Ramblings for December

At Madre's last Sunday after lunch I burned the excess of the yard waste pile behind the shed. It was fun burning all those branches, leavings and dead grass in the afternoon. I used to like burning trash as a kid, before the town banned burning trash years ago.

It was not fun trying to find water to keep the flames and ashes at bay. The outdoor spigot was never turned on this year due to its not being used. And the garage door was locked tight after the automatic door opener was installed a month ago. So I had to go inside to the basement, which has a free spigot, in order to fill my bucket.

On Monday night, I brought my gifts to Madre's and put them under the tree. I had to race the weather to get there before the rain came. After that I scrubbed out the microwave oven, which had months of cruft baked into the walls and platter. Eww.

During last Sunday's lunch my sister the teacher went on a genealogical spew that concluded in my being volunteered for a gene test to determine which of three branches of the West family I belonged. I know about such tests; National Geographic has a gene kit that is supposed to tell you what general ancestors you have. I am not interested, really, but I will be nagged about it unless I get my cheeks swabbed for genetic material.

You would think, after spending so much time in Japan, that my niece would know better than to not buy a proper omiyage (gift representative of Japan) like she did last year. After her mother (my sister the teacher) told me what she planned to buy for me, I told her not to bother.

The latest images for the public Macs at work are claiming that the network accounts are not available, even though they are. I have had to do configuration gymnastics to keep the Macs connected to the campus network. But even though the results are good, the Mac still insist on lying that Network accounts are unavailable. I tried to use Google to search for a solution for this, but all I got can be summed up by this contextless response.

You must set up DNS to use OD.

DNS links domain names to IP addresses; OD is Open Directory, the open-source version of Microsoft's Active Directory. None of this is of any help to me, because both are functions of the campus network and therefore beyond my reach. The best I can do is to keep the Macs synced with the campus time server, and put as much info as I can into the Active Directory and CIFS (Microsoft file/print) utilities.