The Secret - pt 2...

The Stone Manor - Lake Geneva Wisconsin. Sold for $74,000 in the 80's




So I was riding my motorcycle this weekend getting mentally lost for a while.

My Bike is my "golf". I hate the idea of having to pay a bunch of money to play a sport, where an old guy in a cart drives around telling me to hurry up. On top of that, it's a sport I'm not very good at, so it's either "Don't talk to me, I'm CONCENTRATING!" or "Where the HELL is the beer cart??", no middle ground. Finally, it takes SOOOOOOOO long. I only have a couple of days a week to get anything done worthwhile, why would I waste 6 hours on a golf course?

I hit the road Sunday morning early. Not as early as I like, but we (My Bro-In-Law) were gone by 8:00AM. We meandered for a couple hours zig-zagging across Northeastern Wisconsin; Walworth, Delavan, Williams Bay, et.

After a breakfast in Delavan I wanted to get back home, so we decided to take a route out of town that would take us Northeast, away from my home, but pretty scenic, and cut across the area once we got further north. It was a great plan, it looked like a cool route - after all, I planned it using my "Walworth County area map" I got when we walked into the "Delavan Family Restraunt". Yep, nothing but the best for me!

"The best laid plans of Mice and Men"

We ended up totally missing our road, and stuck on some backwoods route that was the COOLEST road. Some country road that wound around, up and down, curves, straights, hills, valleys and scenery! It was Serendipitous - but wait, there's more..

As we buzzed along this road, we finally came to an end at the back end of Lake Geneva, the part people who are visiting, don't go to. We drove along the roads until we popped out on the major highway, and dove to the lake. We cruised along the lake shore, and up "Wrigley Ave". If you ever go to Lake Geneva for the first time, you really need to take time to see the homes on the shore - wow!.

Wrigley takes you past the Stone Manor, a mansion built in the 1870's by a guy who made a fortune in Chicago real estate. It is 18,000 square feet. You may not believe this, but in the 80's this place was sold for $74,000. Yep - back taxes.


As we wound our way up the hill, heading North, ( a route I've driven hundreds of times, since I was a kid), I flew past a new Gate. It was a huge gate, as Lake Geneva Gates go, but this one had big, gold lettering. It said;

"Expect a Miracle"

It was really cool looking. Based on how things have been going, and always lookng out for inspiration and clues, I fully contributed this to my karma. I've never seen it, I've been by there a jillion times, and how could I have missed it in the past?. I got up this morning, and said "heck, I think I'll google it.." and did.

It is owned my a woman, who ownes a company, not one block from here. Not only that, but one of my old employees dated her son! Wierd.....

I'm not sure that there are any underlying cosmic vibrations that may be travelling the earth, but I think it's something..

So here's my "butterfly effect".. I'm posting my experience, I've not had ONE comment on my blog yet. Maybe the moon will be in the 7th house, and jupiter will align with mars, and perhaps the good fortune I've been expecting will come crashing down on me...

In short, from here on out, I will "Expect a Miracle"..

Yep, Ubuntu is Feisty alright..

OK, so over the weekend I broke my PC. Anyone who knows me would not be a bit surprised. I'm a little OCD when it comes to computers, and I am constantly tinkering with them. I suppose if I was born in the 40's, I would be one of those guys with a souped up chevy or something.

I bought a 3D graphics card card from ebay, and installed it over the weekend. It worked just fine, so I pushed in and tried to set up Beryl (think Windows Vista, only better). Well, when I rebooted I got the famous "X windows no longer works, sorry kid, nice try" and a prompt.

Most Linux jocks wouldn't be a bit phased by this, but I'm lost without a GUI. I'm an old time DOS hack, but my memory just doesn't work well enough these days to memorize a new operating system, so I did what anyone else would do. I resigned myself to the fact I lost all my stuff (yea, I know, I should have backups) and re-installed.

I figured that my piecemeal method of getting 3d to work versus a fresh install where Linux handles setting up my card is the better choice anyways. Well, it worked great, and I was up and running again. I flew through my wireless card setup thanks to my trusty USB that had the drivers, and a copy of the web page I used to fight through it the first time.

Once I got it all running, I popped up the "updater", and noticed that "Feisty" had been released over the weekend. Feisty is Ubuntu 7.x, with better support for things like Wireless and 3D. Well, I think you know me by now - I hit "upgrade" and it did.

The download/upgrade process took a little over 3 hours, with minimal babysitting on my part. I re-booted and "wham", it came right up!.. "excellent" (think Bill & Ted)

I had a good strong signal on my wireless, I had the new NetworkManager up and running, it saw my router without any problems, and I jumped into Firefox. Alas, too good to be true. "www.msn.com not found".

After some fiddling, I determined that I have a connection, but no IP addrees. I mis-concluded that I needed my old driver, so I went about de-installing the new stuff, and installing the old stuff. After a second re-boot, I had lost all connectivity. CRAP!

Now, I had to put all the new stuff back, and back out the changes I made. This took a while, as I had to figure out exactly what I did to break it, and what was installed before I messed with it. Lucky I also have a windows laptop that works, for me to look up these issues on the web.

Anywhom....

After hours of messing around, I was about to give up when I came across "dhclient". This is different that the standard dhcp program. Once I had my connectivity back, and could see that I was connected to my router, I popped up a terminal window and typed " sudo dhclient ra0", and "viola", it worked, firefox was off and running.

Now, I had to figure out how to get that command in the startup process. I edited the init file and added it to the end and it worked fine - under KDE, not Gnome. CRAP! again.

Turns out that the cool new NetworkManager only gets in the way on Gnome, you have to remove it for this to work. Hopefully a new version will take care of it. When I uninstalled NetworkManager, everything worked fine.

Now, the real work starts.. I need to rebuild my kid(s) environments too, anyone remember what my 8 year olds Painted Penguins name was??????