I know it isn't very productive, but I'm not feeling very productive. Something about sound is broken and I don't know how to fix it and I don't know how to find out how to fix it and trying to figure it out is making me frustrated. I discovered the ...
This isn't the first time that I've spend a wee bit too long trying to figure out how to search for large files on a file system. I think if I were a trained computer type person, I'd intuitively know what printf means and how to slice and dice the find command. I don't, and I've been struggling with this for a bit. I've got a file system that is in a state of deep disrepair (it is full) and I need to figure out, among other things, whether there are really big files somewhere that I should know about. As usual, I inherited this file system from someone who inherited it from someone who was pretty smart and clever but not necessarily an expert or someone who took the time to do things the right way. So I've got a lot of puzzles before me. du and find shouldn't be among them. For starters, if you are just getting the hang of the command line, man, the manual command is your friend -- it will describe all of the options available to a particular command. Usually, a web search for "man somecommand" will also point you to a manual page somewhere on the great interwebs. Even "man find" points you to a few manual pages before the flurry of links to advice on finding yourself a man. For bonus starters, get the O'Reilly Linux in a Nutshell book, because it is fantastic for puzzling through this stuff.
Martha Peach found me. When I was little, my mother got it into our head that we needed some quality time with an old lady, and signed us up for this "adopt a grandma" program. We'd go visit with a Venezuelan woman with linoleum everywhere in her house. She ...
View Look, I Don’t Care Who You Are (adventures in adopted grandmothers)
I've been in a kind of hysterical depression over letting the house on Macon slip through my fingers, and trying to channel all that energy into something more useful (like work, you say? hah.) or at least stem the tide of obsession. I've looked into it and it seems to be unlikely that the WHOLE WORLD WILL END if I don't buy a house this week. Possible, but not likely. Not to just lay my finances bare here on the interwire, but ... at what we'd offered for a four unit building, we'd be paying a chunk more ourselves each month than market rent, certainly more than we pay now, but definitely within our budget, as long as the other three units were occupied (or the tenants were actually paying their rent) 75% of the time. The big vision was that in a few years we'd be able to afford to expand into two floors of the house. It turns out that in addition to totally new wiring, we'd need to replace all of the plumbing in the house and, while we could probably afford it, we couldn't then afford for anything else to go wrong in the first two years and that was too risky for us, so we backed out. Here is the thing: even with the major work that the building needed, we could easily have afforded one third of the building. While we'd forgo the rental income, we'd also get to skip out on a lot of risk because we wouldn't be counting on rental income to pay the mortgage. Even half the building would have been manageable and put us back in a somewhat comfortable position, where it would hurt to carry the whole mortgage, but we could do it. Before I go on, just in case I've given you the illusion that I know what I'm talking about ... I don't. I'm making this up as I go and writing it up so that my friends (and my parents) can tell me if I'm wrong.
A few folks have asked for this, and so I am sharing it. With you, my dear readers. Here is what I know: Buying a home is usually a smart idea. You can use all kinds of rent vs. own calculations, but the big truth is that unless you ...
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