weekend deliberations

Weekends are always a relaxation time.  I pull away from work on Fridays and have this sensation that I have this well of time to drink beer, watch old westerns, read stuff.  Every other weekend I get to sleep in as late as I want too!  Sleeping in, no 7 year old telling me at 0530 that its time to get up; no 15 year old insisting on some tribal rites of passage… its a good thing!

I’ve tried also to stay away from news.  News frustrates, angers, and disappoints me.  That is until this morning when I saw coverage of the Bay to Breakers race.  Here in full glorious sight were people with bags on their heads, other people with nothing on at all, still others dressed as various and sundry characters.  With all the serious news that we all have to contend with; its good to also have a thing to write about which tips the other scales. 

I don’t have serious topics to blog about today.  Its more like a recap of a weekend of rain and some shine and a bit of humor.  I noticed that the average amount of time spent blogging is falling off of late.  With the best of intentions I still read using one of them RSS gators.  On Linux, I’ve been using Liferea which is pretty nice.  But, I’ve also been using the Sage extension for Firefox which rules in the areas of quick reading of a few feeds.  If you want one that can travel across OS’es and a Firefox extension is not your cup of tea; may I humbly suggest RSSOwl?

I also spent some time this weekend getting rid of my last real XP system and replacing it with VMware Server and a virtual XP system.  I just don’t need XP any longer on a real computer.  VMware Server is very nice and easy to install and I can reach my install of XP Professional from anywhere on my home LAN.  Its pretty respectable in speed even over 11g wireless connections.  If you don’t know about VMware Server its what GSX Server turned into.  Give it a look if you want to run virtualized guests within Linux.  Works very well.  I came down to realizing I only need XP Pro for a few tasks on a weekly basis and most times with what I do now,  I can get by with VMware sessions.