morrowlife

Here’s Loyal Reader Number One at the top of a rock wall he climbed during the last camping trip. I wasn’t at all happy about the risk and stood at the bottom of the wall, directly underneath him. I guess the idea was to hear if he had any last words as he came crashing down at my feet. Or try to catch him. Or something. Anyway, he survived the climb and I’m nearly over it as well.

It was meeting night again tonight, so the day was pretty full. I did manage to get the HRVA’s email working again – moved it from Larry to GoDaddy. I don’t want to run an email server anymore, although I might have to start it back up again if I end up dumping Vizaweb in a few months as currently planned. My mail list server is with Vizaweb, and it doesn’t appear that GoDaddy offers one. So I’ll have to host the McCulloch family news list on my own. We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it, though.

Otherwise, I worked and commuted. And talked like a pirate, ye scurvy dogs.

Tomorrow’s vacation to Yosemite is cancelled, just in case I forgot to mention it yesterday. The weather predictions are worse than we’re willing to camp in (snow and towing large trailers don’t mix in my book), so we’ll try again some other time. Pity, that. On the upside, at least I’ll be able to blog!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s photographic proof that Loyal Readers Numbers One, Two, and Four have been at a pretty high altitude. Alas, I was behind the camera and can provide no such proof. Not that anyone’s asking.

No post yesterday. All of a sudden, I was sick. Sorry about that. Fortunately, I’m feeling much better now.

Fine weekend. We went to the temple on Saturday morning with the boys and had a nice time. Had brunch with our friends the Hepworths/Englands at IHOP afterwards. Food: passable. Service: slow but otherwise okay. Company: enjoyable.

Not much else got done. I worked hard on the Waterlogged website. The application is now running but can’t be updated without much grief. Still need to get a few things figured out there, and then get it prettified. I think I can do some simple CSS that will go a very long way towards making it look better in a very short time. There’s a ton of things to do to get that very simple application – for which there is a very limited market and no visible way to monetize it – in shape. Kind of discouraging right now. Loyal Reader Number Three is busily working on some videogame stuff but not making much progress either. I’m spending a lot of time reading textbooks and so is he, though, so maybe we’re laying a solid foundation. Or maybe we’re just reading. The trouble is that too often I stop at the reading part and never quite get to the finishing part. Got to turn that around.

I also replaced a mower-destroyed sprinkler head Saturday afternoon. That makes about three in the past year. Let’s bear down there, Loyal Mowers!

Tried to go home sick yesterday starting at 1:30. I finally got out the door at 5:45, which is quite a bit later than my standard departure time, so that didn’t work out so well. I laid low and got to bed pretty early last night, though, so there’s something, anyway. Also got up late this morning and lazed around the house a bit, trying to decide how I felt. Eventually, I decided I felt well enough and went to work.

Very bad traffic going in to work anyway. Apparently, there was a three-semi crash that closed a major bridge quite a bit earlier, and things were pretty slow through Livermore. Sigh.

Let’s see, what else is newsworthy? Ummm . . . nothing. See you tomorrow.

VERY SPECIAL WEDNESDAY MORNING UPDATE: Today is a very special day. Arrrr, Loyal Mateys.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Two out in the middle of the stream at Clark’s Fork. That water was wadeable but cold.

Welcome to the doldrums! That’s where the Morrowlife blog has been for several days now, and why leave now? So we won’t. But maybe next week. Or the week after that.

Loyal Readers Numbers Four and Twelve and I are watching Monk. We don’t remember seeing tonight’s episode and we haven’t figured it out yet, so it’s an improvement over recent weeks. Psych is next.

Long work day today, and I got lots done. There’s still a lot more to do, of course, so I think I’ll go back on Monday. The good news is that the Miata stayed cool and collected.

Speaking of cool, the weather has turned fallish. It was perfect open-air motoring weather, both morning and night. I turned on the heater for a while and was as comfortable as could be.

