Eventful day

This post is moderately long and pretty geeky.

First off: Thompson’s ashes to be shot from cannon. The cannon will be mounted in a 53 foot tall, stone, gonzo fist.

Now on to my life:

My seedlings have sprouted their first real leaves. When dicots (a broad category of plants) emerge from their seeds, they have a pair of very generic leaves. After a week or so, the plant starts producing leaves which are distinct to the species. My tomatoes have finally sprouted the hairy, thick leaves which mean that they’re going to live. Woo hoo!

I plan to grow a monster pumpkin this year. To this end, I’ve started “Prizewinner Hybrid” seeds. I understand that there are varieties that go bigger, but we’ll start with the 100 – 300 pound version from Burpee and work up. My goal in all this is simple: I wish to hollow out my 300 pound pumpkin and cut gun ports in the sides. Then I can hide in it at Halloween and scare the living hell out of the kids as they come by.

Now geeky stuff:

I installed the developer-seed version of Tiger (OS X 10.4) on the G5 server in my basement. Getting it there was a little tricky, since the server doesn’t have a DVD drive. I made a small (4GB) partition on the internal disk of the server, and booted it in “target mode.” This is a beautiful, beautiful invention which simply exposes all of the disks in the system as firewire devices through the front port of the system. I connected my laptop, with the Tiger ISO to the target-moded server, and did a block for block copy of the installation ISO onto the small partition. Boot from that partition, install onto the rest of the disk, and voila: Server. I plan to do the same trick to make it dual boot with Gentoo.

I was in Staples today, looking for a firewire cable. I wound up purchasing two multi-purpose cables. One for USB, and one for Firewire. Both have an assortment of tips. The two firewire plugs (small and large) and the four USB tips (small, medium, large, and large-female). This should empower me to make any wire I damn well please, and never have to buy another of either cable.

Also added a networking device to the basement. An old 10/100 switch fell into my hands, so I’m using it to split out the single length of cat-5 that I dragged through the crawl space into the basement. I’m out of ports on the Linksys router, and my servers don’t have wireless cards.