morrowlife

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Here’s LRN1 with his new companion. Part of my famous Guatemala series.  I’m not taking enough pictures lately – I took my camera to Las Vegas and never got it out of its case, for example – but LRN1 is helping me out in the Great Art department.  Thanks, LRN1!

Extreme short shrift.  It’s already 9:30 and I need to get up by 5:00 again tomorrow morning.  Need some sleep.

So let’s see if anything happened today.  No, not so much.  I worked like a mule, only smellier.  More of the same tomorrow (work, not smell) (hopefully). I’m still working on next year’s proposal, and there’s still lots to be done there.  Also working on getting one guy a promotion, which is turning out to be quite difficult.  I remain hopeful on that one.  Also working on extending one other guy’s contract (he’s not an employee, obviously).  Also working on keeping everybody else happy.  That’s kind of like a juggling act these days.  Thank heaven for my totally reliable people – the ones who are just happy and contented.  We’re kind of like cows over there.  Only less smelly.

Anyway, it’s time to go.  Lots planned for the next couple of days.  I have a scouting meeting tomorrow night and then need to leave the office pretty early on Friday to speak at a scout high adventure campout way up in the mountains near the coast.  It’s being held at one of the Young Women camps – we went there for a YM/YW day-long activity last year, so I’m hoping to be able to find it this time.  And I’m hoping even more to be able to get home from it – my last trip home from there was pretty much the long way.  But the TomTom got us home!  Eventually!

And I’ll leave you with yet another wonderful Morrowlife employment opportunity: Druid accident preventer

See you tomorrow.

Here’s a blue house in Guatemala.  LRN1 sent us this picture (and a couple of others) to show us the effect of the volcano on his neighborhood.  It wasn’t too bad there, but I thought this qualified as Great Art.  It’s a blue house, after all.  Part of my famous Guatemala series.

No post yesterday.  It was a holiday.  Also, we were in Las Vegas and I was busy.

Spent most of the day fixing/installing/configuring my brother-in-law’s and sister-in-law’s electronics.  Got their DVD player situation fixed up and simplified – even made them work with just one remote!  That’s more than I’ve been able to accomplish here in Lardville.  Also get sister-in-law’s new color laser printer installed and working and got brother-in-law’s new computer installed and working, with his files transferred over to it, anti-virus installed, a tiny bit of crapware removed, printers installed, openoffice.org installed, and everything tested and guaranteed to work.  For at least until we left.  After that, he’s on his own.  Also helped their daughter (my lovely niece) decide on a new computer and get it ordered.  She got a MacBook Pro.  Spent a ton of money on it, but hopefully she’ll love it.  Otherwise, I suppose she’ll curse my name.  Either way, it’s a good computer.

Bought a new 100TB external drive for myself while we were out.  I have it reformatted as a Mac disk and installed on my beloved Mac Mini.  It’s been partitioned into two 500GB drives, one of which is my new Time Machine backup disk.  It’s busily copying 1,346,159 files right now.  Been cranking for a few hours and it’s about one third done.  Yikes.  That’s a lot of files.  I’m hoping to use the other partition to back up the loyal readers’ computers.  We’ll see if I can make it work with Time Machine on LRN4’s machine.  Time Machine only wants to work with storage directly attached to its computer or with Apple-branded network attached storage.  Time will tell whether I can find a workaround that lets LRN4’s machine think my locally-attached drive is the right kind.  In any case, I can share it on the network and let her copy files to it on a regular basis.

By the way, LRN1 reports that not only did he survive this week’s Guatemalan volcanic eruption and tropical storm, he wasn’t really seriously affected by either.  We’re delighted and grateful about that – have seen a few news reports and things were pretty bad in some locations.

Made the trip home from Vegas today, uneventfully.  It was a pleasant drive with good company.  It’s really nice to have the Loyal Readers back home again.  I’ll probably get a lot less Arduino work done, though.  Everything has its tradeoff, doesn’t it?

Anyway.  Time for bed – it’ll be a busy day tomorrow, what with catching up on everything.  No toilet or food violence news tonight – maybe tomorrow.

See you tomorrow.

Here are LRN1 and his old companion.  Standing on a hill.  Either that, or they’re sinking into it.  You be the judge.  Part of my famous Guatemala series.

