joe ferrare's blog

Now that the last post is more than 18 months old, I thought I’d up date the site. People have asked, I (belatedly) respond. What follows are three photos of the family and the latest flower installment in front of Casa De La Del El Haus Ferrare (Maryland branch).

The first photo is of Alexandra and Sue at an event of some kind — what kind exactly is, of course, immaterial. You can see Alexandra’s smile, which is under construction these days. Sue is smirking in the background.

The second one is of Alexandra and I on my 50th birthday last month. We took the photo with a small number of candles on the cake because, once we got all 50 on, it was like trying to take pictures of the sun and see detail. I’m sporting the goatee in this shot, which is something Alexandra talked me into growing and Sue said I should keep, as it deemphasizes the rest of my actual face.

The last is the front of the house. The previous owners were really into sculpting the whole flower bed thing, but we’re taking a somewhat simpler line. Pretty flowers. Sue did all the work, of course, and took the picture.

This being Memorial Day, we’re hanging out at home, eating sausages on the deck with visiting friend Tom Blake. I’ll try to capture a pic before he shoves off tomorrow.

Yesterday was Alexandra’s first day of school. Kindergarten started a couple of days after the rest of the school, because the teacher does home visits. Anyway, it was a big deal around Haus Ferrare, as you might imagine. We got the girl up, she watched a little TV and then it was time to get ready. She chose her own clothes (the night before) of course, and had her new backpack and lunch box. We stopped to take this photo on the pedestrian zone, which is right outside our house.

She’s really taking to this well (based on a single three-hour day, mind you). She decided she wanted to take the bus (insisted, really), had fun at the Kindergarten visits, seems to like the teacher and so on. The Kindergarten has 17 kids, which will soon be 18 when another family arrives in October. Alexandra knows about half the kids, as she went to pre-school with them. So it’s not that big a move up for her, not like it was for me. Back then we went right from playing in the the dirt outside the cave to the first day of Kindergarten, so it was all quite a shock. She was in hourly day care, then pre-school, and now the big K. So for her, it’s just “big kids’ school.”

Besides, she got new clothes, a new desk and chair (which she’d been after us about), the backpack, lunch box, school supplies… So it was not unlike Christmas for her.

I’m going to put up a separate page in a bit with several more photos.

Just got done setting up Linux on the machine of a friend. Her husband got the laptop free (!) for signing up for some service, probably DSL. Anyway, it’s not a killer laptop. It’s got a 1.2 Ghz Via C3 processor, which means it probably runs about as fast as a 600 Mhz Pentium. But it’s got a nice enough 14″ screen and is otherwise OK for laptop kind of computer work he wants to do — surfing, e-mail, writing (we need a new snappy one-liner on the order of readin’ writin’ and ‘ritmatic to capture the surfing, e-mailing and word processing trio a lot of people use their computers for). Hey: my laptop runs at 600 Mhz most of the time, thanks to frequency scaling to save battery life.
It came with Knoppix (and a “designed for Windows XP” label) on it . They seemed to have done a terrible job installing the system. Knoppix is a live CD, which means you don’t have to install it to your hard drive to use it. You can run Linux from the CD. But it’s huge and has all kinds of things the average user doesn’t need. The husband is retired, and it’s his first computer, so I don’t think he needs any high speed stuff. Parts of it also seemed to think it was still running off a CD (disk is not writeable errors), and they set aside 3.5 GB for the swap partition (the usual is about twice your physical RAM, which would be about 512 MB in this case).
Well, after trying to bring the thing up to date (it came with version 3.8 and 5.0 is the current version), I just downloaded Kanotix Lite and installed that. Worked like a charm. Spent a few minutes setting up his KDE preferences, simplifying his panel and so on, and the machine is a good 15 or 20 percent faster (don’t ask me how I know; it’s just snappier to use).

That makes four people I’ve set up with Linux now. That’s out of a pretty small group of people, as the Garmisch American community is pretty small. Now that I think about it, though, neither of them is American. She’s British and he’s Austrian. Anyway, small world to be evangelizing Linux.

I’m going to revisit the other machine I recently installed Linux on. I put Zenwalk on it, and have since discovered STX Linux, and it is perfect for that machine. It’s a 300 Mhz laptop with 128 MB of RAM — and an off-brand machine at that. Zenwalk runs a lot better than Windows 2000 on it (yeah, Windows 2000), but still, STX looks to be perfect. Or maybe I’ll give Kanotix Lite a try. It has IceWM in addition to KDE, and IceWM is about the right speed.
I just realized I have yet to install the same version of Linux twice. The four I’ve installed were Mepis, PCLinuxOS, Zenwalk and now Kanotix Lite. Funny, that, espeically because I’m a die-hard Slackware user. I’ve got one other person asking to try Linux out, and I’m going to install a music-specific version for him, because he’s into mixing his own tunes. It’s a wonderful world, this Linux.