Short post

[altivo]

My brother is in the area to teach a management class, and we met him for dinner in Crystal Lake. It was a nice time and not bad food either, though I prefer restaurants to be a little quieter. (Jameson's Charhouse)

We left the house without one of Gary's homemade fruitcakes that we were going to take to him, but who knows whether he could have gotten it past TSA anyway without them thinking it was explosive? We'll mail it instead. (Yes, he likes fruitcake. So do we.)

We also left the house without putting Red in his crate. We've done that regularly for absences of an hour or so, but this is the first long one. We didn't really intend to, we were just talking and forgot. The good news is that in a three hour period, he did nothing. No hunting through the trash, no opening cupboards, no breaking into any food storage. He was very enthusiastic in greeting us when we got back, but had been perfectly good the whole time.

Oh, and I installed a virtual machine with OpenSolaris over the weekend. It took a long time, apparently because they compress the files so tightly on the CD. I had gotten the impression that OpenSolaris was being killed by Oracle after they bought up Sun, and that the CD I had would be the last free version. However, once I got the thing up and running I discovered that there really is a newer release. There's a process to upgrade the OS in place, but it involves a whole lot of network activity that I can't do from home. In fact, it would probably take hours even from work. I guess I get to download the iso file, burn a new CD, and redo the installation from scratch instead. ;p

Comments

[schnee]

Good Red. :)

Heh, and yeah, I think fruitcake may be classified as a blunt weapon by the TSA. ^.~ (I'm just teasing, though; I like it, too.)

[hrrunka]

There've been rumours (very probably un-founded) of fruit cakes being mistaken for explosives on airport X-ray scanners before now...

[schnee]

Right — now that you mention it, I vaguely recall hearing about that. Something about the fruitcake having the same density as certain explosives, IIRC.

[hrrunka]

Yeah, Semtex comes to mind, probably from decades back when scanners were far less sophisticated...

[altivo]

That was my thought. On an x-ray, they might look like plastic explosive or something. And people who hate fruitcake might consider it toxic even though it's perfectly harmless. These do have a lot of nuts in them.

[altivo]

Gary's cakes are hefty but nowhere near hard enough for that. It might be more effective to make someone eat a lot of it and get drunk from the alcohol content.