More bales, beautiful weather, and a Linux surprise

[altivo]

Unloaded another 155 bales this morning. The weather is cooler today and crystal clear, a perfect autumn day, so it wasn't as unpleasant as the last load. We now have nearly 500 bales stacked up, which should easily take us through until next summer. That's a good feeling, especially as hay prices are rising here and may be very high by spring. The drought this summer had a serious impact on local crops of all sorts. The hay wagon is pushed out of the barn and waiting for pickup, so we won't be stuck with one taking up space in my indoor riding area all winter as we were last year when an early snow left the last wagon trapped.


Fall color hasn't peaked yet, but is developing nicely. It remains to be seen whether this year's drought will produce flaming color such as we had in 2000, but I have my hooves crossed. Here's a photo from October, five years ago:



I promise to get out there with a camera again if this year is anywhere near as good. Today is the average "first frost" day for our location, but we are having pleasant evenings with temperatures around 50 F and daytimes in the 70 F range. Just perfect fall weather, perhaps to make up for the endless dry dust of last summer.

I started pulling together the software I would need to record podcasts, and realized that I didn't have a decent microphone. Well, actually I have several, but they are wired for my amateur radio transmitters and not to connect to the sound card. My dear mate suggested I try his headset that he bought for experimenting with voice control of the computer. OK, I asked what connectors it used. "Oh, it's USB," was the answer and I thought "Fat chance of that working with Linux." Well, guess what? I plugged it in, Slackware immediately recognized it and attached the right drivers, and it just works. A little fiddling with Audacity and Xmms to set their input and output to use USB (which they both supported easily, yay) and it's working. My first one minute test recording isn't bad at all. I guess people will be able to stand listening to me. I'm now assembling the material for a first 15 minute presentation, and may have it ready before the weekend is over. Look out net, 'Tivo is about to become a star... not.

Comments

[ducktapeddonkey.livejournal.com]

I've been having all kinds of little Linux "surprises" myself lately as well. Things that I really expected not to work at all, working very well and with little or no effort involved.

When I think about how far I can get with just one CD, even running live off that CD. Then I compare that with how far I get on the same hardware with just an XP disk. There really isn't much comparison. If it wasn't for a few very specific pieces of development software I use, I probably wouldn't even use Windows at work.

Lovely photo by the way. We were out hiking all day today and saw all kinds of colours. Unfortunately our camera doesn't seem to handle overcast days very well and a lot of that colour is washed out of today's pictures.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I thought that about my own work until a little over a year ago. Then I decided to just try it. Turned out I was able to find Linux solutions to everything I needed and I often go a month or more without ever booting the Windows partition. Now, as you've probably read here, I have the library very seriously on track to dump Windows in favor of Linux on the majority of our PCs.