response 329 of 475:

Mar 8 02:36 UTC 2004

Can libc6 serve in the place of libc5?

response 331 of 475:

Mar 8 23:09 UTC 2004

Today we went to check out the new Chinese food store on Liberty near Dragon's
Lair Futons, Faz pizza, and Coleman's market.  They bought a large chunk of
building that used to be several offices, and did the wiring and painting
themselves - two brothers and one wife who used to have a downtown restaurant.
Scott let us know that they were open.  They were excited to see us and let
us come in the wrong door (where there is no shelving or food yet).  No other
customers, so we got a grand tour of all the dumplings, and fish, and tofu,
and vegetables (we got Chi broccoli and baby bok choy and 2 garlics for $1).
Prices are very low - they say it is to attract new customers.  Jim got some
black sesame seed candy, and dried tofu and mushrooms, and sesame oil.  We
got advice on how to make soup and how to steam dumplings from some good
cooks.  There will be even more food in a few days.  You can buy 25 lb of MSG,
or 50 lb of rice (or 10 brown rice).  They are selling to the 5 local CHinese
restaurants.  While we were there someone wandered in looking for a type of
meditation chair and they steered him to us (our English is better and they
know we like brown rice).  
        They found us some vegetable and leek dumplings but we already spent
all our $17 on other things so will come back again soon.
        We then wandered through Coleman's and looked at garlic for three times
the price, without even the nifty little plastic mesh bag.  Coleman's is
selling sticks of forced forsythia.
        I am still having trouble keeping up with Jim.

Today I got an email from one of our small group of computer users who says
AOL blames the modem we gave you (56K winmodme) for the fact that she is being
disconnected increasingly often.  I used it for a while (the modem) in my
computer and never got disconnected.  I have heard that AOL disconnects users
when things get busy - is this true?  I suggested she keep a log of what times
she gets disconnected and how long she has been on first.  AOL suggested her
modem was 'outdated'.  Do outdated modems disconnect more often???
Last tiem they told us to make more memory by clearing 'art work' (saved image
files) from the hard drive cache.  I don't trust anything they say.

response 333 of 475:

Mar 11 15:30 UTC 2004

Monday will be six weeks from my last chemotherapy (Jan 26) if I counted
correctly.  My digestion is slowly improving and things are tasting better
but still not quite right and my tongue still feels a bit sore.  My fingertips
are still slightly numb (except maybe not the right pinkie) but my feet are
not numb (or I don't notice if they are).  My legs are stronger but I could
use more upper body strength.  I had trouble carrying a couple of printers
(dot-matrix are heavier than inkjet).  The pains in the area of my spleen are
finally gone and my left hand rarely hurts where they put in all the IVs. 
My sit bones still hurt, and the laryngitis does not seem any better than it
was a few weeks ago.  Some days are worse than others.  The hot flashes are
no longer happening every 45 minutes, they are at least an hour and maybe 20
hours apart.  I have not been keeping good track.  

The neighbor down the street called to go for a walk yesterday while it was
sunny but we had a visitor, someone new to grex who read this item and was
interested in linux.  Today it is snowing and she won't want to walk.  Jim
promised to bike in the snow (and dark, coming back) to replace the 56K modem
in the computer we set up for a friend of bruin's.  It may be dying due to
nearly continuous use.  THe owner now wants a cable connection or DSL - any
suggestions other than SBC?  Does she have to pay for both DSL and AOL
separately?  

response 337 of 475:

Mar 13 05:10 UTC 2004

I now have another version of basiclinux going - dietlibc and Kernel 2.2.16.
It has a few bugs, some of which have been fixed in the second edition (which
came out three days after the first one) - wrong terminal in rxvt might be
why I don't get a cursor using cli programs like telnet.  I cannot download
linux files - they get to about 75% and stall, with two browsers and wget.
Every time they stall at the same place.  When I installed BL3 to a computer
with mono VGA I could not see the numbers I was typing for a couple of menus
but after I plugged in a color VGA monitor I saw what I typed even after
plugging back the mono VGA monitor and again when I rebooted a few times. 
Lynx from Slackware 4.0 with two added libraries works but there is some
scrambling - might this be due to using an earlier libncurses.so ?  Kermit
is not happy and wont' run, and also needs libncurses.  I cannot easily
upgrade because I can't download files.  I used another linux finally to
download and copied to this  one.  Most of our floppy disks wont' work on
several linux computers, which complain about I/O problems.  I got plip to
work finally by reversing the numbers.  Turns out I was sending to myself
rahter than the other computer.  

