08:49 – Barbara’s been gone two days now, and Colin is taking it pretty well. At night, he’s taking advantage of her absence by stretching out full length on her side of the bed–with his head on her pillow, yet–instead of having to curl up in a little dog ball at the end of the bed. Still, he’ll be happy when she returns home tomorrow, as will I. I made it through seven episodes of Heartland last night, S4E17 and 18 through S5E5. That leaves 13 episodes of S5 and S6E1 remaining, which I won’t get through before Barbara returns.
I finally took the time to install a DVD writer in the new system sitting in the den. I’d used a borrowed optical drive to install Ubuntu on that system. It appeared to work fine, until power-saving kicked in, at which point I could no longer get any video even after a cold start. So last night I installed a new Samsung optical drive I’d gotten from Amazon.com and installed Linux Mint. Everything went as expected, and I immediately turned off power-saving mode. I used the system all evening, and finally decided to re-enable power saving to kill power to the display after 10 minutes. I watched the clock ticking down. At 10 minutes, sure enough, power saving kicked in and cut power to the display. I moved the mouse, and the screen came up normally. Success. Then, this morning, I moved the mouse again. The video was dead. So when I have a moment, I’ll try restarting the system. If it comes up, I’ll disable power saving entirely. There’s something going on with Linux power saving and this Intel Atom motherboard, but I’m not sure what. Worst case, I’ll just manually power the display on and off as needed.
I’m working on a core set of prepared microscope slides for the Life Science kit. I think we’ll include that core Slide Set A with the kit. It’ll be 10 top-priority slides of specimens that are difficult to prepare at home, things like onion root-tip mitosis, cross-sections of monocot and dicot stems, and so on. Then, as an option, we’ll offer another 10 or 20 slides as Slide Set B, which’ll include second-priority slides.