morrowlife

Here’s LRN2 blowing out his seventeen candles on Monday.  We had a nice little family party.  More fuzzy Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam.  That camera really doesn’t like low light.  But I like to push it, so there you have it.  Fuzzy photos.  Or is that fuzzy fotos?  Phuzzy photos?

Short Shrift tonight.  I got home from work relatively late and I have to get up relatively early.  Poor me.

Normal day, so not much to write home about.  I need to make a couple of church phone calls tomorrow or Friday night.  Lots of ’em, in fact.  Maybe it’ll happen on Saturday.  There just never seems to be any time on a work night.  My leader has expressed disappointment with my habit of communicating with the hordes via email and he wants me to make phone calls.  That can take some serious time, so it’ll have to wait until some serious time is available.  Whenever that is.

Started listening to the audiobook version of Jesus the Christ this evening.  The jury’s still out on the quality (of the recording, that is; the book’s amazing), but it’s a gazillion percent better than those incredibly boring people who do the audio version of the Ensign magazine.  Sorry folks.  I love the magazine, but I just can’t stay awake for that one, as much as I really want to and as hard as I try.  Put a little life into it!

And on that slightly sour note, I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: pancake swat!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s LRN2 and his birthday loot.  Happy birthday, LRN2!  I love you!  Slightly fuzzy Great Art taken in low-light conditions courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam.

LRN2’s been raking in the stuff lately.  His much-anticipated MacBook Pro and iPod Touch both arrived (via separate carriers and at different times) on Friday.  Fortunately, it was my off Friday, so I was home for all the excitement.  He’s in computer heaven.  We immediately dissected his old beloved iBook (formerly LRN1’s old beloved iBook).  It had long since passed its useful life.  I really hated to see it go, though.  Its disk drive lives on connected externally to Cooper, my old beloved G4 Mac Mini currently serving as a development and general-purpose machine in my office, its memory lives on inside Ted, my current beloved Linux laptop, and its CD/DVD drive is available when called upon.  The rest was lovingly laid to rest in our outside garbage can.  Rest in Peace, trusty old iBook.

Sniff, sniff.  There, now I feel better.

Observant readers will notice that Cooper is once again not serving the television in the loft.  Sadly, it was simply an untenable situation.  It couldn’t do Netflix because the G4 isn’t supported for that purpose.  No problem, said I; I bought a Roku.  But then it turned out that it couldn’t do Hulu either, which is an absolute CPU and graphics card hog.  Since Netflix and Hulu are the only things LRN4 cares about on a television, Cooper was out.  Larry’s back in, with a fresh Windows XP install (ack!) and working fine, although Hulu is fairly marginal on that computer too, seeing as how it’s a four-year-old AMD 64-bit CPU with a four-year-old low-end graphics card.  At least it’s a candidate for a future upgrade, though.

My ideal situation would be to get a MacBook Pro like LRN2’s as my main computer one of these days, at which time Curly, my beloved Intel Mac Mini would become the media center for the loft.  It would do everything well in that role.  Maybe someday.

No posts on Thursday or Friday.  Didn’t feel like it.  Both days were fine, thanks.

As were Saturday and Sunday.  I attended priesthood meeting with the Spanish branch, and learned they had sustained a new Young Men president earlier that day.  His counselors will be sustained next Sunday, after which we really need to sit down with them and help with some training.  Really.

Otherwise . . . I don’t remember what I did all weekend.  I’m sure it was exciting and useful, though.

I took the Suburban to work this morning and drove my beloved pickup home this afternoon.  As I may have mentioned, the pickup is running rough at times, and I need to get it fixed.  I can either do it myself if I can figure it out or get it over to our mechanic if I can’t.  I also need to replace the serpentine belt and get the brake disks turned.  I have no idea why all my rotors are warping these days.  I’m not doing anything different, but they all seem to go bad.  Even the Suburban’s relatively new brakes have started to wobble a bit.  Sigh.  It’s always something.

Found an interesting website today – zenhabits.net.  Don’t let the “zen” mumbo jumbo put you off – check it out.  It’s written by a guy who’s trying to simply his life, be more efficient and effective, get the things done he really wants to do, and be happy.  Pretty much all goals I share.  Lots of content.  I recommend it.

I finally achieved something this evening I’ve been trying to do for quite some time – I got my Mac’s calendar, my iPhone’s calendar, and Google Calendar all talking to each other!  Okay, it may not sound like a big deal to you, but I’m excited.  For one thing, I’m trying to get more and more of my computer files into the cloud.  I’m less worried about my privacy (I put everything I do on my blog as it as, as my Loyal Readers unfortunately know) than I am about losing everything.  Well, my calendar’s safe.  Now I have to figure out how to do the same thing with my contacts.  My blog’s at Godaddy, so it’s safe.  I’m going to have a look at Google Docs very soon.  My sources tell me it does way less than Microsoft Word, but it does the things people really want it to do.  So there’s that.  Plus I have Evernote for short notes and other tidbits and Dropbox for miscellaneous stuff.

