48-Hour Days

Wow. Life has been really pretty hectic lately. I’ve hardly had time to breathe. I miss my friends from CWSA, whom I haven’t even IMed with in what seems like ages. How are you Bridget? Still out there? Brad? Brad? Brendan? Eric? Joe? Everyone else?

So, what’s kept me so busy? Well, potty training for one. I thought my son would never be potty trained. No amount of coaxing, bribing, or threatening would get Timmy to go in the big potty. Then, finally, miraculously (as it seemed anyway) he one day announced, “Mommy, I have to go potty.” and he got up from his puzzle and did it. He kept it up for two days and I was starting to think this was it. But, no. He went back to his old ways for another week. When he again decided to use the big potty, I didn’t get my hopes up. However, I knew he was done with diapers when his teacher told me he had gone potty at school for the first time. I knew instantly that he was serious. He hasn’t needed a diaper since. One down, one to go.

Most of my time over the past few weeks has been spent on the section of my company’s web site devoted to our annual conference, Riemer Week. With a little help, I was able to create a design that won the approval of my superiors. Since then life has been a never-ending string of updates, changes, corrections, and additions. The program was being reworked and fine-tuned up to the last minute. Content trickled in and then hit like a tsunami. Just as things seemed settled, one of our speakers (and a good friend of many) passed away. I only got to meet him at one Riemer Week, but he was such a warm, friendly, fun-loving person, I instantly felt like I’d known him longer. I was looking forward to seeing him again, showing him pictures of the kids, and hanging out with him.

I’m both looking forward to and dreading Riemer Week. It is in May in Monterey, California and I’ll be there this year. I’m looking forward to going someplace new, staying in a nice hotel, eating good food, and hanging out with Anna and Tom (who I miss a lot working from home). I’m dreading spending a week away from my kids. I wonder how they will deal with it? Probably better than me. I’m feeling a bit teary just at the thought. Oh, how will my babies survive without me???

Ahem. Okay, I’m better now.

Riemer Week has meant weeks of work and I actually racked up some over time. Unfortunately, the extra hours I put into work meant that something else had to suffer. That something else was the housework. So, now I’m desperately trying to catch up. It is all the more urgent, as we are putting our house up for sale.

This is something that makes me really nervous, cautiously excited, and a little sad. I love my house. I’ve loved it from day one. It has been a place of solace in sad times, and of celebration in happy times. I lost a marriage and a baby here. I discovered my independence here. I was blessed with a happy marriage and two beautiful children here. This is the only home I’ve been able to call truly mine, the only home Ray and I have called ours, and the only home my kids have ever known. There is a big part of me that will be sad to leave.

But, we’ve long since outgrown it. Cozy and sweet as it is, it is bursting at the seams. Since my children insist on getting bigger, the situation is only getting worse. We are finally making the move, literally. I hope, anyway. As everyone knows, this is a horrible market if you are trying to sell. Even worse if your house happens to be in the city of Cleveland proper. Luckily, we are in a great neighborhood and you couldn’t ask for nicer neighbors. How do you advertise that?

We’re not fooling around and we’ve priced the house to sell. A photographer is coming in about two weeks and once the pictures are ready, the house will officially be on the market. That gives me a few weeks to de-clutter, thank heavens. There is just so much stuff! Then there are the Spring Cleaning chores that will need to be completed a bit early. I usually wait for warm weather so I can open the windows, but I don’t have that luxury this time around. The next two weeks are going to be filled with packing, shuttling things to my inlaws’ house (they’ve graciously agreed to let us store our extra stuff there), and scrubbing everything in sight until it all shines.

I’m nervous as hell about selling our house and I absolutely refuse to look at any other houses until we have a firm offer on the table, at least. Ray is optimistic and thinks it will sell quickly. It is a perfect starter home, in great condition, clean, move-in ready, and priced low. We’ve made tons of improvements, but in this market, that may not matter at all. What we need is a couple who has been looking in our price range for a bit, but not liking anything they see. Until they see our house and just fall in love with it. Then they will buy it just as we find the perfect house for us. Everything is timed just right and we trade keys before the mercury even hits 80.

Hey, it can happen.

My setup at home is rather unorthodox. We have a really small house. Really small. As a consequence, I don’t have an office. I don’t even have a desk at which to work. I use my laptop as an actual lap-top and work in the recliner or on the couch in our living room, where we truly live. When not in use, the MacBook Pro lives on the coffee table and, as you can imagine, it gets moved around quite a bit. All of my other equipment (DSL modem, router, web server, etc.) is located in our upstairs bedroom.

Among the various components located above me is an HP OfficeJet 5610 and a 500GB SimpleTech SimpleShare. Separately, I’ve been very happy with the performance of both devices. But, until now I had never tried to connect them.

I purchased the SimpleShare because I needed more disk space for my iTunes and iPhotos libraries, as well as somewhere to put backups. I didn’t relish the thought of dragging an external drive around the house with me and I wanted something that would be available from any computer on my network. A network-attached drive fit the bill rather nicely.

Getting the OfficeJet to play nice with the SimpleShare’s built-in print server was not the most straightforward process. HP does provide driver software for Mac OS X, so I’ve had no problem printing when the printer was directly connected to the MBP. I figured the drivers had to be on my computer somewhere, right?

I connected the OfficeJet to one of the USB ports on the SimpleShare, then used the web interface to enable the print server. The SimpleShare had no problem seeing the OfficeJet. So far, so good.

I then used the Print & Fax preference pane (I’m running Leopard) to attempt to add the shared printer. I could log into the SimpleShare and see the printer, but when I had to choose the driver, I was stuck. The driver for the OfficeJet wasn’t there. There were other OfficeJet drivers and I tried a few of them, but they didn’t work. The SimpleShare accepted the job, but nothing printed.

So, what was I using to print when connected directly? Apparently, some application that served as a proxy of some sort. There wasn’t a PPD somewhere that I could select. Damn.

Some Googling around led to others with the same problem, but no one finding a solution. So, I tried the Apple forums. BINGO!

Here’s the solution in a nutshell (all of these files are available from The Linux Foundation):

1. Download and install Ghostscript
2. Download and install Foomatic-RIP
3. Download and install HPIJS for Mac OS X

Once these were installed, it was a simple task to add the printer in:

1. Launch System Preferences and choose Print & Fax
2. Under the Printers list, click the + button; this will open a printer browser window
3. On the toolbar, click Windows
4. Click on the name of your SimpleShare workgroup, then host; you’ll be asked to log in
5. Once logged in, you’ll see the printer attached to the SimpleShare; select it
6. From the Print Using drop-down, choose “Select a driver to use…”
7. There isn’t a 5610-specific driver, but there is a driver for the 5600 series, and that is the one that works for me

Incidentally, the printer browser is a rather strange and buggy beast, with an unfinished feel. It doesn’t seem to be attached to any application: you can’t hide it, it doesn’t have a menu of its own, and it doesn’t go away when you quit System Preferences. When you are presented with a login panel, you have the option of saving the information in the Keychain. Although it appears to have been saved in my Keychain, it wasn’t using it because I had to enter my password every time. I also noticed that I was only able to see the printer once, then I had to reboot to see it again. I’m not sure if this is a bug in the printer browser or with the SimpleShare. I tend to think it is with the printer browser, though. These are annoying quirks and hopefully will be fixed in future updates. I’ll have to file a few bug reports.

Anyway, I’m happy with the outcome. I have more printer drivers than the law allows, but I can print from anywhere in my house. Now, if I can only find some software that will bring the printed pages downstairs for me…