Last night I printed the hard copy edition of colgaffneyis newsletter. I mailed it this morning, and now I am finished with this responsibility. Somebody else will be doing it next month—my term as the organization’s Secretary ends a week from today and I am not running for re-election.

I am continuing to configure Easy Peasy on my ASUS Eee PC 900, which I installed last weekend. I took care of an annoying bug in the installation. Open Office did not work as installed. I removed all the packages related to it, and reinstalled what I wanted. Now it works. I also installed (g)vim, my preferred editor (Emacs is also available). It would have been much simpler to reinstall the original software, but I am enjoying the process of rebuilding the system my way. I suppose I have voided the warranty, at least on the software, but that does not bother me. I have been in the industry for 32 years. This has included a couple jobs with software vendors, which have long since removed any awe I may have felt for them.

After mailing the colgaffneyis newsletter I went to work on rebuilding my human powered lathe. I built it a few years ago, but taken it down because of space issues. Some of the parts had been consumed by other projects, but I replaced them today, improving them in at least one case. Warmer weather made the shop more tolerable than it had been for weeks. A couple things remain to be done, but they are not hard.

In the course of the work I went to Home Depot to buy some plywood to replace the base on which the lathe stands. the original board having been consumed by one of my projects for colgaffneyis. While I was there I was amused to see a tool tote that was very similar to Roy Underhill’s. It was made of plastic but the shape was topologically identical. You can see my implementations of Roy’s tote here (both are still actively used).

While at Home Depot I took some extra time just to walk around the store for exercise. It is not as good as the downtown skyway, but I was able to run up the numbers on my pedometer some, at an aerobic rate for a while. So I did better than my slug-like pace a week ago.