morrowlife

Here’s a rather old picture of various Loyal Readers enjoying an al fresco luncheon during a camping trip. Happy times.

I found the post! Here it is:

– Tuesday –

Thought I’d get started a little early today. I’m writing this on my Palm a few minutes after 9:00 a.m., while I wait for my computer to finish updating itself. They send us updates from time to time, and today’s is a doozy. It’s installing the latest versions of Quicktime and Java Runtime, and they’re both taking forever. I think it’s been roughly half an hour so far, and it shows no signs of finishing anytime soon.

Oops, I was wrong. It just finished. Now I can get back to work. No, wait. The computer has to restart itself first, so there’s another five or ten minutes. I just love Windows. There were a couple of pretty massive updates waiting for my Mac last night, requiring an unusual reboot. The whole process took about three minutes and worked perfectly. Why do so many people waste so much money and time on Windows computers?

Anyway. We’re expecting Dave the landscaper and his associates to finally show up again today. Loyal Reader Number Four got concerned yesterday that they hadn’t been around in several days since the last time she gave them a large amount of money, so she called Dave’s cellphone. It was disconnected. Uh oh. So she called the number on the business card they gave us. The guy who answered claimed it wasn’t him who gave us the business card. Uh oh. However, he thinks maybe his son took some of his cards and was going around with Dave trying to drum up some business. LRN4 asked him to call Dave and have him contact us immediately because we were planning to make fraud complaint with the police on Tuesday.

In the meantime, she looked up the address Dave had given her. It appeared to be phony. Uh oh. Goodbye, money.

However, I looked up the address again and it turns out that he had just given her the wrong zip code. Then Dave’s stepmother (?!) called and promised to come right over. She never showed up. She finally called pretty late last night and promised that Dave would be there today and get back to work on the project.

He better. And he better fix the things he hasn’t done right so far, or there will be no additional payments made and there will be fraud complaints filed. That probably won’t help, of course, but we’ll do it anyway.

Okay, the computer is working again, so I’ll finish this at home tonight.

– Wednesday –

It’s Wednesday go to meetin’ night now, so not much more.

Landscaping update: Dave never showed up. Tony, Dave’s Dad, is working on the project now and has promised to do it and do it right. We’re cautiously optimistic. He had somebody here working on it all day and has promised to continue tomorrow. Progress!

That’s all for now, Vladimir. See you tomorrow.

Here’s the launch of a manned Soyuz spacecraft from Baikonur a few years back. The viewing area for Soyuz launches is fascinating. It’s way closer than for any other launch vehicle I’ve ever seen – so close that the nerves jump a little. You can kind of see the launch vehicle from the where you’re standing, but it’s completely encapsulated by the tower until just before launch and it’s over a slight hill, so you don’t realize how close it is until it starts to lift off. The first clue that something is odd is that you hear the sound at pretty much the exact moment you see the flame. That’s too close. I found myself looking around for a hiding place in case of a failure near the pad. In the absence of a problem, though, the view is awesome.

I wrote a nice, long post this morning while I was waiting for my laptop to update itself and tried to email it to myself from my Palm. I must have turned off the email function, however, because it’s not here.

And I stayed at work until 7:30 tonight, so there’s no time to write something new. If I can find today’s post, I’ll use it tomorrow. See you then.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number One’s new disk drive, shortly before it was entombed (enshrined?) forever inside his iBook. Oh disk drive, we hardly knew thee. But it’s working fine. Am I running out of Great Art again? You be the judge.

LRN1 commented on Sunday that I should report what made him miss Monk (link warning: loud Monk commercial) on Friday night. I don’t think I rightly remember. Oh wait – yes I do. He went over to his battle-axe buddies’ house to spend the night in preparation for the Mega Battle-Axe-O-Rama on Saturday. They went down to Hollister to beat each other over the head with sticks for a few hours. It took pretty much all day and LRN1 had a great time. He’s still a little new to the Art to come off a conqueror in a Major Event like Saturday’s, but he gave a good accounting for himself and had a great time. And he didn’t break any major bones.

Psych (same link warning as for Monk) was really good too.

We all went to a big Chili Cookoff on Friday night. Loyal Reader Number Four won a well-deserved Major Award for her crescent rolls. All the chili was tasty – I was glad I didn’t have to be a judge. Overall, it was a fun way to spend the evening – and it ended in plenty of time for Monk.

