morrowlife

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Twelve getting worked up for something big. I don’t want to be around about ten seconds from the time this picture was taken.

Well, I’m half a century old (happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, happy birthday dear Loyal Writer Number One, happy birthday to me!). Strangely, I don’t feel much different from yesterday. At least I’ve lived a full life. I got phone calls today from my mom, Loyal Readers Numbers Three, Four, and Five, and both of my brothers. Just finished a nice long chat with LRN3, in fact. It was nice to hear from them all.

My Standard Happy Birthday Protocol was followed today, with one minor exception. Instead of bring cupcakes to work, I opted to buy donuts instead. I got lots of signatures on my card, though, so it appears again this year as if I have a lot of friends.

I took myself out for sushi this evening and enjoyed it. I’m looking forward to the family’s return home tomorrow so we can have our real dinner and small celebration together on Sunday.

Otherwise, the day was fairly standard. I participated in a job fair this morning. There were about 70 people from Northrup Grumman looking for work. Their company has decided to close their bay-area facility and move the work and some of the people to Chicago. Most people don’t want to go, so they’re looking. I talked to several highly-qualified people (maybe more highly qualified than I’m actually looking for, in fact) and have some followup to do next week.

This trying to hire people is really wearing me out. I probably spend as much time working on hiring as on anything else, and I only have one acceptance to show for it so far.

It’s sleepy-time. See you on Monday.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Twelve just before last Christmas, staying warm in downtown San Francisco. Photo courtesy of Loyal Reader Number Five. This particular photo published in honor of Loyal Reader Number Sixteen, whose comment on yesterday’s post was most welcome.

Also a shout out to Loyal Reader Number Three, who commented a couple of days ago on the 30 May post. He’s doing well in school this summer and enjoying it, which I’m delighted to hear. And I have no idea who that 70’s guy was. Only that he was a pretty good musician. And that he has Big Hair.

Long ride to work today. I decided to sleep in and drive, as I wanted to be able to stay a little late at work this afternoon. Big mistake. It turns out there was a pretty big accident in Livermore quite early that closed down half of the freeway lanes in my direction. It took four hours to get to the office, which seems a little excessive. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen again tomorrow.

Otherwise, a fine day. I’m still feeling sorry for Loyal Pet Number One, who is cooped up in her kennel all day. Just one more day to go, LPN1! Although I seriously doubt she reads the blog very often.

The Happiest Day of the Year is tomorrow. I don’t have any cupcakes to bring to work, so I’m buying donuts tomorrow morning on the way in. My birthday card is ready and nothing could possibly go wrong now.

See you then.

Here’s another look at the Big Sur waterfall featured in this space last month. I’m pretty sure the camera was horizontal when this picture was snapped. See what you think.

Wednesday meeting night tonight, so there will be little time to do things at home. I’ll be able to grab some dinner and maybe feed the fellas. And maybe set the papyrus plants back up yet again. And maybe pet the dog for a minute or two before locking her back up again for another couple of hours. Poor thing.

I’m hoping Loyal Reader Number One and his friends are having a good time at EFY. Do you have computer access, LRN1? Probably not. How about you, Loyal Reader Number Two? Any other Loyal Readers out there? Why?

Today was a Very Important Day at work. I’m free of my indentured servitude! I started work here in Sunnyvale exactly one year ago, and I no longer have to repay my move expenses if I should choose to quit. I have no desire to quit, but it’s nice knowing I’m free, Just In Case.

I’ve been fooling around with getting a Ruby book on my Palm. I saved all 520 pages of a web-based version of The Practical Programmer’s Guide to Ruby as a PDF file last night. Today I converted it to the Palm version of Adobe Acrobat and copied it to my gadget. It took a very long time to convert but seemed to work just fine. I wondered, though, if there was a better way. I use a neat open-source program called Plucker that grabs web pages and puts them on your Palm, allowing you to decide how many levels deep it will go and which pages it will include and exclude. The advantage of this program is that it preserves hyperlinks, so you can jump around on the downloaded site as you choose. I ran it on the Ruby book site and it worked! I copied it to my gadget. It worked just fine for a little while, but then it seems to have made the Plucker application on the handheld go bonkers. I grabbed control back and deleted the document. The PDF version is back on there. Stupidly, I had deleted it when I installed the Plucker version, so I had to convert it again, but I survived. I don’t know what went wrong with Plucker, so I just might try it again. I’ve used it for fairly large websites before without any problems.

