jordon, Larry Bird, and other basketball players on the highest shelf in his office. He doesn’t play with it, or take it out of its case… he cherishes it because it is valuable to him. This in itself isn’t bad, but when we value our possessions over our family, then we have a big problem.
One of the most powerful statements he made this weekend was this: “How many of you men have families that are glad you are away for the weekend, families who dread your coming home on sunday. Better yet, how many of your wives are telling your kids about how Promise Keepers changes mens lives, wives who are praying with your kids that you will come back a better father, a better husband.” There were quite a few guys in the stadium who were hit by this statement. Sometimes we need to be hit over the head by someone who isn’t afraid to tell it like it is before we’ll see the error of our ways.
I think this was one of the best conferences I’ve been to. My only hope is that I can retain as much information as possible so that I can grow closer to God, my family, and my friends. Thank you Lord for giving me the opportunity to share this experience with my father, as well as my friends.
Up early, WAY TOO EARLY. Had a wonderful night last night! God is moving here. Have lots of pics. Will upload when I get home. C-Ya!!!
UPDATE: I got to upload the pictures last night before I went to bed. They are in the Promise Keepers album.
WE HAVE ARRIVED!!!!
I’m finally getting things back to normal. I worked at the ambulance service today for the first time in weeks. It was a pretty slow day, a few transfers and a chest pain call on the south side of town were all that we were dispatched to. A nice day for us and the patients. It was also the first time I worked with J, the paramedic who was assigned to my unit. He was completely cool and one of the cleanest medics I have worked with. The back of the ambulance was almost spotless after his emergency call. Normally it is the duty of the EMT to clean the rig after an Advanced Life Support (ALS) call. When I went to put the stretcher into the rig after the run was complete, I noticed that he had already cleaned up the patient compartment, wiped up the blood, and had thrown all the trash away. Thanks man… I really appreciated it!
I arrived home a bit after 5 pm to a little brown package sitting on my doorstep. I couldn’t wait to get inside and open it up, just like the other little brown packages I’ve received lately. I ripped through the packing tape and quickly and discovered to my surprise that the MSR Water filter I ordered was here!!! I wasn’t expecting it for a few more days and was delighted to be able to “examine the quality” (aka PLAY with it) it had to offer. I also noticed in the package, a free coupon for 12 issues of Outside Magazine. I always enjoy reading Outside, as it quickly gets me fired up about camping. Thanks Moosejaw!!!
I’m heading out to Promise Keepers tomorrow morning. I’ve still got to finish laundry and pack, but I don’t think it will be too big a deal. Its not like I’m taking a weeks worth of camping gear, or even taking 4 people to Mammoth Cave. This time its just ME to pack for which means 1 SMALL backpack with 2 days of clothes. No need for that back seat packing area on this trip.
I’ll try to keep you all posted about the convention, but I’m not sure where I’m going to get internet access from so I’ll just have to play it by ear. Just means I’ll have to do a bit of wardriving while I’m down there. If you don’t hear from me for a few days, you’ll understand why.
God Bless all!!! See ya soon!
Oh man!!!! I just saw this and it looks AWESOME!
BlackDog has developed a linux server that runs off USB, boots in seconds, and has a biometric sensor to limit its use.
Talk about a portable hackers dream! I know I want one!
I have finally chosen a sleeping bag for the camping trip. I’m not positive that I will be getting it, but I took the time to do a little comparative shopping anyway, just in case. The sleeping bags that I currently own are all about 7-25 years old, all rectangular, and all rather heavy. When it comes to hiking you want something that is small, warm, and very light!
A few days ago I narrowed the list down to 4 bags. The Wenger Swiss Alps Mummy, Slumberjack Trekker Ultrapacker +20ºF, Kelty Mistral Long Sleeping Bag (+20 Degrees) all from Dicks Sporting Goods, and Kelty Tundra +15 Sleeping Bag from Rei’s Outlet store.
I liked the low temperature level on the Wenger bag, but wasn’t happy with the fact that the liner appears , to be one layer that you lay beneath. The Slumberjack bag was nice also, but the temperature only went down to +20º in addition to not having internal liner loops. The Kelty Mistral was a wonderful pick, but I wasn’t happy with the fact that Dicks Sporting Goods charges tax on items shipped to Kentucky addresses. Also, the Kelty Tundra sleeping bag from REI was $10 cheaper, 5º colder, wasn’t taxable, and came with a lifetime warranty. The FAQ on Kelty’s site tells more about the bags.
If I get a sleeping bag, it will most definitely be the Kelty Tundra +15 Sleeping Bag from REI.com.
