morrowlife

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Two testing his bridge at the Science Olympiad. It held! Check out those safety goggles. Special cameo appearance by Loyal Reader Number Four.

Fairly Short Shrift tonight. Took the late train, and I have to get ready to travel tomorrow morning, so some preparation must take place.

I took a chance today. I’ve been planning to buy a couple new HDTVs because I couldn’t find a video card that could talk to an old-fashioned RCA jack on an old-fashioned tube TV. Well, today I saw an ad for an old-model video card that claims to do just that. It was offered for thirty bucks. I bought it. It also has an S-video connector and two VGA ports, so it was apparently fairly hot stuff when it was new on the market.

The risk is that it won’t end up working like I need it to, thus wasting the thirty bucks. My judgment was that it was worth risking $30 for the chance of saving $300. Sadly, it has no DVI port, so it will be truly useless in the event it won’t drive an old TV. Fingers are crossed.

Loyal Reader Number One had his phone interview with Apple today. It appears to have gone well. They surprised him with the need to propose a personal project to spend half-time working on, so he needs to come up with some ideas and get back to them. The good thing is that the interview seemed more like a final-decision talk than a screening call. I hope it works out for him. It would be a great summer.

Any news in the education field today? Let’s check: Here’s a great moneymaker!

Speaking of which, we’re long overdue for a Morrowlife financial juggernaut update: I’m up to $13! Exactly! I think I’ve reached critical mass. I can sense the blog has just gone over the tipping point. Riches are inevitable!

Posting tomorrow is unlikely – we’ll be in Las Vegas. Wifi and time availability are doubtful. We’ll see.

One bit of bad wedding news is that Loyal Readers Numbers Five, Six, and Twelve are too sick to go. Get well soon, Loyal Readers! We’ll miss you.

See you tomorrow. Or maybe Monday.

Here’s Buddy, Loyal Reader Number Two’s first water rocket, on the launch pad at the Science Olympiad. Its identical twin was Skippy. Buddy did better than Skippy, largely because of a setup glitch. They’ll never fly again, though. The cleanup crew apparently decided our bucket of rockets was trash, and they threw it all away. Sigh. At least they took third place in their one and only outing.

Perfect weather again today. Near-freezing temperatures overnight and warm and sunny all day.

Odd day. I have one subordinate who constantly asks me to approve unbelievably high expenses. Today, he asked for $700 worth of label-making supplies, which he tells me will be used over the next six months. I decline to believe this. Two days ago, he asked me to approve ten power cords for the lab. When I asked how many he needs to use right now, he told me he needs three. The other seven were supposed to be spares. I approved two spares. I’m going to approve one or two hundred dollars’ worth of the label supplies.

I wish he’d quit wasting his time and mine on these ludicrous things. We both have better things to do.

I checked out chargers for my Palm today. I can get a cheap Chinese knockoff for about $3 including shipping, or an official Palm one for about twice that much. I’m going to order the Palm one tonight, based on the numerous negative reviews of the cheap one.

I’m also going to (finally) order the computer remote control tonight. If I can find the one I was looking at a few weeks ago. I had a quick look at Amazon, and can’t find it. Need to do a little detective work.

Otherwise, the evening’s mine, I believe. Need to get to bed at a reasonable hour and maybe do a little preparation for Friday’s trip to the Wedding of the Century. Check the Honda’s oil, make my packing list, etc.

Let’s check on today’s food violence/dog news: They’re a bunch of liars. But they’re also philanthropic. However, they can be rather strict. Unfortunately, they’re just too darn noisy.

There’s a new iPod Shuffle! It’s smaller than a AA battery and has no controls on it other than a power switch. The rest of the controls are on the earbud cord. It talks. It’s aluminum and stainless steel. It has 4 gigabytes. It costs $79. We really need one.

Apple has a way of making all their formerly cool hardware look sort of dowdy as soon as they bring out the next generation, don’t they? My first-generation Shuffle was pretty slick, not to mention extremely tiny, when I got it. Now it’s just old. Although I still love it. My 80-gig iPod was the ultimate in cool until just recently. I still love it too, but now it’s yesterday’s news. The funny thing is that I generally like older technology. I just like Apple’s new stuff better.