Welcome to my newly-converted blog!  I’m off of Blogger and on to WordPress.  It’s a bit confusing still, but I think it’ll work out.  Eventually.  Stupid old Blogger decided to abandon the capability to publish blogs via FTP, so I moved my content over to blogspot.  But I never really liked it.  First of all, all my old pictures disappeared, so I had to move them over to Blogger’s photo hosting service.  One. At. A. Time.  Not much fun.  I got a bunch done, but nowhere near all of them.  I’m also just basically a computer snob – I want to host my website on my own hosting service.  WordPress allows me to do that.  So now I have to get it figured out.  This first post on the new system will go a long way towards that goal.  Or not.

So far, so good.  It looks like my newly-added pictures might end up being a bit differently-sized, but that’s not the end of the world.  Now I just need to get a template set up that looks like my old one.  Work, work, work.

Anyway.  Have a look and let me know what you think of the changes, recognizing, of course, that I’m trying to make it as similar to the old format as possible.

Otherwise, a quiet day.  I ordered new tires for the Miata, cleaned all the filters, added oil to the Miata (it was a quart low – yikes!), ate, spoke with LRN4 (she’s doing fine and is now in Las Vegas – thanks for asking), tried to visit a new home teaching family (I have no phone number, so I went over – they weren’t home), and . . . umm . . . did a few other things too.  I think it might not be too late for a bit of jacuzzifying.  But I’ll have to stop blogging right away.

So I will.  I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this important toilet news: talking musical toilet!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s LRN1 with his previous companion standing on . . . umm . . . I think that’s their roof. That’s LRN1 over there on the right. Part of my famous Guatemala series.

Good day today. LRN2 and LRN4 got to LRN3’s house in good shape after a relatively pleasant journey. I got a few things done at work and attended a good leadership meeting at church in the evening. And not a whole lot else.

Oh, I did notice over the past couple of days that I had gotten a virus on the little Averatec laptop LRN1 gave me just before he left on his mission. So I did the only rational thing – I installed Linux. I had tried installing version 9 of Ubuntu before I installed Windows on it, but without any luck – it wouldn’t even install, let alone run. I’ve had a lot of luck with Ubuntu 10.04, though, so I thought I’d give it a try. As expected, it installed perfectly – and very quickly. I did it during my lunch break at work, in fact. Had to wait until I got home to have it install its updates, but that was quick and painless too. Now I’m working on getting additional software and tools like Java installed. Should have it nicely configured before I go to bed.

I’ve been using Ubuntu 10.04 on the other Averatec laptop I got from LRN6 – the one with the bad-but-still-barely-limping-along-if-you-know-what-to-do hard drive and the dead battery. It works great, so I’m using it always plugged in as the development machine for my little Arduino project. My good laptop is older and slower than the development machine (let’s use their names here: the development machine is Buddy and the other one is Ted), but its good battery means it works perfectly for name indexing on the train. That has already been proven to work fine under Ubuntu, so it will continue to serve its purpose. Just without viruses. And a lot cooler. Sorry, Microsoft.

Let’s see – what else is going on around here? Umm . . . nothing I can think of. Oh yeah, LRN4 reports that LRN3 and family are doing well. LRN3 has been really suffering from what appears to be fibromyalgia, which is quite debilitating, but he’s getting along well all things considered and his spirits remain high. They’re getting ready to move into the apartment two stories directly beneath them, but they’re not quite ready to start yet, so LRN2 and LRN4 won’t be able to help them. They’re not quite sure what’s on the agenda for the next couple of days – maybe just visiting. I’m certain LRN2 would be more than happy to do just that. And play a few games while he’s there.

So that’s about it. I’ll leave you with this tragic toilet news: exploding outhouse! I guess boys will be . . . umm . . . homicidal toilet-bombing maniacs.

See you tomorrow.

Here’s a big red bus in Guatemala. Love those lightning bolts. Part of my famous Guatemala series. Of course.

Extreme short shrift – it’s late and I promised myself I’d be in bed about an hour ago.

Got a couple of emails from LRN1 today. He got transferred this week, which was totally unexpected. In fact, nobody found out about it until he got to the transfer meeting. So he’s in a new place with a new companion, who was also transferred there this week. Hopefully, they’re meeting people, getting settled in, and getting to work. I’m sure they are.

Otherwise uneventful around here. With the Loyal Readers gone, it’s quiet. I’ve been working on my Arduino project again. I got it creating and saving files to an SD card, so now I need to get another Arduino interfacing with my accelerometer and passing data to the SD card reading Arduino via a network. Won’t take too much work, actually.

And I’ll leave you with this exotic toilet news: a throne fit for royalty.

See you tomorrow.