A Minor Epiphany

I was lying in bed tonight, unable to sleep, when a strange and unsettling thought occured to me. I have picked up the habit over the years of thinking of myself as smarter than everyone else. (That's not the epiphany. I already know I think I'm smarter than everybody else.) It was something related to that though.
So anyway, I was lying unsleeping, and thinking randomly about work, life, programming, my family, God, America, Gas prices... Whatever. Eventually I got around to replaying my day. I was remembering an ordeal that a friend and I had today setting up a wireless driver under linux.

(For those of you who don't care about Geek Stuff, skip this paragraph.) We were trying to set up a wireless card with a Broadcom chipset. Now because of complicated laws concerning wireless traffic, Broadcom hasn't released the specifications to most of their chipsets. As such, most of which have no native linux driver. (Linux programmers haven't yet found enough spare time to reverse engineer them.) At any rate we had to use ndiswrapper, which is a program to use binary windows drivers and make them work for linux. We spent a long time fooling with the stupid thing, only to discover that we had downloaded a bad windows driver... Anywho, we downloaded the driver from an Acer support site and presto! Suddenly the stupid thing worked like it was supposed to. In the process, my friend, a relative linux newbie got to see just about every command related to linux wireless there is.

So anyway I was thinking about that when it occured to me that he would probably be able to get the thing working a home too. This is no small feat, since he has a different key than I do, and probably a different channel, network name, etc. So to make a short story long, in order to do this he'd have to be just about as smart as me. I'd honestly never thought of him that way. I mean intellectually, I accepted that some people are probably even capable of things I'm not... Like childbirth... And some other less physically impossible things too... But to think of someone as an intellectual equal was a real shocker. Yeah, that's all. The epiphany was that I might not be the smartest person in the world. Really.

It was just one of those "Ah Hah!" moments that I felt I should record for posterity. Now you all (both) know how truly arrogant and patronizing I really am. But maybe now I can change... Maybe not.

Computer Geek Stuff

I just helped fix a small bug in the Gnome window manager for Linux. It was only a small thing, and probably 3 people in the whole universe would ever notice it, but I had to dig into the source code and figure it out. (The 3 people by the way include myself and the developer who did the actual patching.)














It was a bug that stopped the multimeter applet from functioning when you turned off your ethernet device. It turns out that it was a problem with the Hard Disk monitor. The hard disk monitor tells you when you are accessing information stroed on your computer's hard disk drive. It shouldn't have had anything to do with the ethernet.

Well the applet in question was also trying to look at a disk I had mounted remotely because of a missing line of code. When you turned off the ethernet card, the monitor could no longer look at the remote drive. I figured it out and the developer fixed it. (He used an identical line of code to the one I had written but not given to him.) No kidding, it was exactly the same, character for character.

Anywho, it made me feel smart. :-)

My Family

Here is my little family. The woman on the left is Ms. Stonebrow. (I haven't come up with a good pseudonym for her yet.) The cute blonde on the horse is my daughter Misha, and the small bulge in Ms. Stonbrow's belly is little miss Annika. (At least if she does indeed turn out to be a girl.) I hope to talk about my parents and friends, but I'll show them to you as I talk about them.

Medicating The Lesser Members of My Family

For those of you that know me this will come as no suprise, but I am now officially a crazy cat person. Darth Vader had a bunch of kittens he wanted to get rid of and I took one. We now have 5 cats and a dog. Our animals outnumber us two to one.

Anyway, the new cat has ringworms and earmites so we have to treat all 6 of the animals. Now giving a cat a flea treatment can be fun (if you're a mean, sick person) or it can be a heart wrenching experience (if you think they have feelings) or it can be just about impossible (if you don't know what you're doing). I happen to fall into all three categories to some extent.

The way it works is this. You grab the nerest cat and hold it down. (Hopefully you have an assistant to do that.) Then you part the fur on the cat's neck and sprinkle the medicine on the cat's skin. It sounds easy right? Well it does sound easy, but it's not.

