11pm on Sunday Night and Still Working

Biz News - One new, semi-churchwarden Ligne Bretagne was just posted to the catalog.

Today's pic shows the work of this week - at least, what little work managed to happen around the continuing adventures with the new laptop. Today's fun? Enabling the laptop (Windows XP) to print on the upstairs Officejet printer, shared via the desktop system (Ubuntu) over the wireless network. Whee. Working like a charm now, though. It's amazing how old this all makes me feel - Emily is now able to send documents through the air to a wireless network talking to a completely different operating system, and print her documents on a printer not connected in any physical way to her laptop... and also via a Linux OS!

(This reminds me, I need to write an entry for the long-quiet "Life in France" blog comparing expat life with switching operating systems... a fairly apt comparison in many ways. For the record, I still find both France and Ubuntu to be pretty darned groovy, despite the occasional confusing differences in style. Most of the confusion derives from the strange way that the file systems of les français are arranged - I keep telling my French friends to 'del' and they keep replying 'rm'? Thankfully, Ubuntu is usually a lot tastier than Windows was...)

Above are pictured some pipes that will soon be shipping to a new dealer, who will be promoting my pipes to the Russian markets and, of all things, to the high grade collector market in Israel. I've really been enjoying internationalizing my business these past months, and continue to hope that someday I'll get lucky and have the chance to visit some Czech or Shanghai pipe club someday! The pictured pipes are not available for purchase - in fact, they'll be going into a box shortly, but I will soon be posting links and info on my website for the new dealers I'm working with.

Whew. I think I'd intended to actually write about something tonight, but that's enough writing for 11pm on a Sunday - time to go collapse and check out the new Supernatural, methinks!

Back in Action

Well, after several days of total manic computer set-up, we are finally finished and the laptop is fully loaded with all the needed software and off and running. Em is downstairs now working on it as I type this. It's going to be a wonder having two computers in the house (Time to check into multi-player games? Assuming there ARE any that can be played between Windows and Ubuntu, anyway.... probably some online games...).

I've got a hellish stack of piled-up "To Do's" that includes several days' worth of emails, PMs, and forum messages to answer, plus a lot of un-done book keeping here, but if all goes well I should be back in the workshop shortly, and back to actually making these little wood pipe things that we sell...

A Three Pipe Problem

No pipe news today, but there IS news of import - After a hard drive screw-up cost us our Windows disc, we finally bit the bullet and bought a separate laptop for Emily, to put all her accounting records on, so we're not dependent on one computer. It just arrived, and this means that the website is going to be quiet for probably a few days as we work to install everything we need onto the laptop. This is a bit more complex than it may sound, as we'll have to re-activate our accounting software (in French), replace our old ADSL ethernet modem with a new wireless model that can handle multiple connected computers, figure out how to make that work in French, and install something like 500 patches, firewalls, and other safeguards needed to keep a freaking Windows computer operating in relative safety. Not to mention transferring a bajillion files off the current computer and getting an XP system and an Ubuntu system to happily talk to each other. In French.

Think kind thoughts for me....