This is one of those days where one has all sorts of fun with kernel strangeness. It all started after I began implementing the plan as outlined last night. Network card transplant went smoothly. That was the easy part.

I figured that while I'm at it, I may as well update to the latest and greatest, so I downloaded test9, modified my options to include netfilter IP forwarding as well as adding the driver for Dagobah's old card. I figured that would be hunky dory. Well, it was. Drivers for both cards loaded fine, and I confirmed that I was able to use each. (It had assigned eth0 and eth1 to the opposite of what I wanted, but that's just a matter of adding a lilo option.) The trouble started when I tried to get into X.

Now for some odd reason, the mga kernel driver decided to change its version number. The X MGA interface didn't like that. It refused to start at all. Not sure why that is, or what's going on. Maybe I'm going to have to recompile my X drivers to work with the new kernel?

Anyway, I've decided that the interum solution is to go back to test5, stick all my new options in on that, and see if that works. Now, it's all done compiling, but I'll wait to reboot until I finish what I have to say in this rambling.

Went to Target today. The new big super target that opened just a few blocks away from all that other new crap. ("All that other new crap" being defined as... Well, who cares really? But NOT the new mall area crap. The other new crap area.) Quite the enormous thing. Every thing a normal Target has, plus groceries, plus a Starbucks inside, plus Pizza Hut, plus... who knows what else?

I bought some supplies I've been needing (like an ice scraper for Tobias), and also decided to finally get a new pair of headphones. My old ones still sound good, but they're in pretty bad shape as far as comfort goes. The form pads wore out and fell off both ears, so it was hard plastic on the ears. These new ones... well, they rock. Nice and comfy, and sound very good.

Went on a sort-of hike with the family in the late afternoon. We stopped to eat at Illegal Pete's, drove a few blocks to Sanitas, and walked up the valley. During the trip, I happenstance bumped into the male parental figure of a fellow content vulture / solutions provider. This individual mentioned that he himself was turning into a content vulture as well. (Yes, he used that term. Content vulture.) Scary, or wonderful? I'll let you decide.

After the walk, I came home and went straight to sleep for a couple hours. What can I say? When the zonk demons invade my brain, and I have no compelling reason to resist, just let go. Quite enjoyable.

In the cd encoding department, I've encountered a minor obstacle or two. One is that the grip program seems to have a strange bug in which it gets its track placement info corrupted after you insert a second disc. So you go to a track, and it will start you in the middle of the song. (Or worse, a completely different song.) A workaround is to restart the program between discs, but that's a bit annoyning. Slightly more serious is that I discovered that my ogg's aren't getting the album, artist, and title meta info written into the file. These can be passed as command line options to oggenc, but for some reason, grip doesn't see fit to allow the user to access these variables from the encoder option. I grabbed the source, and I'm thinking I'll attempt to hack this functionality into it. Hopefully, it won't be too terribly hard, but until then, the encoding effort has been stalled.