morrowlife

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Two playing the piano in the Old House Museum in Ogallala. As I think I mentioned before, that was a different kind of museum. They let you play the antique piano and pump organ, just to name two examples.

The pool people came and went and did their thing and there’s now a hose filling up the pool. I must have just missed them, since there were only a few gallons of water in there when I got home. It looks great. We can find all kinds of defects, of course, but it looks great anyway. It’s supposed to be full by tomorrow sometime. We can hardly wait.

Time for me to go pick up the missionaries. They have a Very Special Message for us. See you in a bit.

I’m back. The missionaries have come and gone. Their message was Very Special. Loyal Reader Number Four made some of her delicious peanut butter hot fudge sauce, which we had with ice cream and bananas. Yum.

The pool is even fuller now. It hasn’t covered the entire bottom yet, but it’s getting there. I think we have no reason to fear it overflowing during the night, though. Sometime tomorrow. I’ve already been in the water, if you count taking off my socks, hiking my pant legs up a little, and wading in to just above my ankles. I just had to be the first.

Tried to listen to Leo Laporte’s Futures in Biotech podcast for the first time this afternoon on the way home. I tried the first three or four editions. Sadly, it’s a non-starter. It’s an unfortunate combination of too “inside baseball” and too boring. As with most of his other podcasts, they interview a leading figure in the industry. Unfortunately, it turns out that leading biotech industry figures are a dry lot. I doubt Leo will keep it alive for long. Or maybe he’ll find a way to make it interesting. I hope so, because it is truly a fascinating industry that ought to make for some really interesting discussions. The other thing handicapping the podcast is that Leo is teamed up with a young biotech industry insider who is from outside the entertainment industry. Way outside. He can’t ask a simple question without tripping all over his tongue. He can’t complete an intelligible sentence. He’s not cut out for radio, which is essentially what podcasting is. Of course, it might be an acquired skill. Or maybe not. Anyway, you can sense that Leo himself is bored with the whole thing and can tell it’s not making for compelling and informative entertainment. Too bad.

I downloaded the new version of iTunes last night but didn’t get to play with it at all. Loyal Reader Number One did, though, and he says it’s the neatest thing ever. You can finally copy music from your iPod back to your computer, for one thing. There are now movies for sale. Granted, they’re just Disney movies so far, but it’s a start and Disney has some pretty good stuff in its catalog. I wouldn’t ever pay the price they’re asking, but I wouldn’t pay the price they’ve been asking for TV shows for months now, and they’ve been pretty successful with those. They have iPod game downloads too, for which I wouldn’t pay their asking price either. I’m so cheap.

Still haven’t done anything with WordPress, short of printing the installation guide. That’s a start. I’m hoping for something to happen over the weekend.

Loyal Reader Number Four just found out that her uncle Cecil passed away earlier today. We’re very sad about it. He was a happy, kind man and will be sorely missed. We’re finding out about funeral arrangements soon. I hope LRN4 can go.

I’m even sleepier than yesterday, so that’s it for now. See you tomorrow.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number One being cool back in Philly.

The first time I tried uploading that file I didn’t notice it was a .tif, rather than my usual .jpg, and I couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t transfer. Turns out it was just too darned big. Every once in a while I save my pictures in the lossless TIFF format. It’s probably a good idea and it keeps the picture quality as high as possible (my camera can’t save in RAW format, sadly), but it seems to take forever to save a picture to disk after I shoot it, and it certainly uses up a lot more disk space when I copy to my computer. I may start doing it anyway. JPEG’s problem, they tell me, is that the image quality degrades every time you save it, since it compresses each and every time. I don’t know if that’s true, but it probably wouldn’t do me much hard to save in TIFF more often, just in case. Disk space is cheap, and I can always save old images onto CD-ROMs if necessary. But I need to remember to convert to JPEG in Gimp before I upload to my blog and/or Flickr. Neither place will accept a huge TIFF file.

