morrowlife

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Twelve playing peekaboo.

Greetings from the train! It was rainy today and (I’m guessing) the traffic was terrible, so here I am. Ridership was pretty light this morning and it’s pretty heavy this afternoon. It’s just like Friday traffic, and my question is the same – where do all these people come from? They don’t drive to work in the morning and they don’t ride the train, but they’re clogging the highways and aisles on the way home. Maybe they stay in town all week and just go home on weekends. If so, they have my pity.

Speaking of which, I pity the fools who have to go to work tomorrow. It’s my off Friday! All I have to do is generate some charts in the morning, conduct my 10:00 meeting via telecon, attend an 11:00 meeting via telecon, and do timecards in the afternoon. Other than that, I’m free as a bird. At least I can do all that work in my pajamas if I want to. On the other hand, maybe I could be wearing my PJs to work every day. Hmm. That’s something to think about. I wouldn’t ever have to worry about another promotion again!

Anyway. Loyal Reader Number Four and I are planning to finish the garage door insulation project tomorrow. I also ought to go to the library and return a few books.

Speaking of which, I just finished reading Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. It’s a very interesting history of the guy who solved the longitude problem. As my loyal readers no doubt know, it wasn’t too hard in the 1700’s to figure out a ship’s latitude (how far north or south of the equator it is) by solar observation. Direction was simple – compasses were available from a very early date. Longitude was a much thornier problem. Celestial observations weren’t accurate enough to place a ship even within a hundred miles of its true location. Dead reckoning was no good – winds and currents took care of that. Lots of ships were lost because they couldn’t figure out how far east or west they had gone, so they didn’t know how close they were to land or even which direction it might be. Since ships had to sail at night as well as in the day, they were likely to run aground or just get lost long enough to run out of food and/or water. Eventually, the British government put up a pretty substantial prize for anybody who could solve the problem.

Two schools of thought arose. The first one was to refine the ability to make celestial observations and publish tables. The theory was sound – knowing the relative positions of the sun, moon, and stars at your current location versus their predicted locations at a reference location (which ended up being in Greenwich, although the French – typically – demanded that the world use Paris), you could tell how many hours/minutes/seconds east or west of the reference point you were and hence your longitude.

The other school of thought was the timekeepers. If you took two clocks with you and kept one set to the reference time and the other set to local time, you could figure out your longitude without all those messy star charts, long observations, and difficult math. Unfortunately, there were no clocks that were even close to accurate enough. The book is the story of the great race between the two factions, with all the politics and pettiness that accompanied it. Good read. I won’t tell you how it turns out, other than to say that the good guy won.

Well, that was certainly a long explanation. Can you tell I enjoyed the book? Now let’s talk about one I didn’t enjoy. I also need to return The Little Book of Time. It certainly didn’t work out the way I had hoped. I was in the mood for scientific history books and that’s what this one sounded like, based on its title. It turns out to be the pseudo-scientific rantings of some two-bit, unimaginative, unoriginal, dumb philosophy major. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But don’t bother with his book. And if you happen to meet him, run away. Fast.

Okay, that’s enough for today. See you tomorrow.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number One sitting in front of the trailer during one of our campouts this summer. Picture (obviously) taken with the exclusive RAZR-cam.

Fine day today. We’re having rain every other day this week, and today was one of the no-rain days, so I drove. Tomorrow’s a rain day and I’ll be avoiding the inevitable traffic by taking the train.

Speaking of which, I’ve been kind of avoiding the train because I have one round trip left and I still haven’t received my first before-tax ticket voucher. It should be here any day now. I don’t want to buy another ticket before it comes. I guess there are always single tickets while I wait.

Loyal Readers Numbers One and Two have been watching Country Fried Home Videos on the Country Music Channel while Loyal Reader Number Four is at book group tonight. Of course, they don’t want to be associated in any way with the Country Music Channel, but the show is really funny, so they’re willing to take the risk. Don’t worry, Loyal Readers, I won’t tell anybody!

It’s bedtime for me. See you tomorrow.

