After a week of upgrade woes getting our Broadcomm wireless chip to work with Karmic Koala, the effort seems to be worthwhile, especially since discovering the builtin Gnome Network Manager applet. We’re sitting at Zaxan Cafe at The Mill in Hamilton, and the wireless connection was a painless click-click. Last time we were here, running Intrepid Ibex (8.10), lots of fiddling required in the old network manager, etc. We tried WiFi-Radar, but it comes with Some Assembly Required, Batteries Not Included: the Gnome applet just plain works.
Linux, and particularly Ubuntu, is becoming a mainstream end-user system, slowly but surely. Unix has always been an “expert friendly system,” and the need for professional system administration services (and some of us have had our own issues with lack of documentation) has kept it out of the “even Grandma can use it” mode. We’re using Google Chrome, which is evolving, but the extensions are almost essential to business-oriented social networking and cloud computing. Firefox is the solid browser, and Opera is attractive.
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After five weeks, we returned to Montana to check on restoration of our other old house. Backstory–we got a call from our realtor on New Year’s Day that there was water running down the walls in the dining room, wallpaper hanging from the ceiling, etc. Seems the cold water faucet connection, undisturbed for probably 30 years, suddenly decided to start leaking, which went undetected through several house showings and a friend checking on the house from time to time, as it went directly behind the sink cabinet into the floor.
Purvis Restoration did a great job, ripping out soggy floor and ceiling, drying and mold control applied, and the nearly-new carpet salvaged. We hired Tom O’Shaunessy, who had painted the dining room originally, to do the repaint. The outcome is fantastic, it looks like nothing ever happened, except there is new vinyl in the upstairs bathroom.
So, moral of the story–when you inspect for leaks, feel the joints or wipe them down: leaks are not always visible. Sadly, we just went through a round of leak fixing in our “new” old house in Washington.
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Musings on Unix, Bicycling, Quilting, Weaving, Old Houses, and other diversions
