morrowlife

Here’s the business end of one of the telescopes at the Chabot Science Center. Part of my famous Machinery series.

Fine weekend, as usual. It’s been cold, cold, cold – almost down to freezing at night and only in the 40’s during the day. Brrrr!!!

Anyway. Got a few things done. Didn’t get others done. Loyal Readers Numbers Five and Twelve were here on Saturday, which was nice. Good visit. No news from Loyal Reader Number Three in the employment department – he’s still waiting for that letter.

Otherwise, all is well. We went to a church building in Tracy on Sunday evening to have a look at their first annual creche exhibit. An okay start, but they have a long way to go before they’re competitive with the big guys in Palo Alto. The good: there were some very nice creches there, they made an attempt to display them nicely, and they had a great bookmark, modeled closely after the one from Palo Alto. The bad: there aren’t enough creches to reach critical mass yet, the displays were lacking the supporting material to really make them classy, and there was no significant attempt to do lighting well, other than strings of Christmas lights artistically placed on the tables around the displays. The ugly: the proselyting-to-display ratio was way too high.

All in all, though, I think it was a good start. They need to grow fast, pay more attention to supporting details, and be sincere, and I think they’ll have a wonderful display in a few years.

Let’s see, did anything else happen on the weekend. Oh yeah, the really great news: the water rocket launcher is working! We tried it out with our flight-model bottle, and it stuck on the tube as badly as the one we tried at our recent campout. I swapped the o-ring with a smaller size, and that did the trick. We’re back in business. Of course, we destroyed our air pump at the campout, so we still have equipment problems. I used the compressor to pressurize it for our Saturday tests, but that’s a little bit of overkill and I fear it could damage something. So we need to either get a new bicycle pump or figure out how to limit the compressor’s pressure.

I’ll say one thing for the compressor – it sure pressurized that launcher fast.

I got all the websites but one transferred over to Godaddy on Saturday. The remaining one is written in Ruby on Rails, and it’s a more complicated transfer, what with multiple servers required to be running all at once. I think I’ll wait until Loyal Reader Number One (who is the author of the site) gets home later this week and solicit his input. We’ll get there.

Todays food attack news: A sandwich assault. Can you get any lower than that? Also today’s great Christmas idea: lousy gift wrapping. I need this. I’ll bet I could find a Loyal Reader or two who could do the work, though.

Time for home evening. See you tomorrow.

Here’s one of my favorite vintage drag racers – Ohio George’s famous Ohio Gasser. Photographed in the Henry Ford Museum. Part of my famous Machinery series.

Not feeling well this afternoon. It came on me suddenly, so I’m hoping it leaves just as suddenly. Some coworkers have told me about a bug going around – it’s apparently nasty and lasts three very uncomfortable days. I’m hoping that’s not it for me. I’m hoping my stomach is just going through a phase.

Otherwise a fairly normal day. Got up, got ready, commuted, etc. Came home on an earlier train than normal due to the aforementioned discomfort.

Tomorrow’s work schedule is amazingly not meeting-strewn. I’m looking forward to it. Don’t quite know what I’ll do with myself, though.

I take that back. I do know. I have an exceptionally long list of fascinating and incomplete tasks. No problem.

Today’s Morrowlife controversy: Did Loyal Reader Number One’s friend capture a Ghost Miner in the picture attached to this post? My answer: Of course. Well, probably. Possibly, anyway. Maybe. I have no idea. Probably not. If it’s not a ghost, though, what is it?

Perfect controversy for two days before Halloween, no?

By the way, can ghosts be photographed? If so, can they choose to make themselves visible to the camera? If so, why would the Ghost Miner have chosen to be in that picture? If they can’t choose, wouldn’t that make ghosts improbably rare? After all, people take a lot of pictures and Ghost Miners very rarely show up. Either way, the possibilities are staggering. At the very least, they trip a little.

Time to contemplate those Deep Thoughts. See you tomorrow.

Here’s the new pickup, courtesy of the exclusive low-quality RAZR-cam. I’m quite sure all my Loyal Readers will agree that’s true Great Art, regardless of the actual image quality. Note the delicate lines, the majestic sweep of the fender, the timeless beauty of the wheels. Wow. Part of my famous Machinery series. But only dubiously so.

Speaking of which, maybe I need to join the Ford Ranger Club. I never joined the Miata club (although I do use their excellent tech forums often to figure out how to fix my car) or even the Accord club (they don’t seem overly enthusiastic there, do they?), but this may be different. I think I may skip this club, though. Don’t have the scooter. I like their Ranger attitude, though.

I’m recommending that Loyal Readers Numbers Three and Five join this club. Now that’s the definition of cool.

No new controversy today. I’ve looked in all my usual spots, but there’s just nothing controversial going on in the world. So I’ll have to satisfy myself with Loyal Reader Number One’s controversy from last week. I agree completely with LRN3’s take on the issue. There’s nothing like a pair of Mormon missionaries to strike fear into the hearts of the fearless. That may be the ultimate home security device.

I tried to download Google’s new browser, Chrome. Sadly, the current beta will only work on Windows XP and Vista. No Mac version yet. And my virtual PC on the Mac is running Windows 2000. So I’m not included. Sigh. Have any Loyal Readers tried it out yet?

Time for bed. See you tomorrow.

Here’s a locomotive without any tracks. Picture taken at Greenfield Village. Part of both my famous Train series and my famous Machinery series. You’re welcome for the twofer.

