.:.adaeon.net

For must be 45 minutes i stared at the screen wondering why the big directory of individually tarred up gkrellm2 skins were refusing to untar as a group. I tried and tried and tried to do it with one of those interactive shell loops but no luck. I read up on all the hints i could find but most everything was kind enough to tell me that files are untarred using tar followed by options and a filename. Gee, who knew. the little bit of tcsh typeing:
foreach i (`ls`)
tar -xpf $i
end
Just gave no relief at all. It looked fine with printing the $i but staring at the screen all day apparently has diminishing returns. FINALLY it struck me that my ls is aliased to some usually useful colors … which tar dun like at all.

kde has been compiling since last night, er … this morning about 2am and it’s still sputtering away. thought it would be nifty to put this old machine to use and get some of the deep hack fiddling sensations going at the same time. this is a pIII 500Mhz thing that has been a caseless stand for the pIV 2.5Ghz for a very long time. trying to find the hardware specs to help with the gentoo install was fascinating as i came across reviews of the thing from 1999 that began “on the high performance end …” it’s so easy to forget that a pIII-500 was “hot” not so long ago. well, it’s running gentoo and gnome really great today in 2003 … but for the eternity to compile anything at least. once i get the basics all in and backed up that won’t make much difference as new fiddly bits will just be in the admin desktop … kinda like it is now … even with the kde and evolution running i was able to get this mt install setup finished and do all the other stuff. in any case, if the pain reached an unbearable level the kvm switch is right there and civIII-conquests is already up … and of course the tibook is my left hand … well, the mouse is on the right so what can you do. hm. quite a ramble. oh well.