Anyway. Yesterday’s windy, cloudy day seems to be over. Loyal Reader Number Four told me it’s pouring, blowing, and freezing in Utah today. They have my pity.

And why try my Loyal Readers’ patience any longer? See you tomorrow.

Here’s the Big Sur river. I’m using this picture as the desktop on my work computer.

I need to figure out how to sell some of my Great Art. There must be people just begging for Quality Photography such as mine. I’ll be rich! Comfortably off! Socially secure!

Wonders of Blogger. Excuses: none. I’ve simply been goofing off. It’s been great.

Home from work on Tuesday – I have two medical appointments UPDATE: No cavities. Eye quality remains to be seen in the afternoon.

The weekend was fine, if somewhat quiet. The family left for Utah and EFY early Saturday morning. I stayed home to work, although maybe I should have taken a week’s worth of vacation and gone too. Doesn’t make any difference at this point, of course. I swam, started building a Mousey the Junkbot (still need to order a few parts, so it’s not done yet), and puttered. And ate an appealing selection of frozen foods. Yum.

Sunday was stake conference. It was a nice meeting – no new doctrine and plenty of reminders to do what we ought to have been doing all along. So it was fine.

I’m having trouble with the papyrus plants in the pond. They keep falling over. I have to go out there every single day and set them back up. I’ve started putting rocks in the pots, but it still doesn’t seem to be helping. I think they need heavier pots. Loyal Reader Number Four has suggested repotting them with rocks in the bottom. Might work.

More on Tuesday. See you then.

Here’s another recent look at the pond. Note that we still need to put in the bamboo water pourers. We’ve already getten more plants in with more to come. It’s looking great and only getting better.

The work week’s over! More or less, anyway. I still have to do several work things tomorrow and be on some phone calls and file an expense report and try to hire some people, but I can do it all from the comfort and privacy of my own home.

Which is a good thing. The family is leaving for a week in Utah on Saturday morning, so it will be nice to have the whole day with them before they go.

Let’s see, what’s newsworthy in my world today? I was pleased to hear that Apple is finally starting to sell some DRM-free music through iTunes. Then I read on Engadget yesterday that they are including the purchaser’s name and iTunes account number in the purchased music, presumably to allow the record companies to persecute prosecute pirates. Engadget says they think that sounds like a fair tradeoff, and I mostly agree, but apparently a large swath of the iTunes-purchasing community feels otherwise.

I can sort of see their point. If you rip music from CDs, you end up with high-quality, non-personally-identified music files. Why should music bought over the internet be any different? On the other hand, why should I care if they put my name in my music files? I’m not going to pirate it. On the other other hand, I’m against privacy invasions in any form, regardless of the fact that I’m not up to no good, and this can certainly be construed to be an invasion of my privacy.

In any case, it doesn’t matter much. I upgraded iTunes last night and checked whether any of my purchased music is eligible for the 30 cent upgrade. There’s one song. I might buy it just to see if I can tell any difference between the lo-fi old version and the hi-fi new. But I might not.

Anyway. The broken toe is even better today than it was yesterday. I still don’t like to walk very far, but there’s no limp and only minor numbness. I didn’t even take any Tylenol today. I even think the allergies are doing a bit better. The nasal spray isn’t supposed to kick in for a week to ten days, so the big difference is probably the Allegra I’m now taking as opposed to the Claritin I was taking. Loyal Reader Number Two is now taking the Claritin, though, and it imagine it’s helping him out. Is it, LRN2?

That’s it for today. I’ll see you tomorrow, rested and relaxed.