Well. There’s been quite a reaction to Friday’s Great Art, starting with Loyal Reader Number Three’s suggestion that Grandma teach the kid to skitch and ghost-ride (whatever those are) and going right through Loyal Reader Number Twenty-Four’s non-written comments to me regarding knowing who the friend was on Saturday afternoon. Or was that yesterday? Time goes so quickly on weekends, doesn’t it?

Anyway, if I can figure out what skitching and ghost-riding are, I might start doing them. Probably not, though. Just guessing there.

Update: I found out what ghost-riding is. I had suspicions. I don’t think I’ll start doing it.

Another update: I found out what skitching is. I also had suspicions about this. Ditto on starting to do it.

Those things sound like so much fun, don’t they?

Thank goodness for Wikipedia, Loyal Readers.

Anyway. Fast-moving weekend. It was over before we knew it. The Loyal Readers got home from the Scout encampment on Saturday. They had a great time. Emphasis on the great. I’ll let them tell about it in the comments. If any.

Loyal Reader Number Four and I didn’t do much while the boys were away. Quiet few days. We had our young friends the triplets over to play games and swim on Saturday. Their house had suffered a broken pipe and their parents and LRN24 needed to get some work done around the house. We had a nice time.

Since Saturday was one of the six most special days of the year, we celebrated that evening. What was the special occasion? Loyal Reader Number Two’s birthday, of course. He got a razor. And not a moment too soon.

We had a power outage later Saturday evening, right while we were watching Psych. The power stayed out for about an hour and a half. After the first five minutes, Loyal Reader Number One and I went out and started the generator. We plugged in a light and played some games. Had a nice time. In some ways, it was even better than watching television.

Sunday was quiet and peaceful. Just like I like it.

Took the Honda to the shop this evening. They’re going to try the front-end alignment one more time. Wish them luck, Loyal Readers. Really. I need them to be lucky.

Hope your weekend was as good as mine. Time for bed. See you tomorrow.

Here’s the control panel in Henry Ford’s powerhouse. I guess if I had enough money to buy literally anything I wanted, I might get a power generating plant. Why not?

Greetings from the train. I’ve been riding a lot lately – it’s so much cheaper now – but haven’t been doing much writing onboard. I need to make better use of the time, though, and maybe reduce some evening computer time at home. There’s lots of writing to be done – stuff for the HRVA, articles for Gardenville (working on a short one now, in fact), to name just a couple – and I could stand to fritter just a little less.

I took the Suburban to Sunnyvale today to leave it at the station on that end. That’ll allow me to get to work a few minutes more quickly in the morning, leave the office about half an hour later in the afternoon, and have an emergency ride home in case I miss the last train. Or if I choose to take the late bus, for which there is no shuttle service. Plus, it’ll be nice to have a car at the office when I need it. I’m hoping it turns out to make the train trip much more pleasant. If it does work out, I’ll swap it for the Taurus after Loyal Reader Number One abandons it.

Speaking of which, I definitely want to make one of these. And definitely check out that website.

In spite of the need to get more done on the train, I do enjoy my podcasts. I’ve been enjoying a couple of new ones – one is a vodcast called Jigsaw. It’s a difficult-to-describe sock puppet comedy show. It’s better than it sounds. Have a look.

LRN1 is off to the LDS encampment. It’s being held on a farm a little more than an hour away from Lardville. He took off this morning, and Loyal Reader Number Two is going up tomorrow. They had the priests go up a day early to help finish setting up. LRN1 was able to call this afternoon to request that LRN2 bring him some additional equipment, and he reports that the place is really cool. They’ve got high-adventure stuff galore: scuba in a pool, rock wall climbing, horseback riding, a water slide, and tons of other stuff. They’re going to have live musical entertainment (an LDS group, but still), at least one motivational speaker, and an apostle. LRN1 sounds really excited about it. I’m looking forward to hearing about it when they get back. Have a great time, Loyal Readers!

In the meantime, Loyal Reader Number Four and I will be on our own for a few days again. Just us and the eleven Loyal Pets. We have no exciting plans. In fact, I have to work on my off Friday this week. Still, it ought to be quiet again.

Not that it’s particularly noisy when the Loyal Readers are at home.

We have a camping trip scheduled. We’re going up to Clark’s Fork again. We’ll go a couple of Thursdays from now, stay through Saturday, have a little birthday party for LRN2 Saturday evening (two weeks after his birthday, but it’s the only opportunity), go to church on Sunday, and leave for Utah on Monday for our fun-filled week of dropping LRN1 off at school. We’ll come home on Saturday and go to church on Sunday. Then it’s Labor Day. That’ll be twelve days away from the office, including the weekends, at a cost of only six days of vacation. Pretty good deal.

Anyway. I’m looking forward to the campout. We were up there last year and it was beautiful. Probably will be again this year. This time I’ll remember to write it up for the HRVA.

Morrowlife controversy followup: It looks like Kirby’s getting a little fallout. He can’t say he wasn’t warned. Assuming he reads the Morrowlife blog, that is. But everyone does, of course.

The blog was down for part of the day today. The server got a new IP address and I needed to update my DNS server. Things are back to normal. No comments on yesterday’s controversy, though, so I’ll let it stand for one more day. What’s your opinion on the Lasagne Registration issue?

See you tomorrow.