It's Beginning To Smell A Lot Like Chili

All through the house... The chili has been cooking since about 10:30, should be ready by 5:00 or 6:00, and it smells pretty good despite some expedients I had to take (I had no diced tomatoes, so I used tomato soup, which was a fancy kind with parmesan cheese in it). Like I said, it should be ready in an hour or so; too bad I have like zero appetite right now.

So while that's been cooking I've been reading (see previous post), playing on the computer, and also I went and cancelled my Moab flight plans: four separate phone calls (Travelocity, Travelocity flight insurance, regular Travelocity again, and finally Continental), the final call consisting of 40 minutes on hold followed by one minute of transaction, but it's done. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out how to do this online, and believe me I was motivated. (I swear, these guys compartmentalize the process so much, like they run from any responsibilities, other than their most strictly routine, and no doubt legally mandated ones like actually flying the plane, as soon as they have your money. If a travel company could or would provide full service, cradle-to-grave care for your trip, I think they would own the industry in a year.)

Linux Voyager, Tossing Things Overboard: I noticed that my hard drive was 50% full the other day (rather, my main partition on the hard drive, which uses 29G of the available 40G, was 50% full). This freaked me out, I couldn't believe that there was so mch stuff on my machine... what it turned out to be, was that almost every time I upgraded some software, I kept the old version in case the new one didn't work out, and I kept the compressed files for the new version in case I had to re-do the upgrade, so each iteration (and I kept them all) would dump another 20-30 megs on my hard drive -- 20 megs here, 20 mwegs there, pretty soon that adds up to real storage... So what I did was park about 1.5 gigabytes of essentials in my 5G "dead storage" partition, then erase about 3 more gigs of old versions of Mozilla etc. I was a little worried at first -- as in, immediately after I pressed the "OK" button -- that I may have left a few library files in among the archives, like say maybe only putting links to the archived ones in my current system, so instead of having a "flash" plugin (for instance), I'd only have a broken link. (I was especially worried about Mozilla, since I'd played fast-and-loose with the initial install, and every subsequent upgrade, and I no longer remember all my clever-stupid shortcuts.) Things seem to still work OK though, so I guess that wasn't the case. Phew, and now I'm back to a more comfortable 35%-full main partition, so I'm downloading more stuff as we speak.