morrowlife

Here’s a happy, peppy duck couple observing their duck friends. Photo taken at Loyal Reader Number Two’s Science Olympiad event, and part of my famous Bird series.

Happy St. Patty’s day. One of our many meaningless holidays. I celebrated by wearing my pale green shirt. Must honor my Irish roots, don’t you know.

Otherwise largely uninteresting day. Got up an hour late, commuted, worked, and commuted again. Evening plans include more fussing with the new remote control and a few more girls camp phone calls. In the event that my other goodies (DVD burner and video card) arrive, I’m sure I’ll find time to install and test them too.

Loyal Reader Number One’s iPhone application has been submitted. Let’s hope it turns out to be a little more lucrative than the Morrowlife Blog has been (still at $13 and holding!). Remember me when you’re rich, LRN1! Better yet, support me when you’re rich.

The Stereo Stream website is making progress too. There are pretty much just placeholder pages at this point, but that’s a start. I expect he’ll have a version of the desktop server available for download Real Soon Now.

Speaking of the iPhone, version 3.0 of the iPhone software was announced today. Developers can already get to it, and it will be available to the public sometime this summer. Lots of people have been looking forward to some of the improvements they’re putting in, like cut-and-paste (finally!), push email, and tethering. I think the most important change, though, is peer-to-peer connectivity. Why? Thank you for asking! I see Apple subtly positioning the platform as a competitive portable gaming machine – especially the Touch, with its other functions becoming more and more secondary. With peer-to-peer capability, tons of fun new games will quickly become available, resulting in a lot more hardware sales. It’ll be interesting to see what comes along. Your opinion?

How about a little controversy? It’s been a long time since we’ve had any controversy. Consider this: Have you ever seen a stupider idea than this? My answer: not that I can recall.

And speaking of stupid ideas, I definitely think my Loyal Readers and I should pool our money and buy this. I volunteer for the position of “Lord of the Manor.” There are plenty of “Serf” opportunities available.

See you tomorrow.

Here are a bunch of spitting lions. Part of the bridge over the pond at CSU-Stanislaus in Turlock, where Loyal Reader Number Two’s Science Olympiad was held. Also part of my famous Statue series.

The blog is back. I have no idea how my Loyal Readers survived.

Interesting wedding. The Liberace Mansion was surprisingly nice. It’s in a residential neighborhood near downtown, and the neighboring houses are surprisingly . . . ordinary. Maybe even a little rundown. The mansion itself is simply a fairly nice, reasonably large house with a very large ballroom added on in the back where the swimming pool used to be. The furnishings are original, and there’s a lot of Liberace’s personal memorabilia. Kind of interesting. Groups who rent the place have basically the run of the house. Also kind of interesting in this day and age. Nobody seemed to ruin anything.

The wedding itself was a little unusual in that it was quite casual. The guests sat at the same tables used for the reception, and there was applause and cheering where most traditional weddings might have been more sedate. Presumably, that’s how the bride and groom chose to do things, and it was just fine. Traditional ceremonies are getting more and more rare.

It was great to see family, especially Loyal Readers Numbers One, Three, and Fifteen. They’re all doing well. For that alone, it was definitely a worthwhile trip. And then there was everybody else too!

No Friday post. There was Wifi in the hotel, but there was no time. Spent the evening with family instead. Don’t regret the decision.

Normal work day. Lots to do; did some of it. Couldn’t get out early enough for the early train, so I’m getting home at 7:30. Too bad.

None of the cool stuff I’ve recently ordered was here as of this morning. I’m excited to get it and try it all out. Soon.

Breaking update from home: the remote control and Treo charger are here! The remote works great! So far!

Let’s have a quick look at today’s utterly disgusting toilet news: consider getting a bluetooth.

And I’m especially gratified to see that my program has already started to spawn spinoff applications.

That’s about it for Monday. See you tomorrow.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Two testing his bridge at the Science Olympiad. It held! Check out those safety goggles. Special cameo appearance by Loyal Reader Number Four.

Fairly Short Shrift tonight. Took the late train, and I have to get ready to travel tomorrow morning, so some preparation must take place.

I took a chance today. I’ve been planning to buy a couple new HDTVs because I couldn’t find a video card that could talk to an old-fashioned RCA jack on an old-fashioned tube TV. Well, today I saw an ad for an old-model video card that claims to do just that. It was offered for thirty bucks. I bought it. It also has an S-video connector and two VGA ports, so it was apparently fairly hot stuff when it was new on the market.

The risk is that it won’t end up working like I need it to, thus wasting the thirty bucks. My judgment was that it was worth risking $30 for the chance of saving $300. Sadly, it has no DVI port, so it will be truly useless in the event it won’t drive an old TV. Fingers are crossed.

