Entries in Life

Pennsylvania has hills!

New Orleans is flat. Flat as a pancake. There are a few mounds of dirt here and there. A ramp up and down. But mostly it’s flat. I was spoiled by this. Riding to work on my bicycle, I’d only have two inclines and one was optional: The ramp to the Superdome’s second level.

My ride to work in PA is about 1/6th the distance that my ride was in New Orleans, but, since I live on top of a hill, it is all down hill. Until the evening. Than I get a brief CV workout as I climb back up the hill to home.

I should mention that (this part of) Pennsylvania is almost built for road biking. All major roads have wide shoulders where slow traffic can ride. On roads without wide shoulders, people are patient with the slower traffic. It makes it a natural area in which to cycle.

So I was playing with screen and, after Debian put /usr/bin/screen in my /etc/shells, tried it as a login shell. It works great! I can log in and, automatically, I’m re-connected right where I left off.

One problem: I use tramp and scp. Tramp and scp just don’t work when screen is the default shell. After struggling mightly with the documentation, I switched back to bash as my login shell and implemented the following in my .bash_profile.

Tramp sets $TERM to tramp-terminal-type. By default this is “dumb” (which is also what $TERM is set to when using scp), and that’s good, because screen can’t handle “dumb”. It says something like “Clear screen capability required.” At the end of my .bash_profile, I added:

  if [ "$TERM" != "dumb" ]; then    screen -x -RR    exit  fi  

So you won’t have to look at the man page, “-x” means “attach to an already attached screen session”. You could actually have two different xterm windows with the same session running in each. If you prefer that only one window get attached at a time (say, you leave from work and forget to log out and you want to force that session to close when you log in from home), then change the “-x” to “-D”. “-RR” just means “Do what ever is necessary to re-attach.”

One nice thing about this (versus using /usr/bin/screen as your shell) is that you have a fallback in case something strange happens with screen and you can’t reconnect with it. In that case:

TERM=dumb ssh remote-box

and you’re back on the system and able to debug your screen problem.

To the surprise of no one who has lived in the New Orleans area, the Jefferson Parish police force are a bunch of racists. This incident (man-handling muslim attendees, accusing them of having “fake tickets”) happened at this years graduation cermemony for the high school that my wife attended.

For the un-initiated, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s department is headed up by Sheriff Harry Lee, a Chinese man. routinely strikes potential black jurists, hires racist cops, etc. Jefferson parish also elected David Duke State Senator.

We tore up the carpets in our new house. It was pretty nasty. A widow had been living there for several years with a cat. A cat that evidently didn’t have a litterbox. This sort of carpet does not smell good.

After taking up the carpet, we discovered a beautifully preserved chestnut staircase (to go with all the trim) and an oak parkay floor. The selling agent visited after we pulled up the carpet. You could see from the look on her face that she wished the seller had pulled up the carpet. Her commission would’ve been bigger.

There is a lot to discover with this home. We found, for instance, that the original owner started the first electric company in the town (after running a generator in the barn for a while); the hundred-year history of the town claims that he later moved to Florida and invented the electric rabbit used in dog races.

The previous owner was the audio tech for the Fulton and had tapes of all the shows done there. One of the singers, a close friend of the family, came by last night and asked if the tapes were still around, but we couldn’t find them.

All in all, I think we’ve got a gem of a house on our hands. It just needs some polishing.

Since the Clark for President campaign disbanded, I’ve been looking in various places for the type of work that I would enjoy. I think I’ve found it in Pennsylvania.

While Lancaster County, PA is a long ways, both culturally and geographically, from New Orleans, we’ve already found a house (which we’ll be moving into this Friday, if all goes well) and begun to acquaint ourselves with the area.

My determination to find work that involves Perl by watching the Perl Jobs mailing list paid off huge dividends. I’ll be able to program in Perl and continue to do some interesting Linux System Administration work. Additionally, since the company is small, I’ll be the primary (only, for now) technical person, so I’ll be able to have the influence on decision-making that I wanted in my previous position, but lacked because the company was phasing out their UNIX-based operations.