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This is a Brett Favre jersey.  Notice how it is green and yellow and seems to resemble a Packers jersey?  It is not red, nor does it have pewter or black highlights.  There are no skull and crossbones, nor any ominous pirate ships.

Keep it that way!

If the Bucs pick up Brett Favre it will be a disastrous move for the organization.  They have already been less the stellar in working with Jeff Garcia with his desire to sign an extended agreement with the team, and signing Favre would effectively being giving Garcia a big thanks, but no thanks signal, as Favre would clearly be the de-facto starter, leaving Garcia in the lurch.  Additionally, you'd also be bringing the yearly mid-winter festival of "Retireous", where Brett Favre tearfully gathers his offensive line on the field after his last game, then retreats to BFE Mississippi to ponder his future, leaving the team in the lurch, then emerges two months later to render his decision to play yet another season.  And the Packers are talking trade as the only way to get Favre.  Are you seriously going to bank a first round pick and a few second rounders (as I can see this would be the only way they'd let him go), for a guy that'll play for another three years tops? 

Please please please please please go someplace else to finish your career, and don't wreck the team that I love!

"I'm a single woman with no children trying to pay my mortgage and grow my home-based business," she explained. "I was out there mowing one day and thought, 'Lord, what can I do to turn this grass into cash?' That's when I remembered that corn flake."

Reasons for her still being single are under investigation...

Last Thursday I decided to work from home, to avoid some traffic by my office, combined with Burton having a grooming appointment.  After dropping Burton off at the groomers, I popped open my laptop and went digging through my bag to find the AC adapter, only to realize that I had left it at work.  This posed a little bit of a problem, seeing that the battery would run for about 2 hours and then die--just a tad bit short of the full day I was planning on putting in.

On my desktop at home, I run Windows XP64, and in the past, I had attempted to install Cisco's VPN client, since that's how I connect remotely to work. After a little bit of research I realized that Cisco had no support for either XP64 or Vista64, so I was pretty much out of luck VPNing to work from my desktop at home. Now the problem on Thursday was that I had limited amount of battery time on my laptop and no way to connect to work outside of my laptop--at least on Windows. I rummaged around in my big box of parts and found an old hard-drive and external USB enclosure, plugged it into my desktop, and booted up a copy of kubuntu. In about 30 minutes, I had a brand new environment set up on a removable drive (so I didn't have to take my existing Windows drives and dual boot or repartition), was connected to work via VPN and coding away on a machine at the office remotely. Outside of kubuntu (which is a great distro), the other two key applications that were lifesavers were:

VPNC - This is a great VPN tool for anyone who needs to connect to a CISCO VPN concentrator, but who wants to avoid all the hassles of the official Cisco vpn client. In the past, I've struggled with the Cisco VPN client, most notably when updating kernels, because when doing so the client insists that it needs to be rebuilt, and then it will invariably have compilation errors. This either locks you into an out of date kernel, or you need to go scouring the Internet for an updated copy of the code. With VPNC, all those problems seem to go away. You no longer have to compile anything to connect to work via VPN, as VPNC is readily available in most distributions already packaged and ready, and is also therefore guaranteed to work with whatever the latest kernel version tends to be.

rdesktop - This is the definitive way to connect remotely to Windows machines from a Linux environment. I've been using rdesktop for quite a few years now, and it is epitome of the *nix tool--it does one thing, it does it very well, and it's highly specialized. The most basic usage from the command line accepts the name of the machine that you want to connect to, and to add additional connection parameters, you just need to append command line switches. It's lightweight, fast, and has near complete RDP support, so those times when you do have to connect to Windows, it's a great experience.

The nice thing about both of these tools is that if you're a command line warrior, you will be right at home out of the box, and if you are more comfortable in a GUI environment, there are assorted tools that will put a nice looking frontend up for you.

I've been running Linux daily at work for nearly three years now, and with every day that passes, it is becoming more and more viable in a professional Windows/MS Office environment, thanks in large part to software like VPNC and rdesktop.

As promised, I took a few photos of the new furniture, and complete with some modeling help from Burton, Bella and Harley.

You can start looking at them with this photo.

The only remaining tasks are to fill the corner on the left side of the fireplace, place some light, hang the few pictures still leaning against the wall and hide the cords running to the television.  That should be easy enough to knock out over the next 3 or 4 months...

The sofa, chair and console table that I ordered for my bedroom's sitting area arrived today.  It was a special order due to the non-stock colors I chose, so it took about 10 weeks from order to door, but the pieces ended up looking pretty good.  My master bedroom is almost finished now.  I just have to find a little bit of additional lighting, hang a few photos and do something with the wall behind my bed.

I'll post photos of the furniture over the weekend.

...seeing that Bella has spent the last 5 minutes licking them.

Your unread articles count in Google Reader says 361, when it normally hovers around 10...

Welcome to the family Bella!  I adopted Bella over the Memorial Day weekend, when I was visiting my folks down in Tampa.  She's a 4 or 5 year old female Bichon, and was a rescue.  She currently adjusting okay to life in her new home, although she still has problems with pooping in the house during the day and sometimes over night.  We haven't seemed to get on the same schedules quite yet.  Burton was originally a complete grouch around her, but the past few nights he's been warming up to her, and hopefully in a little while, they'll develop a good repoire.  I've updated the photo album of Burton to be Burton and Bella, and now you can see pictures of both dogs in there.

Something only someone whose formative years were spent in front of an Apple II and Atari could appreciate.

Contrary to some people's opinion, Burton is actually the better than your pet.