"Bye John!"

“Bye John!”

Those are the words yelled out a car window by a little boy as he waved at my son, his new friend. I don’t have a child named John you say? Well, that is mostly correct. I do have a silly little son who is so cute and hilarious and changes his name frequently. Reece has started introducing himself as John now. John is his middle name so this IS a step up from introducing himself as Diego or Batman. That is legally one of his names.

We debated whether to name him John Reece (I preferred that combo because it flows so nicely) or Reece John, knowing full well that I planned to only call him Reece. So many friends who go by their middle name said that it was a bit difficult to do that. They did admit it was really easy to tell who telemarketers were when they called asking for them by their first given name instead of their preferred middle name. They all agreed that that was the only bonus about going by their middle name rather than their real first name. I decided to just name him Reece John so he could go by his first given name and avoid the confusion of being J. Reece Murdock.

Now five years after that debate he has decided to do the opposite? Now I have R John Murdock.

For the better part of the last year he went by Diego. For a few weeks, he went by Batman. I could choose to be offended by his apparent dislike of my name choice for him, but instead it makes me giggle profusely. What a silly kid we have on our hands!

Dreadfully far behind

I know we have not blogged enough for the longest time. Sorry. I do have a few brief stories from this week to share though:

Our boys have decided they really want to earn money so I said I would pay them $5 per bathroom if they wanted to clean the bathroom (to my specifications of course) and we have various other chores that can earn them money too. The other day they wanted to earn some money so I told them to go clean the bathroom because it really needed it. They decided they would rather not earn the money.

I was eating breakfast the other day when Davis got grumpy in his high chair and I got him out and sat him on my lap instead. Then he shared everything he had just eaten with me by throwing it up all over me. Twas adventurous.

Today I got my dinner ready in the crockpot and then we went out for a hike to find nearby Bells Canyon. I came home to realize I had set the crock pot onto warm, not high, so our dinner is now going to be ready at bedtime. We will eat it tomorrow I guess. Whoops. I am also too tired to cook now thanks to the hike. Out to eat we go.

I told my boys Tuesday they cannot play Wii after 7:30 am on Wednesday because I was tired of hearing it all day and them fighting over it. They got up before 5 am so they could get their time in. We were all grumpy all day thanks to the early start.

My AC is working like a champ. Love it. The basement is practically Antarctica. The upstairs is just lovely though.

We have been slowly working on our sprinkler system to fix the leaks from the winter and Bryan repaired a leak to find the next one 6 inches away from the one he just fixed. Oops. Once he finally had time to fix all the leaks we had to check the sprinkler heads. Amazingly, they all work. We just have to figure out again how to program the system and then I will no longer have to remember to actually water the lawn with the hose. The hardest part of using the hose is remembering to turn the water off again. I had to pay Isaac a dollar to run home and turn off the hose sprinklers when we left for a few minutes to visit a neighbor that turned into a few hours… Oops.

Davis has four teeth now. Tooth number three was his first tooth on top. It was not a middle front tooth, but one next to it. It totally looked like a fang. It was hilariously cute.

Memorial Day Weekend

p>We decided to visit the grave of my Grandma and Grandpa Murdock this Memorial Day weekend. The weather was supposed to be really rainy on Monday, so we took advantage of the relatively clear skies on Saturday and headed down to the Orem cemetary. We found their plot, set down our flowers, and I told the boys some stories about Grandma and Grandpa until they got tired of listening to me. Then we left and went up Provo Canyon a ways to Bridal Veil Falls. It was a short walk to the falls and the kids had a good time playing in the water and seeing all the water. Click on the link below the picture to see all the photos we took with Ily’s phone.

Virtual Desktops on Windows

I love multiple virtual desktops. I have to work on windoze sometimes at work, which doesn’t have virtual desktops, but I found Virtual Dimension, and it rocks!

