Buddy


Here’s Buddy, Loyal Reader Number Two’s first water rocket, on the launch pad at the Science Olympiad. Its identical twin was Skippy. Buddy did better than Skippy, largely because of a setup glitch. They’ll never fly again, though. The cleanup crew apparently decided our bucket of rockets was trash, and they threw it all away. Sigh. At least they took third place in their one and only outing.

Perfect weather again today. Near-freezing temperatures overnight and warm and sunny all day.

Odd day. I have one subordinate who constantly asks me to approve unbelievably high expenses. Today, he asked for $700 worth of label-making supplies, which he tells me will be used over the next six months. I decline to believe this. Two days ago, he asked me to approve ten power cords for the lab. When I asked how many he needs to use right now, he told me he needs three. The other seven were supposed to be spares. I approved two spares. I’m going to approve one or two hundred dollars’ worth of the label supplies.

I wish he’d quit wasting his time and mine on these ludicrous things. We both have better things to do.

I checked out chargers for my Palm today. I can get a cheap Chinese knockoff for about $3 including shipping, or an official Palm one for about twice that much. I’m going to order the Palm one tonight, based on the numerous negative reviews of the cheap one.

I’m also going to (finally) order the computer remote control tonight. If I can find the one I was looking at a few weeks ago. I had a quick look at Amazon, and can’t find it. Need to do a little detective work.

Otherwise, the evening’s mine, I believe. Need to get to bed at a reasonable hour and maybe do a little preparation for Friday’s trip to the Wedding of the Century. Check the Honda’s oil, make my packing list, etc.

Let’s check on today’s food violence/dog news: They’re a bunch of liars. But they’re also philanthropic. However, they can be rather strict. Unfortunately, they’re just too darn noisy.

There’s a new iPod Shuffle! It’s smaller than a AA battery and has no controls on it other than a power switch. The rest of the controls are on the earbud cord. It talks. It’s aluminum and stainless steel. It has 4 gigabytes. It costs $79. We really need one.

Apple has a way of making all their formerly cool hardware look sort of dowdy as soon as they bring out the next generation, don’t they? My first-generation Shuffle was pretty slick, not to mention extremely tiny, when I got it. Now it’s just old. Although I still love it. My 80-gig iPod was the ultimate in cool until just recently. I still love it too, but now it’s yesterday’s news. The funny thing is that I generally like older technology. I just like Apple’s new stuff better.

Speaking of which, best of luck to Loyal Reader Number One in his phone interview tomorrow. I’m sure he’ll do well, so it will probably come down to whether they think they need his skill set this summer. I hope they decide they do.

A word or two about the Safari 4 beta. I installed it as soon as it came out. There’s some good and some bad. The good: The cover flow view is pretty, although surprisingly not as useful as you might think it would be. I prefer to just start with my home page. Which you can make it do, of course. The bad: Putting the tabs in the window’s title bar. It’s not just bad. It’s wretched. I’m used to the tabs being directly above the business portion of the window, and that’s where I want them. There was absolutely no reason for moving them. And they’re stupid up there. It also seems to be really slow. Otherwise, another hit from Apple.

See you tomorrow.

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