morrowlife

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Four and a friend in the Narrows. Who wants to go camping? I do.

I had a terrible time getting the above picture to look right. There must be a flaw in the original file, because Blogger wanted to cut off the bottom. I tried several times (which required me to FTP to my account on Vizaweb and remove the bad files before giving Blogger another chance) and finally got the little picture to be right, although the big one was no good. I went into Gimp and saved the picture as a GIF and tried again. This time the little picture was slightly bad but the big one was fine. I edited the HTML for this post and saved the little JPG picture and the big GIF. Phew. I hope my Loyal Readers appreciate all I go through for you.

Otherwise, the day was pretty uneventful. Oh, I did get the Honda washed during my lunch break. It’s a thing of beauty once again. I like the car wash in Santa Clara. With the break for the car wash, I only ended up working five hours for free. Having to go in on my off Fridays is the low point of my otherwise very enjoyable job.

LRN4 has been staining the fence to stave off water damage from the sprinklers. She’s a little less than halfway done, but it’s looking pretty good. The stain isn’t changing the color – maybe darkening it a little – but it will keep it looking nice for much longer. Of course, we can’t make our neighbors finish their side, so it will probably wear out just as quickly, but our side should look good right up to the day when it crumbles into dust.

LRN4 has inadvertently gotten herself set up as a substitute Seminary teacher. It’s a very rewarding thing to do, but it’s a lot of work. She’s teaching next week and already working hard to prepare lessons. I’m not helping much by listening to some music on iTunes and Pandora, but she doesn’t seem to mind too much. At least she’s keeping it to herself.

We’re heating up the spa tonight to help LRN4 relax her sore painting arm. I’m looking forward to getting in there. I don’t think I’ll be jumping into the pool tonight, though. It’s been very cool for a few days and the water is currently at 68 degrees. Just a little too cool. It’s supposed to warm way back up starting tomorrow, so the pool ought to be nice next weekend.

Speaking of which, I think I’ll go get in it. Watch for a couple of book reviews in the HRVA this weekend. See you on Monday.

Here’s the sign from Merrick & Lennon’s old place in Feasterville. Looks like it must have been nice. I wonder what they sold.

Another short post tonight. It’s already 10:00! How time flies.

Spent a lot of time in the lab this afternoon. It was interesting, instructive, and enjoyable. We had some good success too. It’s all good. I haven’t spent enough time in the lab. Have to correct that omission.

No update on the PostNuke/64-bit Linux controversy. I can’t find anything on the interweb that says it doesn’t work with the 64-bit version, but I certainly can’t make it install. Any ideas, Loyal Readers? Whatever I try next, it’ll have to wait until the weekend, I’m afraid. Too many projects, too little time.

I’m planning to work absolutely no more than 6 hours or so tomorrow, my off Friday. Including commute time, I’ll be spending a grand total of about 11 hours for no money. Ah, the glamorous life of the Professional.

We’ve had some rain the last couple of days! That’s a first for us in Northern California and I must say it’s a pleasant change. It’s officially Fall now. It’s kind of hard on the traffic situation, though. A little sprinkle and they all go crazy on the road. Fortunately, there’s the train. The trouble with taking the train on a rainy day is that I have to stand around in it at the stations on both ends and walk from the bus stop to my building and back. Could get messy. I have a few umbrellas, including ones thoughtfully prepositioned in my car’s trunk, in the back of the Suburban, and in my office, but no umbrella’s perfect. I guess I don’t really mind getting a little damp, though.

I’m listening to one of James Lileks’s Diner podcasts on iTunes right now – the “Hot Dish” edition, to be specific. As with all Diners, it’s very entertaining.

Time for bed. See you tomorrow.

Here are the fellas – at least some of them. Sigh. I miss the fellas. At least I still have some pictures. That yellow-looking fella in the middle is Whitey (he used to be a lot whiter), and if I’m not mistaken, that’s Little Blackie in the bottom right corner. Yes, I know he’s bright orange, but he was jet black when he was just a little fella. The rest of them have no names. They’re just Fellas.

Short post tonight. I have a meeting at 8:30 and I won’t feel like writing when I get home. Stayed up too late last night trying to get PostNuke to install on Larry. It’s working great on the real server, hosting the HRVA. I wanted to get a test installation set up so I could experiment a little, but it would get partly installed and then just stop. No error message, no explanation, no clue. Very puzzling. I tried and tried and tried and then gave up and went to bed. Upon reflection in the shower this morning, I’ve started wondering whether it likes the 64-bit version of Linux. Probably not. I would try installing it on Moe, with its 32-bit (very slow) processor and corresponding version of Linux, but it has Fedora Core 3 installed, which is so old it no longer updates, so I’m assuming it’s not running a sufficiently recent version of MySQL. I guess I could always check. I’m also thinking of putting Fedora Core 5 on it. I’m just trying to figure out how to redo all the configuration I’ve done on it and I get discouraged. It’s really only being used for backup and other data storage, which is not a demanding use. It’s running fine just like it is. So maybe I won’t change it. Anyway, I’m sleepy already and don’t want to have to come back and blog before bed. So I’m doing it quickly now.

Drove the car today and made it in an hour and forty-five minutes in both directions. That’s not too bad for around here. Traffic was especially good through Tracy in the afternoon. It’s been bad every day on 680. I heard today that they have 880, which runs parallel to 680 just a little to the west, torn up. Traffic there has become very bad, so I’m guessing there’s been more than a little spillover to 680. The nerve of those people. Have the decency to stay on your own freeway.

