morrowlife

Here’s some Great Art I saw in Monte Carlo a few years back. They were having a Weird Outdoor Sculpture competition, apparently. The substandard photo quality is due to the use of my very first digital camera, which was unmitigated junk. But it was cheap. So that’s something. Look for other Weird Sculptures in future posts

Drove the Miata to work today. It was warm enough on the way home to put the top down, but that had to wait until I was coming into Tracy. It was raining in Sunnyvale. Curses! Found a few little things that need attention, but that’s to be expected.

We went to Loyal Reader Number One’s piano recital in a nice performance theater at Modesto Junior College this evening. It was really nice! There were about twenty-five students, each of whom played one piece. The unique thing was that they were all quite advanced students and each of the pieces was beautiful. It was basically a very pleasant concert. The individual performers weren’t announced, so there was very little non-music time and zero blathering piano teacher time. All in all, a very nice evening. Loyal Reader Number Four likened it to a minor-league ball game. Apt simile.

By the way, the MJC campus was kind of nice. The buildings all seemed old but in good repair, which is the way I like ’em. Except for houses. Unless it’s a mansion, give me a brand new house every time.

Big Saturday plans. Loyal Readers Numbers One and Two are going to the Merit Badge Midway in Tracy and LRN4 is going to a Relief Society luncheon. I’m staying home and reworking the Sable’s brakes. And then I might do a little bit of something on the Miata – perhaps replace the cruise control switch, or maybe replace the driver’s door lock on the Suburban. So many options.

Better head to bed. Watch for updates to Gardenville and maybe even some action on the HRVA this weekend! See you on Monday.

In honor of today’s Blessed Arrival of the old vintage Miata, here’s the view from all the other cars on the road. Now that’s Great Art. The car’s just crude enough to feel like an old British roadster, but nice enough to be reliable and pretty cool. There are a few things that need fixing, of course, seeing as how it’s fifteen years old, but it’s in remarkably good condition. And did I mention it’s beautiful?

And that’s about all the news this evening. I worked on the Gardenville website a little bit this afternoon and evening. Got Loyal Reader Number One’s Arduino article playing the movie we made and he made some other updates and corrections. I also noticed that Loyal Reader Number Seven had registered, so I approved the registration and you’re good to go, LRN7! Strangely, the system never notified me you had registered, or I would have approved it right away (of course). I’ll have to figure out why I didn’t get the email. Probably some setting that’s not quite right. Or maybe something else.

The other thing I can’t seem to figure out how to make it do is let me use multiple fonts in a single article – LRN1 wants his code snippets to show up in a non-proportional font, as is the standard in programming textbooks. I’m trying to do it in what we like to call The Right Way, using styles defined in Cascading Style Sheets. I can define the style I want just fine, but I can’t figure out how to tell Drupal to change styles in the middle of an article. My fallback position is to go to the HTML tag, but that’s deprecated, don’t you know. How gauche.

Anyway. Time for bed. See you tomorrow with a report on the first drive to Sunnyvale.

Here’s Timur, one of our secretaries at Baikonur. The interesting thing about this guy is that he was a Russian medical doctor, but he made more money working as a secretary for us. Sadly for us but happily for him, he eventually got a visa to move to Germany and work as a doctor there. He’s in the money! Photo courtesy of somebody at Baikonur – maybe my pal Doug.

Wonders of Blogger today. There just wasn’t time to write last night. So I’ll keep it short.

I’m planning to pick up the Miata on Thursday evening. Yea! It’ll go to work on Friday.

Meetings went well on Wednesday evening. I’ve been trying for a few weeks to figure out how to update and print the New Member Report for the bishop. Finally got it figured out. Now I just have to go actually do the update. Maybe Sunday morning.

Which reminds me. I have to start attending a Stake meeting on the fourth Sunday at 7:30 in the morning. That will make it just a little bit tricky to get to church on time. Don’t worry. I’ll get by . . . somehow.

