The Crud

After four days of suffering from some low level respiratory bug, I seem to be well this morning. Lody will be pleased: she has been trying to tell me that even middle-aged, sedentary Collies need an occasional walk. Every morning I have promised her walkies, and then thought better of the idea while doing barn chores and realizing that Colorado suffers from a serious lack of oxygen. My must-do list of barn chores is quite short, and if I can’t get through them without feeling winded and exhausted, then I figure I must be sick. I don’t respond well to cold medicines, so I am limited to whining a lot and feeling sorry for myself when I get cold symptoms.

Raise Havoc

Raise Havoc

My trainer took this photo a few days ago of Havoc, her 24 year old Thoroughbred. I can still remember how thrilled I was the first time she asked me if I wanted to ride him, twelve years ago. I leased him briefly before I bought Hap, and he is probably the best trained horse I have ever ridden. I still go back to him occasionally as a schoolmaster, because if you can’t get Havoc to do something, it is definitely operator error.

gnofract4d

Updated links to galleries so they should work now.

Star Bird Fractal

I’ve created two new galleries of gnofract4 fractals, Gallery 3 and Gallery 4 in addition to the ones, Gallery 1 and Gallery 2, that I put up about a year ago.

If you want to see more, the developer of gnofract4d now has a blog called Chaos Engine showing his fractals.

I’ve been running Ubuntu as my desktop Linux distribution for several months. About my only disappointment with Ubuntu was that it didn’t include gnofract4d in the universe or multiverse repositories. gnofract4d is a fractal exploration program that I like to use.

Last week, I decided to see if I could figure out the dependencies the gnofract4d needs to run on Ubuntu. I downloaded the gnofract4d tar file from SourceForge, and started trying to install it. An hour later, after I used Synaptic to install g++-3.4, gtk2-engines-dev, and python2.4-dev and their dependencies, gnofract4d was running on my system. I had already installed gcc (the compiler gnofract4d uses) previous to this.

gnofract4d is under continuous development. There were a lot of improvments since the last time I had used it under Fedora Core six months ago. It also seems a lot more stable. I used to crash it on a fairly regular basis, but don’t seem to be able to do that any more.

Freecycle

I had heard about Freecycle some time ago, but there didn’t seem to be an active local group. A few days ago, I checked again, and found that the Freecycle yahoogroup for our area had grown to 800 members.

Freecycle started as a way to exchange goods that were no longer wanted and keep them out of landfills. In our abundant society, people frequently discard things that are still useful, or would be to someone else. I take a lot of our discards to Goodwill, but I didn’t think Goodwill would welcome a short cord of firewood.

Since we hadn’t used our wood stove for several years, and finally sold it last summer, we didn’t need the firewood. Worse still, the firewood was stacked along our dog run fence, and two of the local dogs had discovered that it made a perfect ramp allowing them to jump in and join our dogs, which also gave them access through a dog door to the mudroom. (This was especially annoying since these dogs were chewers, and we didn’t have the mud room policed for dogs that chew. I try to keep the chemicals in the mud room secure, but don’t normally have to worry about the rest of the room.) We put up some mesh to keep the dogs off the wood, which worked but made the area even more of an eyesore. I had thought about putting a sign offering the firewood out on our road, but hadn’t gotten around to it.

Freecycle asks that your first post to the list be an offer, so I offered the firewood on Wednesday afternoon. I had over ten responses in twenty minutes. After a little correspondence with the first responder, I had arranged for her to come and pick up the firewood on Thursday afternoon. She and her two children arrived promptly at the arranged time, and it took us less than an hour to load the wood into her cargo van. I had no idea you could fit so much into one of those big vans.

Freecycle accepts posts about almost any legal item except for firearms, alcohol and tobacco. You are also allowed to post an occasional “wanted” item, and the one that amused me most was someone requesting a size 10 blue evening gown. The request was fulfilled the same day.