morrowlife

Here I am at the market in Baikonur a few years back. Great shopping there.

No time to post tonight. My web server broke early this morning and was dead all day. I needed to figure out the problem and fix it after I got home from work this evening. Spent a few hours, but it’s working again!

It turns out to have been an automatic update of a program called ModSecurity that tries to block bad guys from messing around with my web server. The new version killed all my custom rules and had an error in it that kept it from working at all. It took a while, but I found the error and fixed it (it was a bad file name in an “include” command). I spent most of the time trying to get my custom rules working again. I finally got them so that the web server would run, only to discover that both this site and the HRVA were broken. Sigh. I took out the custom rules and am now going with the standard ones. It’s working again, in any case.

So it’s 11:00 and I need to go to bed. I’ll try to be a little more fascinating tomorrow.

Here’s my new bicycle. Well, actually, it’s not. It’s much better than my bicycle at the moment. The movers managed to bend both my front rim and my front axle. Loyal Reader Number Four took the wheel to a bike shop today for repairs, which are promised for tomorrow. I took this picture in Cannes a few years ago. I’m pretty sure this machine was still being used at the time.

Time to pause for Home Evening. See you in a little bit.

– Pause –

I’m back. It’s late now – well, it’s almost 9:30, and that’s late in my book. I can remember when I went to bed after midnight every night and got up at 5:30, day after day. Sigh. Those days are certainly over. Now I can hardly keep my eyes open.

Loyal Reader Number Two has been playing with a new, improved version of Line Rider. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. The premise is ludicrously simple – you draw lines on a white background and a little guy on a sled goes down the lines. You just make cool courses for him to ride without letting him fall off. What a great idea. The new version has non-ridden lines, acceleration lines, and an badly-needed eraser for lines that didn’t quite work out.

I’ve also recently tried another game, called flOw. It’s an eerily peaceful game where you start out as a single-cell creature (or something like that, anyway) underwater, and you eat littler creatures to grow. You have to avoid being attacked by bigger creatures, but mostly you just cruise around and get bigger. The music is peaceful and I like the game. Try it out! You can play online or download the game for your PC. The best thing about the game is that it appears to have been the basis for somebody’s Master’s degree.

We went out to Weinerschnitzel for Home Evening treat tonight. It was our second visit there. This time, we had coupons for root beer floats for only 99 cents each! I’m still not sure we got a good deal. My root beer tasted like it was a little bit short on syrup, so I took it back to the counter and got another, which maybe tasted slightly better. Our first trip was slightly more expensive and infinitely worse-tasting. I don’t think we’ll go back there. There are so many better restaurants.

I -finally- made an update to the HRVA website. I definitely need to keep the updates coming much more frequently if I ever hope to make anything useful out of it. Anyway, have a look!

Work went fine. The commute went fine. I’m feeling fine. Everything is fine.

And I’m exhausted, so I’m going to bed. See you on Tuesday.

Here’s Your Humble and Obedient Blogger pushing the button that launched the first man into space. Photo taken at the Baikonur museum.

Wonders of Blogger today. Friday night was busy.

Lots of things going on today. The drive to work was amazingly quick – just a hair under 1.5 hours. Of course, the Traffic Gods require that I spend a minimum of four hours in the car every day, so the drive home was very slow, even for a Friday evening. It turns out there was a motorcycle accident on the freeway in Tracy. That tied things up pretty badly for quite a long time.

Which was unfortunate, since I had a 7:00 appointment with the missionaries at the church. They had a building tour scheduled with some people. I went directly to the church and made it with a few minutes to spare. The tour was fine, although only one of the several people they had invited showed up. The elders had gone to quite a bit of trouble to prepare and it was a nice tour.

I finally got home at about 8:00, and the weekend is here! It’s general conference weekend, so we’ll be pretty busy watching BYU-TV. In between sessions, we’re planning to wash a bunch of cars, go to the library, clean the pool filters, and who knows what else. Busy, busy, busy. Andy and I need to do one more home teaching visit today too.

And I had better start paying more attention to the conference. See you on Monday!

Here’s a Russian train guy in Baikonur. Hi, Vladimir!

Very little to write about today. Yesterday was Late Meeting Wednesday, so no post popped out of the blog machine, as usual. I worked kind of late yesterday (along with Monday and Tuesday, for what it’s worth) and barely had time to shove some food down my gullet and leave for the meeting. Came home again and went to bed.

Today was a little more relaxed. I got up a little late, got ready, and went down and had some breakfast (Cocoa Krispies and toast – the real breakfast of champions) while doing my morning meeting agenda and checking email. This was followed by a relaxing drive to Sunnyvale. Not a bad trip home either. And work was just fine to boot. Although we had a very serious server crash and also found out we have a bad bug in some new software that was built yesterday – bad enough to require a rebuild tomorrow morning. Alas.

Let’s see, what else? I helped Loyal Reader Number Four take out the garbage this evening. And . . . that’s about it for today. Sheesh. See you tomorrow.

Here’s Loyal Pet Number Zero, taken back when he was alive. He was a great pet. Photo taken with my lousy first digital camera. That camera was so bad that some of its results actually look kind of artistic.

Easy ride home from work today. We expected rain (which we didn’t get) so I took the big car. I have no idea where everybody else was, but I’m not complaining.

I realized today that yesterday’s post omitted one of the more important aspects of the weekend. We finally bought a high-definition TV! It’s a Polaroid(?!) 37-inch LCD. It has 720P resolution and looks and works quite nicely. We also got a Zenith Dolby 5.1 surround sound system that includes a VCR (not really necessary anymore, but it was there) and a DVD player. We’re enjoying it. Loyal Reader Number One is already planning a movie-watching get-together with his pals.

Time to go. See you tomorrow.