A week ago my fingers, two of them, started to get shredding skin around the
fingernails, which had happend about 2 weeks after chemotherapy every time,
but this was 2 weeks after 3 weeks after therapy (when I would have had a 9th
if I had a 9th).  Today I noticed my hair is starting to pull out a gain, 1"
hairs, which usually happens 3 weeks after therapy.  Odd.  Sort of an echo.

Kroger's $2 Deluxe Death by Chocolate tastes good for the first time, instead
of sour or odd.  My tongue still feels a bit sore but ice cream is not
scratchy.  My weight is finally up a bit, to maybe 115 wiht lots of clothing.
The hospital scale tended to weigh at least 3 pounds less than ours, but I
used to weigh 112 on ours for 3 years before getting hospitalzed.  108 a year
ago, 93 in August after all that hospital food.  I still need to climb more
stairs.  Maybe one more flight every day until I can run down and up 50
flights like Jim does without running out of breath, when he had to answer
the questions about this for an exam.  He stopped when he could not talk and
walk at the same time.  I am aiming at 118 or 120 so I will have a reserve.
Bought masa harina to make tacos rather than the premade ones that are too
thin and are only good for making corn chips because they get hard, and we
have lots of onions and tomato paste for salsa, to use before the onions
sprout, like the daffodils and crocus that we saw up today.  It is much more
interesting to cook now that I feel like eating what I cooked.


On today's walk to the library and Kroger for exercise, we stoppped at Ann
Arbor Bedding and looked at all the 10" mattresses some of which have the
special foam that I bought.  $1500 for a bed!  For $200 you can buy 3" dense
foam which also would have worked for me.  I met a small bulldog behind a
child gate.  This year's beds are white, and not as slippery as they used to
be.  No stripes.  Our mattresses are striped cotton.  To keep from getting
bored, Jim collected Kroger carts on the east side of Stadium Boulevard, which
he surmises people walked across to the bus stop and abandoned, pushed them
together, and returned them.  We got the friendly cashier who likes to give
bag discounts.  He gave us five discounts for the five items we bought.  Says
nobody bothers him about this unless it goes over 10 bags, and thanked us for
saving the environment.  Last time he let us use his Kroger card.

Tomorrow Jim will try to fix our doctor friend's garage door opener and I will
try to walk back from there (3 miles?) stopping at another friend's house half
way.  I might not make it, might be 4-5 miles.  I presume they will try to
help fatten me up.  Nice Macedonian cooking.  

We are running out of things to see on Stadium Blvd.  We still have a video
store and a podiatrist and McDonald's.  Stadium Optical.  Toys with Noise.

response 339 of 475:

Mar 13 18:07 UTC 2004

Probably a lot like a Romanian meal, including feta cheese.  What is that
called in Romanian?  Pita (with filo dough).  Good bread.  Soup.  We are
leaving in half hour and I am not trying to walk that far.

response 341 of 475:

Mar 14 04:10 UTC 2004

We had chorba - with rice and lemons.  In Macedonian it refers to thickened
soup as opposed to broth.  We had two kinds of ajvar (red pepper, eggplant,
garlic, spices) one of which we made.  We skipped the bison burgers and
enjoyed the noodles with shiitake and portabello mushrooms which were not
Macedonian.  Jim and our friend played fix the garage door opener and
installed a direct phone line to the computer while I sympathized with his
wife about her brother's dying due to poor pollution controls in Macedonian
power plants and poor medical care.  He got bladder cancer.  
Instead of feta we had Irish cheddar and some sort of mozarella, with
Zingerman's bread.  Godiva chocolates to fatten me up.  Herbal tea.  

response 343 of 475:

Mar 16 19:32 UTC 2004

Last August we were supposed to get our teeth cleaned but I cancelled because
I could not sit up long enough.  Three weeks after my final chemotherapy I
was given the go-ahead to get my teeth cleaned.  Before that my platelet count
would have been too low, leading to too much bleeding.  Usually we try to
schedule spring and fall so we can bike.  Since I can't bike yet anyway, I
scheduled for today, expecting improved weather.