Posted by Bryan on March 13, 2006

Knee-Deep at Alta

Part way through the day on Friday, I realized I was skiing down
the hill and the only sound I could hear was the squeaking of my
boots. I couldn’t hear other people, I couldn’t hear my edges
scraping across ice—basically all I could hear was the silence of
fine, dry, knee-deep Utah powder. It was turning out to be one
awesome day of skiing at Alta. I
have the difficult assignment of interviewing internship candidates at
BYU for my company, so once or twice a year they fly me down to Utah
to meet with the hopefulls. As I’ve done before, I decided to take an
extra day for myself after the interviews and go skiing. My sister,
Julie, skied with me and we had a blast.

My interviews were Thursday and it snowed most of the day. Friday
was the ski day. There was about 6 inches of powder, and a relatively
small crowd at the hill. The soft snow was very forgiving on the
steeps, and I felt like I was skiing better than I ever had in my
life. If I hadn’t bought some sunscreen at lunch I might have had the
worst sunburn of my life too. It was that nice out. I forgot about
the terrible traffic that we’d had on the way up pretty quickly (two
accidents!). The way home was slow going too, but that was OK,
memories of ripping down the hill were very comforting.

(Sorry, neither of us remembered a camera, so no pictures)

Posted by Bryan on March 12, 2006

Root Partition Full

If you’ve tried to access the website in the past few days you haven’t been able to. I’m sorry. This will be way too much information for many of you, but so I don’t forget I’ll write down just what happened and how I fixed it. For the less interested, just know that I’m on top of it, and that the system is back up. Yay!

Here is the sequence of events that lead to this, as far as I can re-create them. First, I don’t remember how long ago, but I installed Mandriva Linux on this machine. I probably had it automatically partition the hard drive, probably for a desktop setup. This created a root partition and a /home partition. It made the root partition about 6 GB, and all the rest of the hard drive went for /home. I put a second network card in the machine and set it up as a router for my home network. I configured samba to serve files on the network card that the home network was on, eth0. Since then I have installed the postgresql database, which by default keeps all its data in /var/lib. Also, a goodly amount of log files have accumulated. I don’t know how much space this was all using before, but I made a change that started using a whole lot more recently, and not on purpose. I bought a linksys router, so I disabled eth0 on this machine. This caused samba, actually nmbd, to write lots of error messages to about 4 or 5 different log files: /var/log/messages, /var/log/syslog, /var/log/daemons/warnings, /var/log/daemons/errors, and I think /var/log/mail/warnings too, all saying it couldn’t find eth0. All of these log files had grown into the hundreds of megabytes range in size. Finally, Ily saw the whole machine crash when she tried to open a rather large attachment in gmail. Firefox probably saved it to /tmp, which became the straw that broke the camel’s back. Of course this happened shortly after I left town for a few days, hence it didn’t get fixed until today. Ahh computers, you gotta love 'em. At least with Linux it’s easy to figure exactly what when wrong like this.

Needless to say, I reconfigured samba, deleted some log files, and for good measure I removed a whole bunch of cached rpms. My root partition has 2 GB free now. I hope that lasts until I can figure out how to non-destructively resize ext3 partitions!

Posted by Bryan on March 11, 2006

Winter Weekend Continued

Sorry I’m late in posting this. After gushing to Ily about how much fun Isaac and I had on that beautiful day of skiing, I decided to take her and Micah up there two days later on Presidents day. The sky wasn’t as clear but it was much warmer and still very fun. We stopped at frozen Multnomah Falls for a bit, and then continued up to Cooper Spur. There wasn’t anything Micah could do there, so we continued on Highway 35 to Little John Sno Park for some sledding. The boys loved sitting on the sled between our legs, and Ily surprised me by being so willing to hike up the sledding hill over and over. So that was Saturday and Monday of last weekend that Isaac and I spent out in the snow. It was so much better than watching it rain from indoors!

Pictures and movies, of course

Posted by Bryan on February 23, 2006