Friday was a week long
Jun. 10th, 2011 09:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altivoBut at least it was cooler.
Took Gary out to dinner in town to celebrate having the shearing all done. It's a job we've come to dread each spring but it went pretty smoothly this year.
Tomorrow is the picnic at IRM, so went shopping after dinner to get salad veggies and a couple dozen ears of sweet corn. I felt "greedy" buying so much corn at once but the cashier seemed to think nothing of it. I'm actually not a big fan of sweet corn but nearly everyone else seems to be, so it seemed like a good addition to the plan. The salad, on the other hoof, will be good by my standards. Lots of ingredients, but I won't mix them up. Everyone can pick the things they like and leave out what they prefer to skip. This went over pretty well last year.
It's also RPO (Railway Post Office) weekend at the museum, when they recreate mail drops and pickups from a moving train, and cancel letters with a special cancellation for the occasion. The local post office sends staff over to set up a temporary branch.
Weather promises to be decent, coolish, mostly sunny, with enough breeze to blow away some of the insects. Last year it rained in the morning and then got steamy hot in the afternoon, as I recall.
I've come to an interesting/amusing conclusion about DECWindows on the VAX, too. Though it's working properly on the LAN at home, it fails utterly at the library. My suspicion is that you have to have DECnet support installed even though you aren't using it directly. Both the Alpha and the VAX emulator at home have DECnet installed and then deactivated by setting an option at boot time. The Vax emulation I'm running at the library was installed without DECnet. The docs don't say you need it, but I suspect it never really occurred to them that you might run without it. (DECnet was Digital's internet-like communication protocol, predating the public TCPIP Internet by a number of years. At one time, the international DECnet extended world-round, connecting Australia to Japan to US to Europe with the same ease we now enjoy on the Internet.) TCPIP was not supported by DEC operating systems at first, and when I ran real VAX equipment, if you needed it you had to buy from a third party supplier. Eventually DEC bought out one of the third party protocol stacks and integrated it into OpenVMS as an extra-cost option.
Took Gary out to dinner in town to celebrate having the shearing all done. It's a job we've come to dread each spring but it went pretty smoothly this year.
Tomorrow is the picnic at IRM, so went shopping after dinner to get salad veggies and a couple dozen ears of sweet corn. I felt "greedy" buying so much corn at once but the cashier seemed to think nothing of it. I'm actually not a big fan of sweet corn but nearly everyone else seems to be, so it seemed like a good addition to the plan. The salad, on the other hoof, will be good by my standards. Lots of ingredients, but I won't mix them up. Everyone can pick the things they like and leave out what they prefer to skip. This went over pretty well last year.
It's also RPO (Railway Post Office) weekend at the museum, when they recreate mail drops and pickups from a moving train, and cancel letters with a special cancellation for the occasion. The local post office sends staff over to set up a temporary branch.
Weather promises to be decent, coolish, mostly sunny, with enough breeze to blow away some of the insects. Last year it rained in the morning and then got steamy hot in the afternoon, as I recall.
I've come to an interesting/amusing conclusion about DECWindows on the VAX, too. Though it's working properly on the LAN at home, it fails utterly at the library. My suspicion is that you have to have DECnet support installed even though you aren't using it directly. Both the Alpha and the VAX emulator at home have DECnet installed and then deactivated by setting an option at boot time. The Vax emulation I'm running at the library was installed without DECnet. The docs don't say you need it, but I suspect it never really occurred to them that you might run without it. (DECnet was Digital's internet-like communication protocol, predating the public TCPIP Internet by a number of years. At one time, the international DECnet extended world-round, connecting Australia to Japan to US to Europe with the same ease we now enjoy on the Internet.) TCPIP was not supported by DEC operating systems at first, and when I ran real VAX equipment, if you needed it you had to buy from a third party supplier. Eventually DEC bought out one of the third party protocol stacks and integrated it into OpenVMS as an extra-cost option.