Saturday, Loyal Reader Number Two got up bright and early and went on a scout hike. It wasn’t extremely long, but they were in pretty hilly terrain, so it was a good workout. LRN4 and I stayed home and puttered around the house. I replaced the rear brakes on the Sable (it still squeaks – curses!) and we both worked on my computer desk – we put a backing board on it to hide most of the voluminous wiring from view. It looks much nicer now. We also did a few other things that don’t come to mind right now. It was a peaceful, relaxing day.

As opposed to Sunday. It seemed like we had meetings from early morning to late at night. That wasn’t really true, but it sure felt like it. They were all good meetings, fortunately, and I for one enjoyed the day. I was sure tired by nightfall, though.

Spent a little bit of last evening trying to make the HRVA’s email work again. It had been refusing to do so for a few weeks. It suddenly occurred to me last night that the new router was probably to blame. It was. I opened up an approproate port to Larry and – voila! – it works again. Should have thought of that several days ago when I first noticed the problem. Oh well.

It was beautiful and warm today. Went both directions with the top down. Ahh. My hair was a little funny-looking when I got to work, what with the trip being started with it slightly damp. It was nothing a few moments in front of the sink couldn’t fix, though. And it was definitely worth it. Weather-permitting, it will be repeated tomorrow and frequently thereafter. The only trouble with open-air motoring is that it’s hard to hear podcasts. I generally just give up and listen to iPod music instead. I think that additional tradeoff is worth it too.

Time to turn in once again. See you tomorrow.

Here are Loyal Reader Number One and Loyal Reader Number Two’s elbow hanging around by a really cool waterfall at one of the state parks in Pennsylvania a few years back.

Beautiful day today. I left the office at 3:30 and came home with the top down. It was warm, sunny, and just perfect. By the time the longish drive was over, I was adding just a touch of heat, but it still felt great. The car’s still not accelerating quite perfectly, though. I need to do a little more experimenting. I think I’ll test the oxygen sensor soon, and I’ll check for vacuum leaks too. Incidentally, my right hand is pretty sore tonight where I rested it on the shifter today. Need to baby it for a few days, I suppose. Better avoid hard labor for a while.

Monk is on. There’s a doctor who killed another doctor in the hospital, and he was just beating Monk with a crutch before a commercial break. I don’t want to rush to judgment here, but I don’t think he’s a very good doctor. Just my opinion, though. I suspect Monk will catch him.

Have a great weekend. See you on Monday.

Here’s a place most of us will recognize – the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It certainly leans. Photo courtesy of my friend Doug, I suspect, with whom I visited this lovely little town. We looked at the tower, ate a pizza, and went back to Cannes. The pizza was quite fresh, but Domino’s is better.

No post yesterday – the usual Wednesday late-night-meeting blues. Actually, the meeting was rather a good one. I just didn’t have time for blogging when I got home. My gain is your loss. Depending on how you look at it, of course.

It was a pretty day today – the rain has definitely passed through for now and we should be set for about a week’s worth of sunshine. It’s supposed to be in the very low 70s for the next several days as well. Loyal Reader Number Four reported that she saw lots of nice-looking plants at a store I’m too humiliated to admit we visit from time to time, and she bought several of them. Springtime is really in the air around here.

Of course, I spent 99 percent of today’s daylight hours inside my non-window-equipped office, which is inside a non-window-equipped office area. Such are the drawbacks of the super-secret work life. We do have to go outside briefly to get to our lab – we walk across the loading dock, which is sometimes one of the more picturesque areas of the building – so I get to soak up at least a few rays every day.

Let’s see . . . what else is going on? Ummm . . . nothing. I’m still letting ideas for my proposed Great Art generating machine roll around in my brain. Several promising ideas have surfaced, mostly for software-only solutions, which would be a start. I still want to gin up some kind of tangible machine, but the cooperative computer network is at least the first part of the puzzle, and I can get working on that right away. Loyal Reader Number One has some good ideas on getting the networking aspects working pretty easily. I may need to be on the lookout for an old used plotter, which would probably make a great starting point for the hardware portion.

And I might just as well quit while I’m ahead tonight. See you on Friday.