Here’s a bridge in the big English garden in downtown Tokyo. It was a very pretty place, even if a rose garden in Japan is a bit unusual.

Short shrift tonight. My Wednesday meeting has been changed to Tuesday this year, and it’s already late.

I had to give three layoff notices to subordinates today. It was not a good day. Hopefully, we’ll be able to place all three within the company. We didn’t want to lose any of these guys anyway. They’re victims of layoffs on other programs. Sigh.

Anyway. I’m loving the new computer. It is way faster than my old one (sorry, Loyal Reader Number Four!). The Missing Sync finally syncs my Palm correctly. I ripped a couple of DVDs the other day; they took about two hours to convert, versus about 15 with the old machine. Those two fast Intel cores are really as good as they say.

And I need to quit already. See you tomorrow.

Here are Loyal Reader Number Three and a friend pointing out some glaring errors in the transcontinental railroad construction. I can see your problem right there! That guy in the background was a real stiff.

No time to blog tonight. We had a great home evening, topped off by a great chocolate cake with Cool Whip. Yum. The lesson was good, the activity was fun, and our calendars are fully coordinated for the rest of the month.

The weekend was fine too – it was stake conference weekend, so there were plenty of meetings to attend. Sadly, I’ve been feeling sick for several days, and I had a terrible day on Sunday, so I stayed home and slept all day. I’m feeling much better today, possibly because of all the rest.

The church has published a video correcting misconceptions about Latter-day Saints. For your enlightenment, I present it here in its entirety:

If the embedded version doesn’t show up in your browser, try clicking here.

The video was originally used to help news people covering the 2002 winter olympics understand the church better and know who and what to believe and what to ignore. It’s possible it at least partially served its purpose. Maybe not, though. News people aren’t typically exactly the brightest stars in the universe, if you know what I mean. Anyway, I’ve only seen the first part of the video, but it looks pretty good.

And I really need to get to bed. See you tomorrow.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Twelve showing off her birthday gifts. She’s looking not too anxious to see the flash.

No time to post. I’m actually using the Wonders of Blogger at a little past 2:00 on Saturday morning. I’ve been mucking around with the Mac and it’s late.

Mac mucking is going well, though. I have VMware installed, and it’s really cool. I have virtual copies of Windows 2000 and Ubuntu Linux running. They both run pretty much perfectly. The only problem I’ve seen is that the Palm emulator doesn’t beep right – I get a default Windows sound. That’s a little bit unfortunate, since I’m working on my Morse code program, but I’ll figure out a way to work around it. It may not be VMware’s fault anyway – Windows has been known to be a little funky too.

I also have everything installed and working on the Mac itself. Printers are installed and working, all the applications are functional, and I’ve even replaced several of the PowerPC versions of apps with Intel versions. On top of that, I have the Android development system installed on the Mac and it’s working great too.

One other thing I got accomplished this evening was to finally get Loyal Reader Number Four’s old email messages onto her Mac. When her old PC was about to die, I copied her Microsoft Outlook files – mail and contacts – onto Larry. I was able to get the contacts imported into Entourage by bringing them into Mail and exporting them from there into Entourage. The emails were a much tougher nut, though. Outlook saves everything into a single file, and they don’t offer any kind of migration path from there to Entourage (both products were made by Microsoft, by the way). I was finally able to import the Outlook file into Outlook Express on my virtual W2K machine. From there, I copied the files into a folder on which I ran a free converter some kind soul wrote to change them to MBOX files, which Entourage likes. I just had to change the file endings from .mbx to .mbox and then run an Applescript some other kind soul wrote that changes the .mbox text files to .mbox-style text files. That script was actually written for MBOX files exported from Thunderbird, but it worked here too. Then it was a simple matter to import the files directly into Entourage (transferring them from my virtual W2K machine to Larry to LRN4’s machine first, of course). Whew.

It rained and blew like crazy today. The pool was full nearly to overflowing, so we spent a few hours draining it out. The pond‘s full too, but I’m not planning to go out there to drain it until the lawn dries out a bit. The rain’s supposed to stay here for a few more days, but I think the high winds are over now.

Have a great weekend. See you on Monday.