I read a little bit today about WordPress, which is a pretty cool open-source blogging tool. I’m thinking of installing it on the Computer on a Dime sometime soon to see if it will work as a replacement for Blogger, which is pushing an “upgrade” version that is causing trouble for a lot of people. It might be time to migrate to a solution I host myself (on my ISP, that is – would that I could legally host the whole website and email server on my own Linux box – dratted Comcast!). The first step is to get a test installation working on my own network, and then we’ll see about moving it to the web server.

I’ve been installing a lot of web tools on the CoaD lately, and they all work great. It turns out to not be too hard to get a webserver and all of the associated trendy tools up and running. I haven’t tried setting up mailserver yet, but I’ll bet it’s equally easy. I’ll have to try that over the weekend too. The tough part, of course, is getting the security right. There’s plenty of internet help available, but you really have to stay on top of it.

No more content today. I got up, showered, dressed, went to work, worked, came home, changed, ate dinner, checked my email, picked up the missionaries from the church where they had two flat tires, got some audio clips ready for LRN4’s seminary lesson tomorrow, got gas in my car, and it’s now 10:19 PM and time for beddy-bye. I’ll definitely have some content tomorrow, though. Water will be in the pool.

See you then.

This sort-of picture of a wheelbarrow is in honor of our neighbor who kindly loaned his real wheelbarrow to Loyal Reader Number Four and even helped her move some sand from the front yard to the back today. Thanks, neighbor!

It’s 9/11. A moment of silence, please.

Pretty good weekend. Didn’t do much on Saturday other than get Ruby on Rails installed and working on the Computer on a Dime. It was a challenge to get the database portion working right, since RoR doesn’t include any tools to manage MySQL and it wasn’t easy to find a really good free GUI to do it. Loyal Reader Number One finally suggested PHPMyAdmin, which runs in a web browser and works great. Highly recommended to my many Loyal Readers who need to manage MySQL databases.

Ruby on Rails itself (other than the aforementioned lack of direct configuration of the database) is really cool. As advertised, it’s a very complete and easy to use web application framework. You tell it what content you want on the website, set up your database to have a place to store the content, and RoR automatically sets up a skeleton website that just works and includes functions to enter, edit, display, and delete your content. You then go back and make your pretty HTML templates and write prettier functions to operate on your data in Ruby, which is a fairly easy language to understand – lots of English in it, which is kind of surprising given that it was written by a Japanese guy. Easy to learn and capable of some pretty impressive results. It even comes with its own mini-web server for development and has a very nice built-in testing function. You have to make it work with Apache when you’re ready to go into production, but that’s not hard at all. Unfortunately, I don’t have a site up on the web yet, since I’ve just been working on a tutorial using the little local server. Besides, I’m not yet sure whether my hosting service supports RoR. It might turn out to be a much easier-to-use content management system than what I’ve started using for the HRVA website. Then again, it might not. Either way, it’s nice to learn a new system. Besides, learning the RoR concepts has given me some clues about working with the poorly-documented PostNuke product.

Sunday I was busy with lesson preparation, my monthly PPI, church, correlation meeting, and an LMP web conference. We’re buying 3M this month, in case any of my Loyal Readers want some inside information. Recommendation: buy anything other than 3M if you know what’s good for you.

The Pool People continue to make good progress. We had our final city inspection this morning, the gas people installed a nice new bigger gas meter today, and they’re coming to plaster on Wednesday. It’s interesting – they plaster in the morning, acid-wash it in the early afternoon, and put a garden hose in it immediately thereafter. No drying time required. We should have it full by sometime Wednesday evening. You can’t swim in it for a day or so afterwards, but we’ll definitely be swimming by the weekend. We may freeze to death in the unheated water, but we’ll be in the pool! Besides, we can heat up the spa to counter any chilling effects of the pool.