I started listening to Pandora again yesterday. It’s a pretty cool website that sets up personalized internet “radio stations” for you, based on your tastes in music. It does an amazing job at picking songs you’ll like. Check it out!

Time to have a little bit of a life. See you tomorrow.

Here’s James Monroe’s desk in James Monroe’s house, with James Monroe’s green miniblinds in the background. Hmmm. Something’s not right here.

Well, the house (ours, not Monroe’s) isn’t sold and it isn’t not sold. Limbo is so much fun. It looks like if the deal still goes through, it might be delayed by a week or two. Hopefully, we’ll hear something tomorrow. Since the line of buyers is somewhat short right now, we’re just sitting tight. And paying through the nose.

Where did that saying come from – paying through the nose? Whoever really paid anything through the nose? Wouldn’t it hurt? How would the money get in there? Would you accept money from somebody who wanted to pay through the nose? I wouldn’t touch the stuff. “No thanks. Send me a check.” That’s what I always say. Or would always say if somebody tried to pay me through the nose.

Anyway. Fairly productive day. Let’s take a look here at my Official Franklin Covey Electronic Prioritized Daily Task List . . . okay, got it. Three of my five top-priority work tasks got done. That’s not really bad, all things considered. And tomorrow’s another day, fortunately. If it weren’t another day, I guess I wouldn’t have to worry about undone work, would I?

Anyway. Rode the train today, which was a good thing. I slept most of the way in and am reading and writing most of the way home. Also listening to more podcasts. I think I may be subscribed to too many of those things. I spend a minimum of five hours a day listening to those things and I never catch up. I’m running about a month behind right now. On the other hand, I’m not losing much ground anymore either. If I ever catch up on the tech podcasts, I have a few old general conferences in the queue. Gonna have to just start working them in, I expect.

We got our DVR replaced the other day. The original one they gave us didn’t work very well. It would record or not record, depending on how it was feeling that day, and it would play recorded shows or not play them, depending on ditto. Finally, it just crashed and deleted everything. Most unfortunate. We got on a waiting list (I guess everybody’s DVR was defective) and got another one after a week or two. This one has crashed too, but it hasn’t deleted anything on us. We’re hoping for the best.

The other weird thing about the old one was that it was advertised as holding “up to” 160 hours of low-def programming. Ours would never hold more than 40 hours, which seemed a little skimpy to me. I don’t know how much the new one will hold yet, but I’m hoping for better things.

Everybody I’ve talked to about these things says they change the way you watch TV, and I have to say they’re right. For one thing, we now don’t have to search around for something good to watch when we have a few minutes in front of the box. We just play one of our favorite recorded shows. For another thing, and possibly even more important, the ability to pause and rewind live TV is really cool. This weekend, we got upstairs for general conference a few minutes late for a couple of sessions, and we just rewinded back to the beginning and saw the whole thing. If a program has commercials, we can start watching a little late and then catch back up by fast-forwarding over the commercials. We didn’t expect to use this feature very much, but it turns out we use it constantly. Very useful.

I’ve recorded a few old movies and need to see if they’ve somehow made it difficult to record them to DVD. That’s the last frontier for me on DVRs. Even better would be the ability to copy the entire digital file to a computer and burn it directly to a DVD. That would certainly save a lot of time, and it’s technically possible, but I’m giving pretty generous odds that Comcast has disabled that feature. I guess I should try hooking the machine up to the network (assuming the ethernet connector on the back hasn’t been removed or covered up, that is) and see if it’s visible.

Anyway. I need to finish up here and write my mom a letter. We’ve been emailing her every week for a while, but she’s finding it much harder to get to her email machine, so we’re switching back to snail mail. I’ll still type my letters so I can avoid that awful personal touch, but at least she’ll hear from me.

See you tomorrow.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Nine and my non-reader niece gettin’ groovy in the disco on the Disney ship, taken during our September 2005 cruise. Far out, man.

I’m a little grouchy this evening. Apparently, the post office has started forwarding our mail back to Santa Clara. This is not good, for those of you who were wondering. We must make them stop. Occasionally, some important things come in the mail and it would be nice to receive them.

Otherwise, the day’s been just fine. I chose (poorly) to drive today. There was an accident. I got there late. Nothing bad happened. So everything’s fine and I heard a lot of podcasts.

Loyal Reader Number Seven had a great idea in yesterday’s comments. I think one of my favorite talks was Elder Bednar (I think), who invited people to choose to quit being offended. I’ve known way too many people who can’t get over something somebody said or did a long time ago, so they punish themselves for years with anger and bitterness. The ironic thing is that the person who gave the offense generally has no idea what happened those many years ago and is happy as a clam. It’s long since time for those people to get over it. I also enjoyed Elder Eyring‘s talk.

My, the First Presidency looked old, didn’t they? It’s clear they won’t be with us forever. President Hinckley looked pretty frail (reasonable for a 96-year-old who recently underwent two major surgeries) and I was distressed to see President Faust unable to stand. I certainly hope things continue to improve for them both. President Monson pretty much looked like President Monson.

I finally made an update to the HRVA site! Have a look at my “Vagabonds” article and let me know what you think. I’m trying really hard to update it on weekends, but haven’t done too well so far. I’m also trying to figure out how to make the site look better (background graphics, etc.), so far without much luck. I also want to figure out how to get some decals printed cheaply so I can pass them out when we go camping (and send them to registered members, of course!). I also need to order some parts so I can write the Coleman lantern rebuilding article. Busy, busy, busy.

Nothing else for today. It’s late and I must get my beauty rest.