Looking forward to the weekend. We’re going to the temple early tomorrow morning and I hope to spend some time on the business in the afternoon, depending on what else has to be done. Otherwise, no big plans.

The formerly-Big-Bear-based Loyal Readers found a different place to live the other day. They don’t know yet when they’ll be moving in, but they seem excited about it. Good luck in the new place, Loyal Readers! Eventually!

See you on Monday.

Here’s the river running through Dos Reis County Park. As I was mentioning to Loyal Reader Number Four a few moments ago, it’s a very small oasis of prettiness in the middle of otherwise-unremarkable farmland.

I’m home! It was a long day, as I had to drive directly to work, after which there were meetings for pretty much the rest of the day. Then I came home, ate, and sat down to write.

Loyal Reader Number One is working on a Fifteen Puzzle implementation in Java for a class. They told him to start with the board in a random state but failed to note that half of the initial states are unsolvable. My guess is that they didn’t know. Now he faces the dilemma of figuring out which initial states are solvable and which aren’t. I suggested a viable alternative – start out with the puzzle in the solved state and then do a bunch of random moves until the puzzle is sufficiently mixed up. That’s the way we used to do it with those little plastic versions I used to get.

Anyway. All the Loyal Readers left Loyal Reader Number Twelve with LRN1 and me in the family room and went off to do other things. She crawled around a little and started to get fussy. LRN1 and I were trying (unsuccessfully) to get her to crawl over to one of us when Loyal Reader Number Five came in and picked her up, thus solving the problem. Except that LRN5 was NOT happy that nobody came to the rescue before she got there. We’re laying low so we don’t get caught in the rampage.

Time to unpack, read a little, maybe check my home email, and go to bed. See you tomorrow.

Here’s some more Great Art from the Phoenix Art Museum. The artist isn’t a relative, as far as I know, but those other people are. Behold Loyal Readers Numbers Four, Fifteen, and Three, respectively. I have no idea who that lady in the background is, but I’m sure she’s very nice. Apologies for the slight fuzziness of the picture – I was trying to go without my flash to avoid ruining the Great Art (soft focus – yeah, that’s it).

The meeting’s over! I’m glad I attended – learned a lot about some upcoming plans and got literally hundreds of new things to test. This is a good thing. I’m heading for home in the morning. Well, I’m actually heading for work, but only for four or five hours.

Had dinner at Marie Callender’s tonight. Got the tri-tip with Cajun shrimp, mashed potatoes, garlic bread, and generic vegetables. Not good. The steak was raw, the shrimp tasted weird, the toast tasted like fish, and the vegetables looked too terrible to even try. The potatoes were okay, though. I’m not going back. I’m also afraid I can’t recommend Marie Callender’s to my Loyal Readers.

I started reading Agile Development with Rails this morning. So far, I’m on page 25 and filled with hope. I need to understand Rails well enough to work with Loyal Reader Number One’s application. And future apps as well.

I believe I’ve found the most useless OS X Widget ever. Check it out. But do not install it. Really. I mean it.

I’m in trouble for tomorrow’s drive – big trouble. I’ve been listening to my supply of podcasts during the trip, including the drive down to Lancaster, the drives back and forth from the hotel to the base, and as background noise here in the hotel room. The problem: I now have only five podcasts left in my list. There’s not enough to entertain me on the trip home! Since my iPod is synced to my Mac, not my laptop, I can’t download any new ones either. There are plenty of video podcasts, and I could just listen to them (watching while driving isn’t exactly safe and probably isn’t legal either), but that’ll chew the batteries down to nothing in just a few hours. Wait a minute – that might be enough! There are probably a couple of hours’ worth of audio podcasts, after which I could switch to video and actually make it! It’s crazy enough that it just might . . . get us all killed!

Otherwise, nothing to report. I want to read some more, so we’ll see you tomorrow, after the long drive back to the north.