We started with the kitten, Cokes. (I always wanted a little bengal cat.) Now she's the smallest and easiest to hold down, but she still has all her claws so starting there could be iffy. Luckily, she trusts us and we were able to catch her without a fight. Plus she only weighs like two pounds and the dose is small. So Mrs. Stonebrow held down the kitten and I applied the medicine. So far so good.


Next, we went after Ebony. As her name might imply, she's an all black cat. She's also pretty friendly and small, and happened to be trapped with us on the first floor. We caught her without too much fuss and got her on the kitchen table. Once the medecine hit her skin though, she stiffened and started wailing a long mournful sound that only a cat in distress (or perhaps a woman in labor) can make. We got her whole dose on and let her go, but now the other cats were on to us.

To give them some time to calm down, we thought we'd give the dog her medicine. That's easy. We catch her by saying "COME" and then "SIT". The dog then sits while we do the exact same thing that sends the cats into spasms of terror. Sometimes I wonder why I'm a cat person and not a dog person. Oh yeah, cats don't poop all over the back yard or stand outside and bark at nothing while you're trying to sleep. (The neighbor's dog does that.) Anyway, three down three to go.

Ezmerelda as you might imagine is also a black cat. Now she is neither small nor friendly. She is however a bit slow, so catching her was suprisingly easy. Having been acquainted with her claws a few times, I knew well enough to wrap her in a towel for her treatment. Once you get the cat bundled like a burrito, it's suprisingly easy to apply flea medecine. They even stop struggling. So Ezzy was pretty easy too. Four down, two to go.

Now the boys are a bit timid, and easily spooked. I guess I should have seen it coming, but I was stupid. I walked right up to Oreo, the younger of our Black and white (tux) cats and grabbed him before he could run. As I picked him up, this smallish cat went into the most violent spasms I've ever seen. I could barely believe it. Now he doesn't have front claws so I felt relatively safe. I was wrong. He raked my chest and drew blood in three diagonal lines with one paw, but I didn't notice that right away. What I did notice was the claw that got stuck in the meat of my thumb as he jumped out of my arms. Right now I have a 1/4" deep puncture wound bleeding through the bandage on my hand.

Well this made me mad at the time and instead of a towel I went and grapped the bedsheet from my daughter's bed. The cat was scared and I was mad, which made for a lively combination. Now we had the cats confined to one floor. This is an essential step toward catching a cat that doesn't want to be caught. After a bit of chasing, we managed to corner the little animal behind out entertainment center. Mrs. Stonebrow shooed him out with a broom while I stood ready with my bedsheet.

I really felt clever for this. I grabbed the fitted sheet and had my feet spread wide standing on two of the corners. I held the other two corners in my hands and draped the sheet down so he couldn't see what was behind it. When he finally bolted, he shot right between my legs. Ordinarily this would be a smart move and the chase would begin all over again. This time however, he ran right smack into my makeshift fish net and he was neatly caught as I brought the remaining two corners down. Apart from a little difficulty finding which lump of my cat-in-a-bag was the head, this ordeal was over. Woohoo! I'm bigger and smarter than my three year old cat.

Anyway, we caught Patches (our other black and white) basically the same way and that was that. He was upstairs hiding under our bed by this time, but my net trick worked exactly the same.

I have to admid I enjoyed it. I just can't figure out why the cats don't like me? On the bright side, the medicine works really well (we've done this before if you can believe it.) and now our cats are protected from fleas, ticks, ear mites and lots of other repulsive six or eight legged creatures.

First Post

Hello world. I have been threatening to start a blog for some time now and here it is.

For starters, I am Myric Stonebrow. I'm a Christian man, an Engineer, and a Father of almost 2 (coming October 2006). I believe in right and wrong, truth and absolutes, but I hope I'm humble enough to realize that I don't always know what those are. If you want to read about my life, beliefs, and musings and such, here is where you can do it.