Drove to work today. There was more traffic than usual, but it still didn’t take quite as long as the train would have. I listened to a bunch of TWiT podcasts, some of which were enjoyable. Unfortunately, TWiT has dropped from my very favorite podcast to well down the list. The same thing happened with Diggnation. They get into topics that just annoy me. In the case of Diggnation, they got cruder and cruder until I finally had to drop them from the list entirely. It’s a shame – Kevin Rose can be very entertaining and articulate. I don’t know why he has to ruin that with crudity. The TWit guys are just annoying, but not crude. If they start geting profane, they’ll fall off the list too. Leo’s other work is still very good, though.

Time for bed. See you tomorrow.

Here are a couple of tough hombres. Stay out of their way.

Had to work about seven hours today, which was kind of high for my off Friday. Still, I got home pretty early and have had a pleasant afternoon and evening playing with various computers. I got a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) setup running on the Computer on a Dime. Installed MediaWiki and got it running as well. Thanks to Loyal Reader Number One for a few pointers he was able to give based on his experience getting the same software to run on his laptop earlier today. I must say, though, that mine runs a bit faster than his old relic. I wonder why his machine doesn’t like to serve web pages so much.

The Pool People were here and not only cleaned up (a very nice job, I’m pleasantly surprised to say), but they also installed all the equipment. They tell us by this time next week we’ll have a finished pool full of water! Jubilation reigns. The only downside is that, according to California law, I have to have these stupid alarms on each of the doors leading outside of the house that make an incredibly loud noise every time anyone opens them unless the happen to remember to push a reset button. They will definitely be installed on the doors during the time of the inspection on Monday.

The Crating People did show up yesterday and they took a whole lot of boxes away with them. Good riddance. Now we’ll probably need a moving box next week. I’ll bet we could scrounge one up if we really tried, though.

Time for bed. See you on Monday.

Here’s one more picture from my trip to Paris earlier this year. They had lots of nice old statues and sculptures and things.

I think it’s time for me to quit being Held Hostage. I’m seriously wondering whether the Ace train is going to work for me. I’ll probably switch to driving for a while. I can always come back to the train when I get sick of the car. Maybe if I can find a way to get a reliable, useful traffic report before I leave home, I can make a decision in real time. The train just takes a lot longer than the car, even on the worst traffic day. The good thing is that I have the choice.

The rumors of a sale of ILS (my former employer in Washington, as you know) have been confirmed – the company told the ILS people, sent out an announcement to all employees, and announced it publicly today. They’ve been sold to a completely unknown company, and they’ll deal exclusively with Proton and Angara. I wonder if any of my former colleagues will move on. I suspect the company will refuse them in-company transfers, if recent experience is any guide. I’m really glad I got out when I did.

PEC went well last night. I like the other members of the council. It’s a little hard to keep the group on task, but they enjoy their meetings. It’s kind of nice the meeting is held on a weekday evening rather than Sunday morning. The atmosphere is just a little more casual. I got home a little later than I would have liked, so I’ve been sleepy today. That was especially hard because of all the meetings I had to attend. I’ve been able to get a little sleep on the train, but it’s really not restful enough. There’s just no substitute for shuteye under the old blankets. Maybe I’ll get my eight hours tonight.

The Pool People are supposed to come tomorrow and clean up the backyard. Hopefully, that will include removing the many piles of cement all over the place and smoothing the yard back out. They’re skipping a week after that – don’t ask me why – and coming the next week (probably) to install the equipment. The plaster should follow shortly after that.

The Crating People were supposed to come today and take a bunch of boxes from us. I hope they did. I’m really ready to be rid of the head-high pile in the garage. Unfortunately, the Crating People aren’t willing to take away the huge boxes full of paper, but the Moving People are supposed to come take care of that. They’re being strangely cagey about the whole thing, though.

The HRVA website is up to five members now! Of course, they’re all family members and Loyal Reader Number Seven, but that’s about right for now. I haven’t been able to get any additional content produced yet, so my readership might not increase for a while.

Time to do some reading. See you tomorrow.