morrowlife

Here’s a welcome bear.  Don’t think I’ve ever seen one of those before.  Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam and part of both my Statue and Camping series.

Greetings from the campground!  It turns out that they do have wifi here, although they charge five bucks a day for it and the connection speed is atrocious.  The suffering is practically unbearable.  But at least I have it.

We’re having a nice time here.  The weather was absolutely perfect today – neither hot nor cool, still almost all day, and just beautiful.  Couldn’t have asked for it to be better.  It was a bit warmer yesterday – we ran the air conditioner for a while.  It’s supposed to be in the upper 80’s tomorrow, which should be just about right.

Spent a lot of the day working sitting on my comfortable lounge chair in front of the trailer, either reading or playing with a computer.  That sounds ideal!  I’m declaring the sdlogger program done – no more changes until after it’s published.  Still need to write the library and example code, but they ought to go pretty quickly.  I’ll see how much I can get done tonight.  We want to do a bit of exploring around tomorrow.

I installed Dropbox on this computer and my iPhone today.  It works great and is pretty cool.  I have it monitoring a couple of folders on this machine and saving their contents.  I’ll do the same with Buddy, my development machine, and Curly, my Mac Mini, and will be able to work on my projects on any of them at any time.  Cool!  Of course, the fly in the ointment is that I’ve been unable to get Dropbox installed on Buddy so far this afternoon.  The installer gets to 58% of the download and stalls there.  I don’t know if it’s the pathetic connection (that’s my guess) or something more serious, but it’s a bit annoying, I can assure you.  I’ll get it figured out, though.

Not much else to report.  Probably no post tomorrow, as I don’t plan to pay the $5 every day.  We’ll see how it goes.  Plus, I still need to spend some time taking some Great Art, and plenty of it.

And I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: hot dog champ arrested!

See you . . . umm . . . soon.

Here’s a huge field of rocks in a state park in Pennsylvania.  We visited there several years ago, and was it ever a beautiful place!  This month’s campout starts today, so this picture is to help me get in the mood.  Part of my famous Camping series.

Didn’t expect a post today, did you, Loyal Readers?  I’m using the Wonders of WordPress and posting this ahead of time, to be published at 5:00 PM on Monday.  We’ll see if that works.

Received my new Duty to God book a few days ago.  I largely read it over last night and this morning, and I’ve now started working through it from start to finish.  I really want to follow the program just as if I were a deacon and progress through it through the end.  Then I can start again in Preach My Gospel, except actually work through that excellent book from start to finish as well.  I expect this will turn out to be a multi-year project if done well.  I really don’t want to hurry – I’m studying, not reading.  I’m just starting the first part of the Deacon section in Duty to God today.

I’d like to record my thoughts as I go through this process here on the blog, so I hope my Loyal Readers will forgive a bit of introspection as a part of the blog.

Today’s Duty to God thought: Under Pray and Study the Scriptures, the Learn section asks us to carefully study a few scripture passages.  One of them is 1 Nephi 15:23-24, which includes the following passage:  “… whoso would hearken unto the word of God (i.e. the scriptures and words of the prophets), and would hold fast unto it (study, pray, and follow diligently?), they would never perish; neither could the temptations and the fiery darts of the adversary overpower them unto blindness, to lead them away to destruction.” (Parentheticals mine, of course.)

One of my areas of Gospel interest is in finding ways to be more reliably obedient and overcoming temptations and weaknesses on an enduring basis.  This passage seems to be telling us that if we “hold fast” to the scriptures and other words of God, the adversary is incapable of overpowering us with temptations and weaknesses (fiery darts).  Pretty powerful promise, that.  Hopefully, going through the Duty to God/Preach My Gospel process will be a very positive step in the direction of holding fast to the words of God.

Anyway.  Presumably, the campout is going great and we’re having a wonderful time.  I need to find cell coverage and free wifi somewhere for my Tuesday morning church iPhone conference call, so I hope to find time to post a quick update at that time.  So far, what I know is that I have a bunch of books to read (mostly technical, of course), some gospel study to do (including trying to retire a few of those old Liahona magazines), and a bunch of writing to get done.

