morrowlife

Here’s a guy with the thinnest head I’ve ever seen. Part of my famous Statue series. Taken in Pisa.

Extreme Short Shrift yet again. Worked until 8:30 this evening. It always happens on my last day before a vacation. There are things that Simply Must Get Done. So I stay and do them.

Anyway. The Detroit trip (doesn’t everybody go to Detroit for Memorial Day?) starts tomorrow, so bloggage will be non-existent tomorrow and spotty for the next five days. If the relatives have WiFi, I’ll be there.

In the meantime, just be glad we’re not going to Gough Island.

See you …umm… soon.

Here are a couple of guys surfing at Big Sur. Taken during this year’s spring campout there, of course.

No post last Friday. I don’t know why. Thanks for noticing, Anon.

Okay weekend. We enjoyed Loyal Reader Number Four’s birthday (link warning: birthday song) on Saturday. Loyal Reader Number Two went to the beach that day with about 175 of his friends. They (and he) had a great time.

Loyal Readers Numbers Five, Six, and Twelve came over on Saturday morning and stayed until very early this morning. They were here for LRN4’s birthday, as well as to escape the heat in their non-air-conditioned apartment.

And the weekend was certainly a scorcher. It was over 100 degrees every day. The upside was that the pool was plenty warm for swimming, which we did a few times. Very enjoyable.

LRN4 and I went to an adult activity at church on Friday night. We tasted The Foods of Many Nations. Several of which were good. Then we listened to a little live entertainment – singers, a flautist, a ukelele player, and a poet. All of which were great. I especially enjoyed the ukelele player. He sang some delightful Hawaiian songs, his wife did a little hula-ing, and his ukelele was electric! Very cool.

Anyway. I accomplished nothing. The weekend was about relaxation.

Oh, I did do some work on getting Larry to serve email and particularly the Mailman list server. My hosting service’s many service outages have finally broken the camel’s back. I’m dumping them forever. Real Soon Now. Since GoDaddy doesn’t do mail lists, I have to host the McCulloch family mail list myself. I think I have a mail server and Mailman both working now, but I have no idea how to use them. Need to do a little more studying and hacking. No problem.

Time for bed already. See you tomorrow.

Here’s the view in front of my office building on the evening of the 14th. Photo courtesy of the low-fi RAZR-cam. It was about 8:30 PM when I finally left the building – there was just way too much to do that day.

Which explains why there was no post. I got home a little before 10:00, ate some cereal, and went to bed. Sorry about that.

Wonders of Blogger today. Sorry again. It was Loyal Reader Number One’s high school graduation on Thursday night! I decided to attend rather than blog. Not a regrettable decision. But I certainly do feel for my lonesome Loyal Readers.

Anyway. Back on track today.

The graduation was nice. Many (well, really most) of the parents and family members were loud and obnoxious and a few (well, really most) of the graduates were tasteless and silly, but that’s how high school graduations are supposed to be, no? LRN1’s speech was very nice and well presented and there was one young man who performed with his brother and somebody else (cousin?). He played the guitar and they fiddled. They were really excellent.

They read a 2-3 sentence statement from each graduate telling what their immediate plans are. Out of about 150 kids, there must have been fifty girls who plan to become cosmetologists. That is not a small number. That is a big number.

Home from work Friday. More bloggage this evening. See you then.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Two striking a pose beside an ex-plaque. I wonder what they were previously commemorating. It must have been pretty good for somebody to grab it.

Greetings from the train. I’m counting on it being right on time after last night’s debacle repeat. Tried connecting to the wireless without success. The network seems to be here, but I can’t get a good connection to the router, and then it’s definitely not clear whether the router has a connection to the Intertubes. Sigh.

Pretty day here in the Bay Area. It’s sunny and warm without being hot. As opposed to a couple of days from today. When it will be both sunny and hot. Although I’m not complaining.

I mentioned yesterday that I’ve downloaded a few new podcasts. My very extra-special favorite new one is Chris on Camera. It’s done by a British publication called Autocar. It features a very personable, interesting guy named Chris who shows a different interesting car each time, talks about it in some depth, and then drives it fast. Sometimes he’s actually on a racetrack, other times he appears to just be on back roads. The perspective on the cars is excellent, the host is interesting and obviously enjoying himself, and the podcast is highly recommended.