Loyal Reader Number One had his phone interview with Apple today. It appears to have gone well. They surprised him with the need to propose a personal project to spend half-time working on, so he needs to come up with some ideas and get back to them. The good thing is that the interview seemed more like a final-decision talk than a screening call. I hope it works out for him. It would be a great summer.

Any news in the education field today? Let’s check: Here’s a great moneymaker!

Speaking of which, we’re long overdue for a Morrowlife financial juggernaut update: I’m up to $13! Exactly! I think I’ve reached critical mass. I can sense the blog has just gone over the tipping point. Riches are inevitable!

Posting tomorrow is unlikely – we’ll be in Las Vegas. Wifi and time availability are doubtful. We’ll see.

One bit of bad wedding news is that Loyal Readers Numbers Five, Six, and Twelve are too sick to go. Get well soon, Loyal Readers! We’ll miss you.

See you tomorrow. Or maybe Monday.

Here’s Buddy, Loyal Reader Number Two’s first water rocket, on the launch pad at the Science Olympiad. Its identical twin was Skippy. Buddy did better than Skippy, largely because of a setup glitch. They’ll never fly again, though. The cleanup crew apparently decided our bucket of rockets was trash, and they threw it all away. Sigh. At least they took third place in their one and only outing.

Perfect weather again today. Near-freezing temperatures overnight and warm and sunny all day.

Odd day. I have one subordinate who constantly asks me to approve unbelievably high expenses. Today, he asked for $700 worth of label-making supplies, which he tells me will be used over the next six months. I decline to believe this. Two days ago, he asked me to approve ten power cords for the lab. When I asked how many he needs to use right now, he told me he needs three. The other seven were supposed to be spares. I approved two spares. I’m going to approve one or two hundred dollars’ worth of the label supplies.

I wish he’d quit wasting his time and mine on these ludicrous things. We both have better things to do.

I checked out chargers for my Palm today. I can get a cheap Chinese knockoff for about $3 including shipping, or an official Palm one for about twice that much. I’m going to order the Palm one tonight, based on the numerous negative reviews of the cheap one.

I’m also going to (finally) order the computer remote control tonight. If I can find the one I was looking at a few weeks ago. I had a quick look at Amazon, and can’t find it. Need to do a little detective work.

Otherwise, the evening’s mine, I believe. Need to get to bed at a reasonable hour and maybe do a little preparation for Friday’s trip to the Wedding of the Century. Check the Honda’s oil, make my packing list, etc.

Let’s check on today’s food violence/dog news: They’re a bunch of liars. But they’re also philanthropic. However, they can be rather strict. Unfortunately, they’re just too darn noisy.

There’s a new iPod Shuffle! It’s smaller than a AA battery and has no controls on it other than a power switch. The rest of the controls are on the earbud cord. It talks. It’s aluminum and stainless steel. It has 4 gigabytes. It costs $79. We really need one.

Apple has a way of making all their formerly cool hardware look sort of dowdy as soon as they bring out the next generation, don’t they? My first-generation Shuffle was pretty slick, not to mention extremely tiny, when I got it. Now it’s just old. Although I still love it. My 80-gig iPod was the ultimate in cool until just recently. I still love it too, but now it’s yesterday’s news. The funny thing is that I generally like older technology. I just like Apple’s new stuff better.

Speaking of which, best of luck to Loyal Reader Number One in his phone interview tomorrow. I’m sure he’ll do well, so it will probably come down to whether they think they need his skill set this summer. I hope they decide they do.

A word or two about the Safari 4 beta. I installed it as soon as it came out. There’s some good and some bad. The good: The cover flow view is pretty, although surprisingly not as useful as you might think it would be. I prefer to just start with my home page. Which you can make it do, of course. The bad: Putting the tabs in the window’s title bar. It’s not just bad. It’s wretched. I’m used to the tabs being directly above the business portion of the window, and that’s where I want them. There was absolutely no reason for moving them. And they’re stupid up there. It also seems to be really slow. Otherwise, another hit from Apple.

See you tomorrow.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Twelve taking a short flight. Excellent piloting skills.

Extreme short shrift. Massive Meeting Tuesday. I expected to have five or ten minutes to do this, but got a couple of girls camp phone calls and here I am with about two minutes to go.

Normal day. Got up (a little late), drove to work, worked, drove home, grabbed a bite, talked on the phone, blogged, and now I’m off to meetings.

I’ll leave you with this: if your dog can’t take care of things, sometimes you just have to do them yourself.

See you tomorrow.