Note to Loyal Reader Number Five: I need more baby pictures! Send them! Thank you.

And now I’ll quit. See you on Thursday.

While we’re on the subject of Cannes restaurants, here’s my favorite one. Ho La La! They served Central American food. Yum.

Happy birthday to Loyal Reader Number Five! If my calculations are correct, she’s somewhere in her mid-twenties by now. Many happy returns, and we’re sorry you’re not here to celebrate with us.

Non-exciting day today. I still haven’t heard from the Miata Lady, so I emailed her this evening. Saturday, hopefully. I want that car. No, wait: I need that car. No. But I do want it. Now.

Felt much better today and went to work. Several of my colleagues have also been out sick, including one who went home at about noon. Something‘s certainly making the rounds.

I’ve been working on salary adjustments for my direct reports. We’re going to be able to do pretty well by everybody, I think, and very well by a few. It’s tough to decide who gets what, so the company has thoughtfully provided an automatic raise calculator for everyone based on current salary, percent of “market” that represents, performance rating, raise money available, and probably the price of tea in China. We can adjust the automatic level up or down a little bit, but not by much. That probably keeps us from getting sued too much, and it certainly makes it easy to decide how much everybody’s going to get, but it does cramp one’s style just a little bit.

By the way, just to follow up on an recently-reported story, Loyal Reader Number One successfully disassembled his computer, inserted the apparently-loose-but-highly-necessary magnet, and got it back together again on Saturday. Hooray for LRN1.

It’s late already! I’m for bed. See you tomorrow.

Here’s my favorite snack stand in Cannes. Le Scoubidou. No more need be said.

Rough day today. I had a splitting headache yesterday evening – quite unusual for me. It kept me tossing and turning in bed for probably two to three minutes, which is also unusual for me. I felt pretty reasonable when I got up this morning, so I got in the car and went to work as usual. After I’d been there for about half an hour, I suddenly felt terrible. Not much was going on today, so I opted to come home and rest for the remainder of the day. Hopefully, I’ll feel better by tomorrow, since it’s a very busy work day this week.

The weekend was fairly good, other than the headache. I finally got the brakes on the Sable changed on Saturday morning. It was a very easy job, which is good because, while they’re working perfectly, they’re squeaking to beat the band, so I need to take them back apart again next Saturday and apply anti-squeak goo. Sigh.

In tragic but also very good news, Loyal Readers Numbers Five and Twelve have gone home for good. They decided on Friday evening that they really needed to be home and they left mid-day on Saturday. It’s absolutely the right thing for their family, but we’ll really miss having the baby here. We need to make sure we get together on a very regular basis from now on. It’s a half-day drive each way, so perfectly doable on a long weekend.

Loyal Reader Number Three has been talking for a little while about quitting his job in Arizona and finishing college full-time. I think it’s a very good idea if they can swing it financially, which he thinks they can do. In the meantime, I heard this weekend that he may be quitting his current job and going to Big Bear to work for Loyal Reader Number Six on his house. Personally, I would rather work in a nice comfortable office doing stuff I don’t particularly enjoy and going home every night than be standing out in the weather pounding nails and living in a remote location, but there are many people who feel just the opposite, possibly including LRN3. We’ll see how it works out. We’re kind of waiting to hear what he ended up doing, but there’s no word so far.

I worked some more on the Gardenville Software website yesterday. It’s now a Drupal site, on the correct server, and looking much better than before. There’s still lots of work to be done, not to mention lots of content to generate, but it’s finally making some progress. Now I need to get back to work on the HRVA. Not to mention Spinfo, which as of today is just on a GoDaddy parking page. I’m thinking of at least making it point to this site, but I’m open for suggestions.

Not much else memorable in the last few days. Loyal Reader Number One and I did a little home teaching yesterday afternoon and we otherwise spent the Sabbath quietly at home. I’m planning to spend the remainder of Monday quietly at home as well. See you tomorrow.