morrowlife

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Four taking a picture of Loyal Reader Number One at the oft-photographed overlook in the Pennsylvania mountains.

Decent day today. My Loyal Readers will no doubt be surprised to hear that the weather was perfect. Again. And I’m not complaining. I read that it’s snowing today in Detroit and is going to freeze in Pennsylvania over the weekend. Heh heh heh. I guess we need to call our real estate agent and make sure the heat is on in the house, huh? It was in the mid-70s in Lardville today and the mid-to-upper-60s in Sunnyvale. Aaah.

Loyal Reader Number One will be sixteen years old tomorrow! He’s away camping with the scouts tonight and most of the day tomorrow (sounds like a lot of fun, by the way) and has requested to invite some friends over tomorrow night for a Pool Party. Permission granted. I hope enough people show up and that it’s warm enough to swim. We’ll heat the pool up some during the day and have the spa temperature nice and warm, so hopefully it will be nice.

There are plenty of things to accomplish tomorrow. Loyal Reader Number Four and I are going to the church to clean it sometime in the morning. We need to do something with the back yard, I think. There are a few panels of the back fence that still need to be coated as well. I need to clean the grease off of the floor mats in the Honda and Mercury – the oil change joint was kind enough to leave use those little gifts recently. The floor mats on the Suburban are disgustingly filthy as well. There’s a bunch of Ward Mission Leader stuff to get done too. I suspect the day will be fairly full (link warning: the ugliest, jarringest pink web page ever).

It’s Friday the Thirteenth today! Nothing unlucky happened to me. Yet. I’m not worried, though. I don’t believe in it. I’ve always believed it’s bad luck to believe in superstition.

The train seems to be moving a little slowly today. I left the office at 4:00 this afternoon, rather than my usual 5:00, and experience says the earlier train is late a lot more often. It’s usually because of slow freight or Amtrak trains. Oh, the speed is picking back up now. Good. I’d really like to get home on schedule tonight.

My brother (unfortunately, not a Loyal Reader, so we’ll call him Loyal Reader Number Zero for now) called me this afternoon just to say hello. He was on the way to the boat dealer. He just bought a boat – a sixteen-footer – and needed to pick up a few things. I’m not sure why he bought it, but I hope he enjoys it. A boat is just about the last thing in this world I want. I don’t have any fun riding around in them (except sailboats, of course) with all the noise, and it’s absolutely no fun owning them. In fact, they say the second-happiest day in your life is when you buy a boat, and the first-happiest day is when you sell it. Let’s all hope LRN0’s experience is different.

On the other hand, I sometimes enjoy riding on someone else’s boat. Maybe he’ll give me a ride.

We haven’t had any new Loyal Readers in a while. Anyone have any friends you would like to invite? Anyone have any friends at all? Hello? Well, then.

As mentioned yesterday, watch the HRVA website for something new over the weekend, and I’ll see you on Monday.

This guy has been featured on the blog before, but I thought it was time for his closeup. I wonder what he’s pointing at.

Bought Anita Baker‘s album titled “Rapture” from iTunes tonight. That sure is a good record. I also bought a couple of other old songs I’ve enjoyed over the years. One of the things I really like about the iTunes Store is that you can buy a whole album if it’s really good or just a great song from a mediocre album. The downside is that it’s way too easy to spend a buck here and there until it adds up to hundreds. I’m not that bad yet, fortunately.

I finished the RV cookbook tonight. It was okay but not great. Read more about it on the HRVA this weekend. Gotta order or go get those lantern parts Real Soon Now. That rebuild article isn’t going to write itself.

The Gardenville house sale is finally moving forward! Our real estate agent there finally got the nerve to call them and tell them to get moving or get going. They got moving. We expect to have the fully-signed contract tomorrow, with inspections happening on about Wednesday next week. It’s good to know the new people really want to buy the place. We’ve been wondering because they’ve been so slow to get paperwork done. Even after they got their buyer straightened out and sent us an updated contract, they took days to get us their earnest money check. In fact, we still don’t have it. They said they overnighted it yesterday, but it never arrived today. Our agent called and told them to fix it now. They cancelled the old check and drove another one over to their agent today, who will take it personally to our agent tomorrow. Hooray. There are still a lot to hurdles to cross (inspections and actually getting their money), but we’ll keep pushing it along. Keep praying, wishing, and hoping for us, Loyal Readers! We need the money!!

Speaking of needing the money, I need to get my beauty sleep so I can earn another small fortune in Sunnyvale tomorrow. See you then.

Here’s another camping picture, featuring Loyal Reader Number One and a tree. The interesting thing about the tree is that, if you look carefully, you can see that it grew on that big square rock and sent all its roots over to the dirt on the left. It had no strength and fell, but not before it got pretty big. Very interesting tree, that.

