Webb Family Blog

As 2009 is coming to a close, I am reflecting on what has transpired through the year. The first thing of significance is that Kellie and I finally completed our Baccalaureate of Science in Nursing from the University of Phoenix. It is kind of frustrating that in and of itself, the degree is not worth much, but Kellie and I have both considered going on and a BS degree is an important stepping stone.

After completing school, I dropped to part-time with American Medical Response but picked up a part-time position with Sutter Auburn Faith Hospital and VeriHealth/REACH Training Institute (VRTI) as a contract instructor. Unfortunately, things did not go smoothly at Sutter Auburn Faith and I did not get much time teaching with VRTI. This was all taking place near the end of June, coinciding with a planned family vacation. For vacation, I was in a state of mixed emotions… it felt a relief to get away and take a week-long cruise to Alaska with my brother, in-laws, and my sister Vicki’s family, but I was haunted with the fact that work seemed to be self-destructing. Upon return from the cruise and another family gathering at our family favorite Fish Camp, I started teaching for National College of Technical Instruction (NCTI), a subsidiary of American Medical Response. NCTI took over the contract (from VRTI) to teach Kaiser Permanente employees on-going medical certification courses like Basic Life Support (CPR), Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) and Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS). NCTI kept me busy and had me travelling ALL OVER Northern California, including Fresno and Watsonville on numerous occasions; I racked up a ton of miles on my car with all this teaching. Teaching and the occasional shift on the ambulance allowed for flexibility, but overall income was less than when on the ambulance full-time. In November, I returned to full-time on the ambulance. I still try to teach classes with NCTI when I can, which is the best of both worlds.

As the 2009 is quickly coming to an end, I am remembering that it is the fifth anniversary of my first kiss with Kellie. Unfortunately, as fate would have it, we will not be together exactly at midnight, as I’m currently at work until midnight and Kellie has to be up around 4 AM. This schedule mismatch kind of sucks, but it makes the time we have together, that much more special.

Here’s to a good 2010 and the hope for a family expansion.

Five years ago, in the Fall of 2005, I was looking for a special person on eHarmony. After playing the online games they have for matching people, I had it narrowed down to two people, both nurses. The first lived in the Richmond, CA area and the other lived in a town I had not heard of at the time, Antelope, CA. I made a date with the girl from Richmond and I thought it went well. Not wanting to drag the other girl along and feel like a two-timer, I tried my best to be nice by telling her the situation. As fate would have it, my second date with the first girl was canceled because she had found someone else. I sent a message to the second girl, revising my earlier mention that I had a date with someone else. I thought I had blown it with both of these prospects and felt a bit depressed that I may have “hit into a double play.” I did not hear back from her. It was nearing Christmas and I drove up to Reno, NV the weekend of December 17-19 for a family get together. I was feeling dejected until this second girl called my cellphone on December 18. Her name was Kellie Weifert. At the time, I was at my little sister Terri’s apartment. I excused myself from family and went out and talked with Kellie. Thankfully my cellphone was well charged because we talked for quite a while. I don’t remember what was said during the phone call… it has been five years, but it was the best phone call to date. This was the first of many phone calls we’ve made.

Keeping with the baseball metaphor, Kellie was the game winning hit. I thank God everyday that she came into my life. Life has been so much better having Kellie to share it with. I just wanted to acknowledge my love for Kellie on this, our 5-year anniversary of our first phone call.

A few months ago, I bought an Asus EEEpc 900 for $150 from a Woot! one-day sale. I have tried several operating systems on it so far. I did not like the flavor of Linux that came on the machine, so I changed it over to Easy Peasy 1.5. I probably did not give Easy Peasy a fair evaluation before changing to Jolicloud. I have been using Jolicloud now the majority of the time.

Now, just a little bit on a netbook for those that don’t know. A netbook is a small laptop computer that is limited in size and does not include a CD or DVD drive. The key advantage is that it is small and portable. This particular netbook has a slightly smaller than standard keyboard and a 8.9″ screen… much smaller than my 17″ widescreen laptop I take with me nearly everywhere I go. Why did I get the netbook in the first place? Well, there have been many times Kellie or I wish to look something up online while in bed or sitting on the sofa watching television. It is much more convenient to pull out a computer the size and weight of a small novel. Now, this netbook does not have a traditional hard drive, but a 4GB solid-state drive; pretty darn small. I boosted the RAM from 512 MB to 2 GB (almost as much as its storage memory). As it has limited storage, I setup the netbook to mount my network shared drives from my FreeNAS system, giving it the equivalent of about 3TB of storage, which is like infinite storage to a netbook.

OK, so after the background on a netbook, I’ve been using Jolicloud. The netbook seems to have gotten slower and slower over the past month, to the point it was getting too slow to use. Something had to change. I’ve been hearing quite a bit of talk about Google coming out with its own operating system that they are calling Google Chrome… the same name as their Internet browser. Google has said it won’t be releasing their operating system until sometime later next year, but as it is primarily an open-source operating system, they have a development version of the operating system that they call Chromium. While Chromium is based on the Linux operating system, calling Chromium a distribution of Linux is like calling Apple MacIntosh’s OS X a distribution of BSD; once you are using the operating system, there is no evidence of the system it is based on.

From the Chromium development website, they do not offer a built operating system, but rather the source files for every person wishing to do so, to build their own operating system from a collection of thousands of source files. Despite following the directions for building the operating system from source files, I kept getting build errors when I tried to build it myself. After wasting several hours in pursuit of building the operating system, I searched to see if anyone was distributing a built version. Thankfully, I did find someone was distributing a built version… calling it ChromeOS Cherry. After much trial and error, I finally was able to write an image of the operating system to a USB thumbdrive. When you boot up the netbook to the USB thumbdrive, it does not make it obvious how to actually install the operating system. Initially, it just runs the OS from the thumbdrive… nice for those wanting to try it out, but the thumbdrive is much slower than running off internal storage. I found that if I press <Control>-<Alt>-<T>, it opens up a terminal window. I was then able to type in “/usr/sbin/chromeos-install” and it will install. Once it was installed, it would take less than 10 seconds to boot-up.

I now have Chromium installed on the netbook… how well does it work? Well, I have mixed reactions. Because the operating system is so lean, the responsiveness is great. I have only had a couple hours to play on it so far, but I am finding that it is severely limited in function. The browser IS the operating system. The “applications” are not really applications, but rather bookmarks that open in a new tab. I don’t currently see a way to add any applications. Being that it is based on a Linux OS, I was hoping that I may be able to add programs from the command line, but I don’t know the administrative password, nor how I would access the added applications via the GUI (graphical user interface). There is also no visible method for adding a network printer, nor how to access anything that is downloaded. If all I want to do is LOOK at the Internet, this is a nice easy operating system. As the Chrome (Chromium) browser is still relatively in its infancy, there are not many extensions available yet… such as my favorite Firefox extensions… Xmarks and LastPass (Xmarks is in development for Chrome, but I don’t know how to add it to this version).

While it is interesting to try, I think I’m going to give Easy Peasy a better look for now.