Latin Lesson 8 is posted, covering the use of the dative case for indirect objects, and adjectives ending in -er.  When I get time, I think I’m going to start doing podcasts to go with the lessons, so I can explain things a bit more and give more examples.

Photo from Flickr.com

It’s 65 degrees out today—very hard to stay sitting here working and not go wandering outside to start planning the garden or just sit outside in the sun.  Can’t wait for spring.

There was no blog post last night because I ended up doing some unexpected system triage.  I upgraded some software, and that upgraded a low-level library which a whole bunch of other programs depended on, so I ended up needing to rebuild a whole bunch of stuff.  As long as I was at it, I thought I’d go ahead and upgrade FreeBSD from 7.0 to 7.1.  That went fine, but when it booted, it froze when it tried to bring up the onboard network card (which 7.0 had happily ignored because it didn’t support it).  Turning the card off in the BIOS got things back to normal so I could continue on with my upgrades.  (Like I need gigabit speed on my home network anyway.)  So instead of a quick blog post and an early bedtime I was up late getting all that done, but it’s all shiny and new now.

Angel noticed that I had a couple typos in my last post.  Two!  How embarrassing.  I edit and rewrite these things several times, but somehow mistakes still slip through once in a while.  I guess when I proofread I don’t really read; I just see what’s supposed to be there.

I’m still trying to keep up the Twitter thing.  It still seems almost pointless.  I think I’ve explained before how this is supposed to work:

1. Pick a niche you’re interested in
2. “Tweet” bits of information and links to content relating to the niche
3. Thousands of people who are interested in that niche start “following” you and click on everything you tweet
4. You occasionally direct them to useful sites in the niche that happen to make you money
5. You buy a big safe to store all your loot

The catch is that step 2 might take months and require hundreds of hours of work before you get to step 3.  The other catch is that you need a niche that works.  I’m interested in too many different things, and none of them really seem like money-makers.  (Does that mean I’m cheap?)  Say I tweet about FreeBSD, and I get 10,000 FreeBSD users following me.  How do I make money off a group of people whose defining characteristic is that they use free software?  And those people aren’t going to be interested in my Latin Mass tweets or my low-carbing tweets, so I’ll have to have a separate Twitter account for each niche…I’m getting tired just thinking about it.  Lack of imagination on my part, I bet; someone with a knack for marketing could probably see ten different ways to make it work.  I’ll keep plugging away at it.

St. Rose has a chili dinner coming up; Feb. 22, I think.  I’ll have more information after this weekend.  We’re putting the bulletins up on the St. Rose web site now, so if anyone forgets to grab one, you can download them in PDF format there.