We had a lovely walk through Eberwhite woods in blowing snow, looking at
treetrunks and one squirrel. Jim walked his bike because he had to be at an
exam at WCC one hour after his teeth were cleaned and it is 7 miles and takes
longer in the snow.  They asked, as usual, if there was anything new with my
health since the last cleaning.  This time there was, so she dutifully wrote
down lymphoma, chemotherapy but no radiation.  I asked why my teeth have been
feeling slimy since I started chemotherapy, might it be a residual fungal
infection.  Nope, there are two types of saliva and I have an imbalance with
more of the sticky type, which since I had no radiation will go away in time
(along with the imbalance in taste buds which still makes potatoes and apples
taste unpleasant).  My gums looked like I had not been flossing for much of
the past six months (as instructed - it might have made them bleed).  
        For the first time since I can recall, I had 'no cavities'.  The
chemotherapy must have been good for my teeth ;=)  Jim needs one filling.
        I wonder if I also have some imbalance in my intestinal secretions
which will go away, improving my digestion eventually.  The pain and bleeding
finally cleared up about 5 weeks after the last chemotherapy, and I suspect
was due to the chemicals preventing regeneration of the lining, similar to
my shredding skin near my nails (which is finally cleared up again). 

        Jim was up until 2 am getting the finishing details on a program about
drywall mud.  He put in some creative spellings such as demntion which I
corrected.  He says the teacher can't spell either and does not grade for
that.  Today I am going to try to compile kermit and ratpoison with glibc5
before Jim takes over the computers again.  

response 345 of 475:

Mar 16 22:16 UTC 2004

Ratpoison is a small window manager that is non-graphical and does not use
a mouse, and runs all X programs full-screen but lets you switch between them
and write a menu.  There is an advanced version that will do split screen.
It uses similar commands to 'screen' for console.  I am hoping Kermit will
run in it using the regular console font, since I need to run Kermit in X in
order to get a scroll buffer (or in DOS, which I tend to do isntead).  
The latest basilinux (3.01) is using swm which is tiny but comes with a bunch
of wallpaper (someone's first reaction to one choice was 'yech!) and requires
a mouse to even get the menu to come back (or Ctl-Alt-Backspace and type
startx again) and also to make the rxvt full-screen unless I reprogram it
larger.  This version of linux is using xli to view images so I would need
to run lynx or links in X to see images.  It can't be used to run Opera (at
least not a recent version of it).  I am trying to get lynx from SW4.0 to work
with it and might need the libncurses from 4.0 instead of 3.5 to do so.  And
the kermit from SW4.0 has some floating point requirement which we don't meet,
and that compiled for 3.5 does not do FTP because it is an old version so I
might recompile without floating point support.  Kermit support sent me
instructions how to do that.  Debian has compiled ratpoison but it is hard
to find a source for Debian with glibc5 - what number would that be?  SW7.1
is something like Debian 2.2 and it goes back to 2.0 if you can find it, at
some mirrors.  I found only 2.2 so far.  

I have become Windows support.  Two calls in two days from people who thought
they broke their Windows.  One of them somehow ended up at 640 instead of 800
res, and the other must have crashed because Alt-F4 and Ctl-Alt-Del did not
get her out of wherever she was.  Power button worked.  

response 347 of 475:

Mar 17 03:25 UTC 2004

Kermit95 won't work with linux.  I use MS-KERMIT for DOS which comes with its
own screen buffer -just hit PgUp PgDn.  in Linux you need to stuff X and xterm
into the computer to get a screen buffer and then Shift-PgUp/PgDn (or the
mouse if you have a poor memory for commands).  I don't know if it is xterm
that provides the screen buffer and whether ratpoison uses xterm.  First I
need to compile it and get it working somehow.  

response 351 of 475:

Mar 18 23:30 UTC 2004

Re#304/305 The thing you are talking about is a kotatsu and these days is
heated by an electric heater, not coals.  I've seen nowhere outside of the
innaka (countryside) and demonstration museum houses that use the coal
kind.  Too dangerous in the old days, even more so with the more cramped
nature of current Japanese homes.

Fusama with shoji (sliding doors covered with translucent paper) are still
common in most houses and apartments these days.  For better or worse,
modern houses are still quite drafty...a boon in the summer, frustrating 
in winter.