Speaking of which, best of luck to Loyal Reader Number One in his phone interview tomorrow. I’m sure he’ll do well, so it will probably come down to whether they think they need his skill set this summer. I hope they decide they do.

A word or two about the Safari 4 beta. I installed it as soon as it came out. There’s some good and some bad. The good: The cover flow view is pretty, although surprisingly not as useful as you might think it would be. I prefer to just start with my home page. Which you can make it do, of course. The bad: Putting the tabs in the window’s title bar. It’s not just bad. It’s wretched. I’m used to the tabs being directly above the business portion of the window, and that’s where I want them. There was absolutely no reason for moving them. And they’re stupid up there. It also seems to be really slow. Otherwise, another hit from Apple.

See you tomorrow.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Twelve taking a short flight. Excellent piloting skills.

Extreme short shrift. Massive Meeting Tuesday. I expected to have five or ten minutes to do this, but got a couple of girls camp phone calls and here I am with about two minutes to go.

Normal day. Got up (a little late), drove to work, worked, drove home, grabbed a bite, talked on the phone, blogged, and now I’m off to meetings.

I’ll leave you with this: if your dog can’t take care of things, sometimes you just have to do them yourself.

See you tomorrow.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Twelve coming down the slide. Not my best picture, maybe, but I think it’s a good likeness.

Another sunny day, temperature about 60. Sunshine predicted the rest of the week, with highs up to about 70 by Friday. The drought people must be positively giddy. As our current Masters in Government say, never let a good crisis go to waste.

Pretty good weekend, although Saturday was packed, as predicted. I had two ten-minute visits home from 6:45 AM until about 10:45 PM. All the activities were pretty good, though. Loyal Reader Number Two had been worried about being competitive in the Science Olympiad, but he did extremely well. Took second in bridge breaking and third in water rocket flying. Congrats, LRN2!

I played hooky from the branch so I could make a bunch more phone calls for girls camp callings. Got almost everything done. The only real worry item left is our head cook. I haven’t been able to make phone contact with the spouse in that case, despite numerous tries. Apparently, he has a difficult work schedule. So do I, so it’s tough. We’ll get it done, though.

Nothing otherwise new. In today’s toilet news, we have an interesting new restaurant. I think I’ll skip it. Thanks to Loyal Reader Number Twenty Six for recommending the place.

Plus, they’re on the attack! Be careful out there. Or in there, I guess.

See you tomorrow.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Twelve getting ready to come down the slide. She has to do a few pull-ups first.

Great day at home. First the good news: against all odds, the Miata passed its biennial smog inspection! Not bad for a car with more than 170,000 miles on it. I’ll probably get another 170k out of it before it’s done. What a great little car.

The other good news is that Loyal Reader Number Two and I got a working water rocket design done. That’s a good thing, since his competition with it is tomorrow. Our design is pretty cool looking (we could do lots more in terms of workmanship, but it works great) and it didn’t break its test egg! We’re still experiencing premature deployment of the parachute, but it’s going to have to be good enough as it is. We made two rockets, which LRN2 named Buddy and Skippy. Contest results reported on Monday. Don’t get your hopes up, though. We’ve never been to one of these, so we don’t know how well we have to do. It’ll be fun just to be there.

Got a couple other things done too, but not much. Attended my two work telecons in the morning, transferred a lot of files to Larry (still doing it, in fact – there are tens of gigabytes of shows to move), a did a bunch of reading and relaxing. Didn’t get any cars washed, didn’t get the cable cut off, didn’t order any TV or Ooma parts, didn’t make any Girls Camp callings. Maybe there will be time for some of that tomorrow.

But precious little. Busy Saturday schedule previously reported. I expect to hold to it.

There’s some big toilet news today: They’re not all that comfortable from the other side. My recommendation: check for your keys one more time before you do anything drastic.

In other toilet news, I’ve found a home improvement project we ought to consider: the golden toilet.

Have a great weekend. See you Monday.