Erin and her dad went to Rona and got some lumber over the weekend, with the explicit goal of building a sandbox for William. John and I put the box together, and have it in place, but it’s lacking sand at this point. Maybe this weekend we’ll be able to get out and pick up some sand, and some material for a cover. While we were out there building it, I picked an apple out of the apple tree for William to eat. He liked the sour crabs, so that’s good. We’ll have to make sure to pick them this year so we’re not raking them out of the lawn again next year.

John took William to the park last night, so Erin and I thought we’d fire up the projector and watch “Battlestar Galactica.” Something I did crashed the MythTV frontend, and when I started it up again, I had no sound. Apparently when I recompiled it with firewire support (to see if it could be done) I didn’t notice that they’d slipped a new use flag into the ebuild. A quick recompile and all was well again, but William and John were back from the park, so we never did watch the show. (In fairness, they were back within minutes of us going downstairs ;))

I preparation for the potential switch to Shaw, I’ve been doing some research, and had a couple of questions. I thought I’d ask the user communities around the various pieces (both MythTV and Shaw’s HD receivers) to see if anyone knew the answers. Interestingly enough, I got snarky responses to reasonable queries at both places. It’s really too bad that some people feel the need to be snarky in online forums/mailing lists. The forum response was “search the forum” - which I had already done. I dunno, I just would rather people don’t bother if they’re going to be snarky. I have to restrain myself from responding in kind, but I find that if I respond to snark with reasonableness, usually I come out smelling like a rose, and the snark-dealers drop off the radar. It is one of the unfortunate side-effects of the depersonalization of the internet though - it’s easy to forget that you’re dealing with another human being on the other end (something that I always try to keep in mind.)

Simpson’s quote of the day: “You should listen to your heart, and not the voices in your head.” - Marge