I still haven’t figured out how to get all my digital pictures into the cloud, though.  Dropbox is way too small.  So is the free account (did I mention I’m not willing to pay for any of this?) at Picasa – they only give you a gigabyte.  What to do?  In the meantime, my pictures are all backed up to my Time Machine disk, anyway.  It’s just on the same desk as my Mac, so not quite immune to theft or fire or things like that.

And it’s just about 9:30 and I want to go to bed soon, so I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: pop machine hatchet attack!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s your Loyal Blogger in the market back in Leninsk, Kazakhstan.  Great Art taken way back in 2000 when I was a bit younger and a bit thinner.

No post yesterday.  I got busy and just never got to it.  As predicted, LRN2 and I have gone totally native in LRN4’s absence.  It’ll be a pretty uncivilized place around here by the time she gets back.

Speaking of which, she should have gotten back from her hike today.  Hopefully, she came through it well.  If there were horrible news, I imagine I’d have been informed by now.  So I’m feeling pretty confident about her chances of making it home on Saturday.  Which is only two days away!  The time is flying by.  For us at least.  Sitting here in our air-conditioned comfort.  And sleeping in our soft, fluffy beds.  And eating like kings  Or at least like pigs, anyway.  And swimming in the pool when we feel like it.  And playing with our computers.  And watching TV.  Et cetera.  The days just fly by.

Anyway. Pretty good day today.  Work was uneventful, the commutes were both uneventful, and it’s been a quiet, peaceful evening.  LRN2 and I went to the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet this evening.  The food there is good.  Not great, but good.  Pretty good value for the money.  Nothing to get excited about, though.  But good.  I think we’ll go out somewhere modest again tomorrow night.  Maybe Mexican.  Father and son togetherness, don’t you know.

Tomorrow’s off Friday, so the weekend’s here.  Lots to do.  I have everything in my beloved iPhone, so I won’t bother enumerating here.  Suffice it to say that filters will be involved.  And lots of work on computers.  Lots of it.  I’ll try to mention accomplishments as they come up.

Had a bit of frustration this evening.  I had been thinking about my television situation and had decided I would rather have Larry (my loft-based video file server and TV driver) sitting in a back room serving files and something else to drive the TV.  My mind went immediately to Cooper, my old G4-based Mac Mini.  I spent several hours getting it set up just perfectly, including saving its video library to Moe.  It took a bunch of research and work, but I finally had it ready.  I even ordered a really cool remote control for it.  Just a couple more tests to confirm things.  And . . . Netflix won’t work on it.  Because it’s a G4.  Also won’t work on Linux boxes.  Sigh.  So Larry and Cooper stay where they are, and I’ll have a nice remote control in my office.  Double sigh.

Anyway.  I’m certain something good will come of it.  Maybe I can at least figure out a way to make it easier to get content onto Larry.  Right now, I copy files onto its hard drive and then have to drag them into iTunes separately so the AppleTV can see them.  There must be an easier way.  I have a few ideas.

And I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: milkshake rage!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s a group of very pretty flowering trees in Tracy, as photographed this evening right before my meeting.  Great Art taken at the First United Methodist Church and courtesy of the famous iPhone-cam.  That’s the church’s spire there in the background.

No post yesterday.  I have no idea why.

Extreme short shrift tonight.  I had another scout meeting – the second one this week!  This was the district commission meeting.  There were only five of us there, which wasn’t surprising, since so many people are either on vacation or working at scout camp right now.

Busy day at work again.  I think I achieved about a dollar performance.  Need to go for two dollars tomorrow.  That’ll be necessary, in fact, since it’s my last day before a week’s vacation.

Speaking of which, there will probably be very little to no blogging next week, since we’ll be in the Sierra Nevada.  I have to go somewhere with cell phone coverage and wifi for my Tuesday morning iPhone meeting, so I might get a quick note in then.  Instead of writing, I’ll be taking tons of Great Art.  Need to spice up my offerings.  Or at least improve them.

And that’s it for tonight.  I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking toilet violence news: lid attack!

See you tomorrow.

Here are LRN4 and me at the luau last Saturday.  That’s LRN4 over there on the left.  Check out those Leis.  Great Art courtesy of my friend Brian Maxwell, a counselor in our stake presidency.

No post yesterday. No excuse, either. It got a bit late before I got around to it and I decided not to get around to it.

But it was a pretty good day anyway.

So was today. But busy. Oh, my goodness. I’m working on next year’s financial proposal for the department. It’s surprisingly hard to get all the T’s dotted and I’s crossed, let me tell you.

Which may explain why I’m having such a hard time of it.

Anyway. I have a few hours’ worth of work to do tomorrow to get it done, which I regret, but it won’t be the end of the world. I’ll try to get it done early.

And the long weekend is here! Besides the work, I’m planning to celebrate my birthday on Friday, wash the (bug-speckled) Honda, probably clean some filters, hopefully swim in the pool, and even more hopefully work on the Arduino project. Also need to start thinking about this month’s sacrament meeting talk and do a little bit of thinking about my calling. Also get some rest and relaxation.

Otherwise, I have nothing to do.

And that’s about it for today. I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food (threatened) violence news: eat your vegetables!

See you tomorrow.