Of course, it’s a video podcast, which is exactly what I wasn’t looking for. I’m quite short on audio podcasts these days. As mentioned before, I’ve gotten very sick of Leo Laporte‘s podcasts, except for the always-excellent Security Now and the quickly-becoming-tiresome Munchcast. Other podcasts just don’t seem to be updated anymore. Anyway, I got onto iTunes to look for more. Actually found a couple:

BYU Kennedy Center Lectures – talks on foreign affairs by invited speakers.

New BYU Speeches – replaces my old BYU Speeches podcast, which appears to have petered out – BYU has a strange habit of suddenly changing its podcast links, which seems to me to be murder on downloads. Anyway, it features recent Devotional and Forum speeches – always excellent.

PodCacher – A podcast on Geocaching, which I had tried before and dropped. I’m thinking I might like it now that I can actually do geocaching. This one is on probation, though.

The MacObserver’s Mac Geek Gab – Yet another Mac show, several of which I’ve tried and rejected. This one is definitely on double-secret probation – it needs to be really good to stay on the iPod.

Anyway. I haven’t yet listened to any of the audio podcasts, so the only one I can really vouch for so far is New BYU Speeches. Updates as events warrant.

I saw yet another version of the worst music video ever. Judge for yourselves, Loyal Readers.

Time to go. See you tomorrow.

Here’s another in my famous statue series. This one, like so many others, is in Pisa. Cute little guys, no?

No time tonight for much blogging. I stayed an hour and a half late at work and the evening is just gone. On the other hand, I really didn’t get home any later than I would have otherwise – I got two email messages before I left the office telling me the last two trains were seriously delayed by a broken down freight train. Again. I saw what I believe was the second train coming into Lardville just as I was about to get off the freeway, and the third one (my usual train) seems to have arrived shortly afterward. Monday evenings have not been good for the ACE people.

Why did I stay late at work? Other than the fact that I have way too many things piled up, that is? Well, I was coding. That’s right, actually coding for money, just like I used to do. I think I haven’t coded at work since at least 1998. I really enjoyed it. I only added about six or eight lines of code to a Perl script, but it took a little effort because I had to study the tool, which had been written three years ago by somebody who is no longer working there and I had to learn enough Perl to get it done. It works!

The weekend campout went just fine. I got home in plenty of time to pick up the trailer and get set up long before dark. I built a nice campfire, took care of the charcoal for the Dutch ovens (delicious chocolate pudding cake – need to keep that recipe), and relaxed a little while the Young Women did their planning for next year’s Girls’ Camp. In the morning, I made myself slightly useful taking down a few tents and cleaning up and managed to sneak in a little more relaxation. Everything considered, it was a pleasant evening and morning.

Let’s see, what else did I accomplish this weekend? Not much that I can recall. I didn’t even use the Wonders of Blogger on Saturday, as sort of promised. Need to do better next week at making a list and checking it three times. Heaven knows there’s plenty to do. Even if it’s no more than getting a car washed and waxed.

The Weather Channel tells us it’s going to be over 100 degrees in Lardville on at least Thursday of this week, with temperatures well into the 90s before and after. Yikes. Maybe the pool will be warm enough to swim in by the weekend.

I was delighted to receive a comment from Loyal Reader Number Twenty-Two on Thursday’s post. Sadly, I have to answer that the new GPS doesn’t plug into a computer. It has only one connector, which is for an external antenna. We’re talking basic, mil-spec unit here. However, I have to agree with LRN22 that it would be cool to have one that did that.

Still hope to find my first geocache sometime this week. Friday seems like a likely candidate.

I followed a link to an interest website today – Clutterers Anonymous. I’ve been trying to figure out ever since whether this is a serious website or a joke. Any opinions from listeners? I could certainly use some help reducing a little clutter in my world. I guess I should really surrender to my Greater Power in that regard.

Here’s another interesting website I found today. How to go about making a movie, and not just how to point the camera. As with most things, the mundane aspects of the job consume most of the time and energy. Kind of like blogging, no? The site hosting this tutorial seems pretty interesting itself. Lots of classes.

I found those websites when I was digging around on Lifehacker. It’s a pretty cool site dedicated to personal productivity. It’s normally a beautiful-looking site too, but it appears right now as if their CSS files have disappeared. I hope they’re not another victim of the Chinese hackers.

Speaking of productivity sites, I also like 43 Folders. Highly recommended for people who want to get things done. Also for people who like Macs – that’s where I found Quicksilver.

Anyway. Time for bed. Remind me to mention a few new podcasts tomorrow. See you then.