Hugh's Worthless Blog

Our old house before demolition  Our lovely old home in Brentwood was ripped down and replaced with two monstrous blobs of homes by Kingbridge Homes . It was weird to go to their site and see our previous home being shown as the before part of their before and after montage . The whole city of Brentwood is going way too upscale for just about any normal folks to move in there now. We bought this house in 1991 for $155,000, sold it in 1996 for $187,000 and it sold before demolition last year in the mid $300K range. It has now been replaced by two $700,000 homes. Incredible...

Smokey, our new cat  Since our old cat died last month, we saved a new cat from the shelter. We looked online and went back to where we found our first cat, Bill, at the APA on Hanley in Brentwood. Smokey is a nice cat! I posted this picture mostly because I was trying out the new Picasa 2 application from Google . It is pretty neat.

Well, it seems like this is a busy weekend for releases. The long awaited KNOPPIX 3.8.1 was finally released, although I was amazed it did not ship with KDE 3.4. However, the new KANOTIX 2005-02 release does come with 3.4 which may make it more interesting than the standard KNOPPIX release. Get both at the WUARCHIVE KNOPPIX mirror site. A bug release of SLAX has also been released to solve some bugs found in SLAX 5.0.0. On completely unrelated news, my wife has finished up her room parties web site that I am hosting at the university on my neighbor's old home PC. In fact I just bought five old PC's from Simplified Computers for the total mind boggling price of $180 (including shipping!). That makes even RetroBox look expensive (although their shipping is pretty steep!)

The folks at SLAX just released version 5.0.0 which many updates, but the neatest part is it allows people to save their LiveCD configurations on the SLAX website using "webconfig". You select a 10+ character passphrase which you use to save your unique configuration online, so you just boot with the passphrase and the machine boots as you last configured it. Neat idea. You can find the latest version on my SLAX mirror site The KNOPPIX team has announced their latest release, version 3.8.1, will be coming out any day now with 2.6.11, unionfs, more wifi support and permanent home directories on NTFS filesystems. Once it becomes available, I will grab it with BitTorrent and dump it on wuarchive.wustl.edu.

Well, Illinois made a game of it last night, coming from behind with their 3 point shooting to come close in the end, but there wasn't quite enough. North Carolina won a well deserved game with Sean May just dominating the inside game. So the NCAA tournament is over, and St. Louis did a wonderful job hosting the Final Four. So now it is time to start thinking baseball!!