I seem to be giving very small amounts of effort/time to everything I'm interested in recently - I'm not really ignoring anything, but nothing's progressing very quickly towards being done.
On the OSD front, yesterday I started to play with the serial console. The preboot monitor is pretty cool - it's feels like a cross between MILO (the Linux/Alpha second-stage bootloader/monitor) and the bootloader on old NeXT hardware - it's filesystem-aware and can prod at other things that used to require a loaded OS, but can also poke at memory. The menu system also pays attention to keystrokes sent over the serial console (in addition to the remote control), which is pretty neat, and pressing escape kills the remote gui and makes the TV into a giant terminal (unfortunately, they have watchdog configured to reboot the system when it notices osdmain to have died, but that's easily changed and sensible for consumers anyhow). Through the "console" app, it's possible to awkwardly shell around on the box (once I figure out how to disable the on-screek keyboard that floats in front of the console, it'll be better). Going further requires me to set up a dev environment, which I started to do yesterday. This unfortunately required me to download a 400-some meg tarball from a slow server, so I didn't go any further than setting up a TFTPD and NFS server on my TV computer after starting the download. I might look into having the OSD serve NFS as well (if it hasn't been done yet -- the wiki suggests a lot more efforts to tweaking the system than I'm keen to read about in one sitting), partly because it'd be cool to have the OSD as a standalone-ish movie-recording device and partly because it'd be an amusing NAS device. I still have a pretty deep dislike for the gui system they built on it, but as we move closer to a working X (and hopefully SDL), maybe a replacement can be written. The hardware is really exciting.
It looks like my grandma in Texas is dying, and she's likely to mentally only partly be there. I don't know yet if I want to go down and visit or not - I doubt she'd remember me in her present state (she's getting my uncles confused), and I don't want to talk with or see my father. If she would remember me though, I'd like to see her, and I haven't seen my uncles/cousins (or been to Texas) since my father's infidelity let to my cutting ties with him. On the other hand, if she's too lucid, she'll probably try to get me to take my dad's side(!) on the whole mess my immediate family has become. I never thought that the most interesting changes in my family would take place after graduating from University. Life is funny that way.. I guess I need to make a decision on this one soon. If I go, hopefully short-notice tickets to Austin wouldn't be too expensive.
The new reference brain at work is good - now we'll have more accurate Talairach coordinates for when we publish. The predefined ROIs all look pretty much the same (which is a good sanity check) -- now to redo my exploratory analyses. Hurrah.
Some coworkers got married. As always, hearing about these things with people I know is bittersweet. It also reminds me how long I've been here - I was here before they were even dating.
