Tarkblog

Well, the gift exchanges and family get togethers are over. All in all we spent 9 hours in the car over the past 3 days. I hope your days were merry and festive.

I wanted to give you this one little holiday gem. First, be sure you have read this blog entry from the wife.

The take a look at this picture of the wife’s gift from her grandparents.

I about LOLed in my pants when she opened it. I kept a straight face, she wholeheartedly thanked them, and all was right in the world.

In 2007 regift news: it’s very likely one gravy warmer will be up for grabs.

Sometimes when you go looking for answers you find hidden gems.

I absolutely love the “splitdebug” feature (that’s FEATURES of the make.conf variety). I didn’t even know it existed until I read up on some changed documentation. It doesn’t seem to be listed in the make.conf.example, unfortunately.

See, this neato thing will cause your program to build in the debugging symbols, then in the end strip them out and put them into a separate file inside of /usr/lib/debug. This means your main binaries and libraries maintain their minimal size and memory footprint as though they were stripped (which happens by default, unless you’re a nostripper like I was). And all of the juicy tidbits of debugging symbols get tucked away until you need them. No more having to re-emerge packages with the debug flag just to get the symbols, then re-emerge them later to get back to the minimal sizes.

I’m completely grateful to whomever added this nitfy feature to portage. You are my hero.

Yesterday, I took the day off to do a bit of volunteering. My volunteering task for the day was to deliver food baskets.

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I try and buy most of my gifts online. The wife does as well. This makes shopping a much easier process. It’s much worth my time to spend an extra 20-50 dollars in shipping over the course of the holiday season than to try and venture out amongst all the people doing mass-pandemonium shopping.

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Every year we make an effort to get our respective families together. Since mine live 2 hours west and the wife’s live 3 hours northeast, this isn’t always easy. Add to this the fact that one of the wife’s sisters is in college in yet another town, one of my aunt/uncle pairs live about another 45 minutes past my parents, and various other family members have other things to do, coming up with a time to get everyone over here is a bit of a challenge.

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