It's been a busy summer.  I've spent most weekends and vacations working on various projects.  This weekend I took a break from that and have been mostly lazy and done nothing.  Probably not a good idea since we are heading into winter and there will be plenty of time doing nothing and we will dream about getting back to work and seeing progress on our numerous, ongoing projects, but having said that it was still nice to catch up on news and play around a little with my new linux system.  I do have a few things to post that may be of interest.

As I mentioned above I have converted my main home system to linux, ubuntu distro.  I have played with linux for many years and have installed it hundreds of times on my boxes all with varying degrees of success.  After a particularly persistent virus attack on my windows system a couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to repartition my hard drive so I made accommodations for a linux partition.  After getting XP back on I found an ubuntu disk and installed it.  It was positively the best install I have ever done, almost everything worked from the installation.  I am now dual booting into either linux, which I am using everyday, and XP which I will only use when I want to play a windows based game.  Everything was configured easily, the only thing not working is my scanner and there doesn't seem to be a linux driver for it so I will have to boot into XP if I want to use it.  There are enough linux apps to cover most every basic XP based program that I should not pine for the XP system, although some of the apps will take a little learning.  The fun part is the highly customizable desktop.  See picture below.


Chicken house/barn:
I haven't done any more work on the chicken house since my last post on it but it is more complete than the picture below.  I post this picture to offer a different view and to bring attention to the roof which extends over the outside chicken run.


Some might wonder why I would go to the expense of creating a covered outdoor run for them, it certainly wasn't necessary but it will provide some outdoor access during the winter when there would be heavy snow cover.  The primary reason though was because our future plans are to make it part of a larger structure, the barn.  Our idea was to provide for access to the total building (chicken house and barn) under one roof to minimize the amount of snow removal.  See the image below for a conceptual drawing of this future building.