Made excellent progress on getting sdlogger ready to publish on Saturday, but there is a ton more to do, as I realized while going through the process.  The code itself is publishable (although I keep thinking of things I’d like to change/add, such as doing something with the LEDs when data is being transferred).  I now need to draw a schematic of the board, write an interface library for the controlling Arduino to link to, and write a test program to prove that the whole shebang works and give users example code for their own programs.  I can do all that stuff during the camping trip and just test it all and publish when I get home.

I’d also like to get the Gardenville site switched over from Drupal to WordPress, I think.  I’ve discovered on this blog how easy WordPress is to use and I think I’d like to standardize all my websites on it.  Still need to figure out if there’s an easy way to allow users to download files from it, though.

I don’t think I mentioned that I bought a new antenna for my beloved Ranger.  Turns out the factory antenna costs $28.  They sell a cheapo replacement at Autozone for ten bucks, and that’s the one I bought.  If it turns out to get all bent from the wind and otherwise be a nuisance, I can always buy the expensive dealer one.  On the positive side, nobody is likely to steal this one, and even if they do, I won’t miss it much.  Sheesh.

Anyway.  It’s Sunday just before church as I write this and it’s time to get ready and go, so I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife employment opportunity: weed-eating goat.

See you tomorrow.

Here’s a totem pole at scout camp.  I thought I was in Alaska for a minute there.  Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam and part of my famous Statue and Camping series.

The weekend has begun!  The holiday weekend has begun!  The nine-day-long vacation has begun!!  I’m feeling pretty good about things right now.

We’re not leaving until mid-day on Monday, and there are a ton of things to get done by then.  It’s good to be busy.  Of course, there are the filters – my eternal weekend companions.  Fortunately, I enjoy working on them.  Then there are a few things to get done on the iPhone project, stake Young Men stuff to do, a nasty-sounding squeak under the Suburban’s hood to take care of before the campout starts, gas to buy for my car and the truck, my car to wash, software updates to do for the Arduino project, and the trailer to be checked out and washed.  Plus about a million other things.  It’s good to be busy.  As I said.

I made my list of things to take camping last night.  It’s about forty items long, six or seven of which are clothing.  The rest are electronics, books, and a few odds and ends.  Must be prepared.

Honestly, I really have a lot of things planned to do during the campout.  I have four or five books to read, a few magazines to read, and some electronics to design.  Plus geocaching to do, hikes to take, campfires to sit around, dutch oven meals to make, and naps to take.  And probably broken things to fix, if history is any predictor.  I can hardly wait.  The weather is looking good, spirits are high, and we’re not quite ready to go.

I saw a link to an article on the most significant architecture since 1980.  It’s right here.  My only comment: if that’s the best they can do, it’s time to quit trying.  So here’s a special Morrowlife poll: which one of these buildings is the worst of the lot?  It’ll be a tough decision, I can assure you.  Vote early, vote often!

And I think I’ll quit and get ready for bed.  Reminder: no posts next week – we’ll be in the mountains getting lots of Great Art.  I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: ice cream wars!

See you in a week.

Here’s a group of very pretty flowering trees in Tracy, as photographed this evening right before my meeting.  Great Art taken at the First United Methodist Church and courtesy of the famous iPhone-cam.  That’s the church’s spire there in the background.

No post yesterday.  I have no idea why.

Extreme short shrift tonight.  I had another scout meeting – the second one this week!  This was the district commission meeting.  There were only five of us there, which wasn’t surprising, since so many people are either on vacation or working at scout camp right now.

Busy day at work again.  I think I achieved about a dollar performance.  Need to go for two dollars tomorrow.  That’ll be necessary, in fact, since it’s my last day before a week’s vacation.

Speaking of which, there will probably be very little to no blogging next week, since we’ll be in the Sierra Nevada.  I have to go somewhere with cell phone coverage and wifi for my Tuesday morning iPhone meeting, so I might get a quick note in then.  Instead of writing, I’ll be taking tons of Great Art.  Need to spice up my offerings.  Or at least improve them.

And that’s it for tonight.  I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking toilet violence news: lid attack!

See you tomorrow.