morrowlife

Here’s the river running through Dos Reis County Park. As I was mentioning to Loyal Reader Number Four a few moments ago, it’s a very small oasis of prettiness in the middle of otherwise-unremarkable farmland.

I’m home! It was a long day, as I had to drive directly to work, after which there were meetings for pretty much the rest of the day. Then I came home, ate, and sat down to write.

Loyal Reader Number One is working on a Fifteen Puzzle implementation in Java for a class. They told him to start with the board in a random state but failed to note that half of the initial states are unsolvable. My guess is that they didn’t know. Now he faces the dilemma of figuring out which initial states are solvable and which aren’t. I suggested a viable alternative – start out with the puzzle in the solved state and then do a bunch of random moves until the puzzle is sufficiently mixed up. That’s the way we used to do it with those little plastic versions I used to get.

Anyway. All the Loyal Readers left Loyal Reader Number Twelve with LRN1 and me in the family room and went off to do other things. She crawled around a little and started to get fussy. LRN1 and I were trying (unsuccessfully) to get her to crawl over to one of us when Loyal Reader Number Five came in and picked her up, thus solving the problem. Except that LRN5 was NOT happy that nobody came to the rescue before she got there. We’re laying low so we don’t get caught in the rampage.

Time to unpack, read a little, maybe check my home email, and go to bed. See you tomorrow.

Here’s some more Great Art from the Phoenix Art Museum. The artist isn’t a relative, as far as I know, but those other people are. Behold Loyal Readers Numbers Four, Fifteen, and Three, respectively. I have no idea who that lady in the background is, but I’m sure she’s very nice. Apologies for the slight fuzziness of the picture – I was trying to go without my flash to avoid ruining the Great Art (soft focus – yeah, that’s it).

The meeting’s over! I’m glad I attended – learned a lot about some upcoming plans and got literally hundreds of new things to test. This is a good thing. I’m heading for home in the morning. Well, I’m actually heading for work, but only for four or five hours.

Had dinner at Marie Callender’s tonight. Got the tri-tip with Cajun shrimp, mashed potatoes, garlic bread, and generic vegetables. Not good. The steak was raw, the shrimp tasted weird, the toast tasted like fish, and the vegetables looked too terrible to even try. The potatoes were okay, though. I’m not going back. I’m also afraid I can’t recommend Marie Callender’s to my Loyal Readers.

I started reading Agile Development with Rails this morning. So far, I’m on page 25 and filled with hope. I need to understand Rails well enough to work with Loyal Reader Number One’s application. And future apps as well.

I believe I’ve found the most useless OS X Widget ever. Check it out. But do not install it. Really. I mean it.

I’m in trouble for tomorrow’s drive – big trouble. I’ve been listening to my supply of podcasts during the trip, including the drive down to Lancaster, the drives back and forth from the hotel to the base, and as background noise here in the hotel room. The problem: I now have only five podcasts left in my list. There’s not enough to entertain me on the trip home! Since my iPod is synced to my Mac, not my laptop, I can’t download any new ones either. There are plenty of video podcasts, and I could just listen to them (watching while driving isn’t exactly safe and probably isn’t legal either), but that’ll chew the batteries down to nothing in just a few hours. Wait a minute – that might be enough! There are probably a couple of hours’ worth of audio podcasts, after which I could switch to video and actually make it! It’s crazy enough that it just might . . . get us all killed!

Otherwise, nothing to report. I want to read some more, so we’ll see you tomorrow, after the long drive back to the north.

Here’s some actual Great Art made by my mother’s cousin, Robert Irwin, sometime in the 1960s or 1970s. We found it in the Phoenix Art Museum. Very avant-garde stuff for back then. In fact, it’s still pretty inscrutable.

Hats off and hands over hearts for the memory of the victims of 9/11. God bless their families with peace, our troops with victory, and our country with security.

Greetings from Lancaster, California! As discussed yesterday, I’m here for a couple of nights. Enjoyed the drive and the sushi dinner. My room is comfortable and freezing cold (not necessarily a negative for me). On the downside, I had to drive around quite a bit to find a gas station. Finally found one, though, so I’m ready to go for tomorrow. Other than that, I can’t exactly remember how to get to the base from here. But I have a pretty good idea, anyway. And I have Google maps. So I’m not worried. I’ll check in the morning.

I brought four books down here. I can never decide ahead of time which one I want to read, so I just bring them all. There’s no chance I’ll get through them all, of course. I’ve started on one called How to Start a Business in California, by Entrepreneur Press. I’m kind of in the pablum part so far, although there are a few good ideas there. I’m looking forward to getting into the list of things specific to California, which I hope will be less pablumy.

Drove the Miata to work again today and the coolant temperature was perfect again. So was the outside temperature, come to think of it. My arms are slightly sunburned from two days’ worth of open-air trips in a row. Small price to pay.

It’s midnight now and I need to get my beauty rest. See you tomorrow.

Here’s one last picture of Big Sur – where the hills and the beach come together.

Long drive to work this morning – 2.5 hours due to a Miata that went off the road and down a hill – so a short drive home. The Law of Freeway Equalization holds true once again.

The good news from this morning’s sit-fest is that the Miata’s thermal fix appears to have worked! The temperature gauge was a steady as a rock! It was practically a no-trial this afternoon, since the traffic never really slowed down much on any but my first freeway, but I still feel pretty confident. I suppose I’ll have to wait until next summer to verify it’s okay on 105-degree days, but I can be patient. Mission accomplished.

Next up: the suspension rattle.

Let’s see, what else? I still haven’t downloaded the new Great Art. Can’t really explain why not – it ought to be quick and easy enough. Maybe Thursday night after I get home from travel.

By the way, I’m going to Edwards tomorrow for a Wednesday meeting. Back home on Thursday. Bloggage will continue, of course.

Time to help Loyal Reader Number Five get email set up on her laptop. See you tomorrow.

Here’s a particularly seaworthy-looking vessel out on San Francisco Bay. Photo courtesy of Loyal Reader Number One.

Wonders of Blogger today. I spent the entire evening working on the business. Roughly six hours. Six fruitless, frustrating hours. Six pointless, meaningless, useless hours. But I’m not bitter. Oh wait, yes I am.

The trouble is, I’m trying to get Waterlogged running on Larry. Well, it’s actually running on Larry, but not under Apache. It comes with a mini-server called Webrick, which is working perfectly, but when you want to put a Rails application into production, you need to make it work with Apache. And I haven’t been able to make that work yet. It turns out to be pretty complicated. I’ll get there, but there’s very little practice. I can’t even get it to be able to write into its own log files. It complains that the file permissions aren’t set, but they most certainly are. And then it claims it can’t find its own fast server. Which is most certainly there. Sigh.

On the good news front, Loyal Readers Numbers One and Two and I scientifically verified that the Miata’s thermoswitch was definitely bad. We went to a couple of parts stores until we found a replacement. Installing it was the simplest auto repair I’ve ever done, I believe. The sensor is screwed into the thermostat housing, which is right at the front of the engine without any obstructions. We simply unhooked the wire, put a socket on the old sensor, easily unscrewed it, easily screwed the new one in, and re-hooked the wire. Started the engine up, waited for it to heat up, and verified the fan comes on and the engine no longer seems to have a desire to overheat. Of course, the real proof will come the next time I take the car to work, but I’m cautiously optimistic.

Gotta go to Costco shortly, and I’m starving for lunch, so it’s time to finish. See you on Monday.