Saturday's Are Nice

It's not a workday and it's not Sunday (where you have to worry about Monday, which is a workday). I spent the morning getting feed, cleaning out self-feeders and fixing fence. Every year I say I'm going to clean out the self-feeders (feeders where the lambs can go and eat their fill whenever they want) after we start individually feeding them and not wait until spring when we have a new lamb crop. And every year I fail to do it, so it's always wet and moldy. Luckily we've figured out that a shop-vac will suck that stuff right outta there. It was really dusty this year. I had it from head to toe. Warning: The black widows and wasps are already out.

We've decided to bottle feed one of the lambs. The mom only has one working food source and the bigger girl seems to be cleaning it out before the little girl can get to it. She ate 1/4 of a bottle this morning and 1/2 tonight. She's really too cute. She's teeny-tiny and has a bleat that breaks your heart. It sounds a lot like a newborn baby when it's really wailing.

I upgraded my Ubuntu to Feisty Fawn. It's a beta version, but for what I've used it for so far today, it's worked great. The best thing is I didn't have to install any printer drivers or anything to get my printer to working. Yea!!

Happy Birthday Sydney!

It's Been a While

I know it's been a while since I posted, but that shows how truly boring I am.

We've had a few more lambs and lost a few. We have four ewes left to lamb, but I think that one of those isn't bred.

I've been playing with Ubuntu; installing, reinstalling, tweaking. I did get MLB.tv/audio working...but then I broke something else and did a clean reinstall.

I always think of things I want to rant about/post on here when I'm away from a computer, and then when I get back to one I've either forgotten what I was going to post or it just seems silly when I think about it.

I want to say a belated happy birthday to my brother. I love ya little bro.

Update: Dad just called and we have two more lambs, a boy and a girl. So now we are down to three (or two if I'm correct).

Ubuntu and Canon

I know that Murphy's Law covers a great many things. I haven't had time to sit down and read them all, so if there isn't one that matches it, or if there is one I want to rename it, that states "If something can go easy or it can go difficult and it always goes difficult" that's Mandi's Law.

So in a previous post, I talked about how I installed Ubuntu on my external hard drive. Well, of course my Canon Pixma ip4200, and all Canon's for that matter, aren't very compatible. Why did I have to have a printer out of thousands that wasn't compatible? That's right, Mandi's Law! So after many frustrating hours of trying to get it right with the driver that's supposed to be for that printer, I may have found a solution using a Canon bjc-8200 model with the recommended driver. It printed the test page and a spreadsheet successfully. I haven't tried a picture, but I'm going to end the night on a successful note and not try it until later.

I still haven't gotten MLB tv/audio to work in Firefox on Ubuntu, but I do think I'm getting closer. I gotta get it working before April 1st for sure. ;)

Huge

Another ram lamb was born last night....and he's HUGE! He is almost as big as the February lambs already. And he got up really quick. I was surprised. Usually when they are big, it takes them a while to get going. Not him. Like all sheep, he was thinking with his stomach as soon as he was born, but it does run in his family. His mom was looking for food in the middle of labor. I'd say that within thirty minutes of being born, he had stood up and found the food source. They always want to shake as soon as they stand up and then always end up falling in a heap. But I learned last night that they really do get rid of some of the wet when they shake, since I was standing right next to him when he did it.

All of the other lambs look good. I will probably let the two others that are in the nursery out today. The babies are running around the pen. That's usually a sure sign they are strong enough to go out.

We may not be up in quantity, but I think our quality is good. As Dad says, "We've taken worse ones that that to the show".

Time Change

The lamb crop is slowly growing. We've lost a few and gained a few. The ones that have made it are looking really good, and are mostly girls. We have eight ewes left to lamb.

I love the long evenings that come with daylight savings as much as the next guy (or girl), but it isn't worth all of the problems it gives me at work. I would be happy if they would leave it one way or the other.

I love seeing the green of the grass and trees budding out this time of the year. I hope we don't get another freeze that, well, freezes them.

Happy Birthday Mom

I'm a day late (and a dollar short), but happy birthday Mom! You look great!

Lambs and Ubuntu

This weekend has been productive. We've had four lambs yesterday and one this morning. The totals are twelve live lambs (eight females and four males), and we've lost five. There are eleven ewes left to have lambs. We don't have as many as we did last year at this time, but the ones we have sure look good.

Also this weekend, I successfully installed Ubuntu Edgy Eft (6.10) onto my usb external hard drive. I thought that installing and using Linux would be fun and I might learn something in the process. I was right. Using this guide and steps 1-3 of this guide and a little googling, I was able to get it going. From this, I learned that my SATA controller shows up as /dev/sda vs. /dev/hda that the guides have, and so my external hard drive shows up as /dev/sdb. I point this out in the hopes that it might help someone else that is as newbie-ish as I am. Also in the BIOS (which you want to be careful messing around in), on my Dell Dimension 8300, to set the boot order I had to go to the boot sequence menu, put CD-ROM first and Hard Drive second. Then go into Hard Drive boot sequence (can't remember right now exactly what it was called) and move USB up to the top. Also, the default setting in the GRUB bootloader menu file has to be changed. To do this, use Step 11 in this guide. If you reboot before editing this file, you might get an error and it asks you if you want to edit the file (or something like that). Choose to edit the file and find the place that says "(hd0,x)" where x equals anything other than 0. Change the x to 0 and hit enter. I believe it tries to start up again and it should go into the login process. Then after you're logged in, you can change the menu file.

I was able to change my monitor settings, but I haven't figured out how to get my Canon Pixma ip4200 to work. It'll work using Turboprint, but the free version puts the logo on it and I don't think I want to pay for it, so I'd like to get the driver working. I got tired of messing with it and decided to play with other stuff and come back to it.

So now I have the best of both worlds. If I want to boot up in Windows, I just turn off my external hard drive, otherwise I leave it on and I'm in Ubuntu.

I also got to see my family this weekend. My nieces' birthday party was yesterday. I think everyone had a good time. Levi and I played basketball for an hour and I'm feeling it today. Then they came down to Dad's today and had lunch. That Colin Dade is such a cutie!

It was just a pretty darn good weekend.

Triplets

I don't know what is with all the triplets being born the past few years. Another set was born last night. Two boys and a girl. They are all legs.

Spring training baseball games started today, so you know what will most likely be on my tv, pc, or XM radio for the next eight months.