I looked at and bought a car for LRN1 to use when he gets his license. It’s a 1993 Ford Taurus. It’s in quite good shape and needs nearly nothing – with the notable exception of the air conditioning. Everything else was good enough and the price was good enough to make it worth buying. LRN1 has until next summer to figure out how to get the A/C to work.

Anyway, the car is nice and tight – totally rattle-free, in fact. The upholstery looks practically new, the carpet is nearly perfect, the paint is quite good, the sheet metal is great, the engine runs fine, it shifts smoothly, and all the accessories work. That’s not bad for a 14-year-old car. I hope LRN1 really enjoys it. If he takes good care of it, it will take good care of him.

Otherwise, I’m tired and going to bed. See you tomorrow.

Here’s a picture by my brother-in-law scott, taken at Fonthill, the palatial cement estate of the late Henry Mercer of Doylestown, Pennsylvania. (Note to Loyal Readers: I can’t get dumb old Blogger to properly upload photos yet again tonight – why is something always broken on Blogger lately? – so I had to link to the Flickr version today. The quality may be lower than usual, but I doubt you’ll notice and, besides, I had very little choice.)

Anyway, the reason this post is titled “bootleg” is that Scott found out shortly after snapping this and a few other photos that indoor photography at Fonthill is Strictly Forbidden. Fortunately, they didn’t grab his camera and stomp it under their boot heels, so he was able to smuggle this photo out for my Loyal Readers’ pleasure. Just remember, a lot of good men died to get this picture to you. Or at least one good man was slightly inconvenienced.

It’s late already (yet again), so this will be brief. Drove to work today. The drive in was pretty standard, but the return trip was quick! Made it in the middle of rush hour in slightly over an hour and a half. That’s probably not a precedent, though, so I’ll just enjoy it for what it is. I’ll ride the train tomorrow.

I upgraded the Fedora installation from Core 3 to Core 5 on Loyal Reader Number Two’s computer yesterday. It somehow goofed up the default login page and I don’t know how to fix it (could figure it out, but I don’t really feel like doing that), so I’m putting on a fresh install of Core 5 tonight. I believe the old one had just about every possible package on it, which took several hours to install yesterday afternoon and evening and then all night to update everything to the latest version, but this time I’m just installing it as a workstation. That should be about a 30-minute process. I can go back and install more packages whenever I want to, and it really shouldn’t need much more. I didn’t install the developer or web server packages, for example. They’re easy to do, just in case LRN2 ever needs those packages, which will probably be never. In any case, there will be a lot of stuff installed there, and he primarily uses Windows anyway.

Got my iBoss today. I don’t think I mentioned it when I ordered it the other day, but it’s a small internet appliance that installs between the cable modem and the router. It filters out objectionable web content pretty well, keeps the webmaster informed via email of all attempted viewings of forbidden content, and resists pretty much every conceivable attempt to sidestep it. It’s highly configurable, too. I can turn the internet off either on a scheduled basis or anytime I feel the need (it’s scheduled to be off overnight on a daily basis, for example), filter specific websites, set time limits on certain sites, and do a host of other things. It has an easy-to-figure-out web interface, although its built-in web page is incredibly slow. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to slow down web traffic at all. It’s so secure that I feel comfortable keeping it in a public place, knowing that it will let me know if somebody tries to disconnect or bypass it. Pretty cool, and a good idea for a family. Leo Laporte recommends it highly (and uses it to protect his family), so you know it’s good. I recommend it too, so you can be doubly sure.

Here are Loyal Readers Number One and Two on a camping trip. The camping pictures will continue until we actually go camping. Or until I run out of them.

Spent the day sick at home today. I had a rough late night and morning. By noon I was feeling much better and I’m actually eating food tonight. Life returns.

Loyal Readers are invited to check out the HRVA website. I wrote a couple of book reviews over the weekend and spent a lot of the day today getting it rehosted in Drupal from the wretched PostNuke CMS. I think it looks a lot better and Drupal is easy enough to understand (unlike the monstrosity that is PostNuke) that I can make it look better still. The website is also much simpler, which I think will make it much easier to navigate. The only thing is that all the members will have to register again. Sorry about that, but I think the change is definitely worth it. Have a look for yourselves and let me know what you think.

My Apple keyboard has turned into a piece of absolute junk. The keys all stick at random, making it almost impossible to type a complete sentence without several errors. Very annoying. I’m looking around for a better keyboard. I loved my old Microsoft keyboard, which is now being used by Loyal Reader Number Four. She kindly offered to give it back to me, but it has a PS2 connector and I need USB. I heard that Microsoft made a version of the keyboard specifically for the Mac, but I can’t find one anywhere. If any Loyal Readers can find it for me, I’ll reward them with fame and glory.

Time for bed already. I think I’ll be able to go to work tomorrow and want to get a good night’s rest. See you on Tuesday.