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 are the telltale signs of LRN2’s new toys – Apple stickers, large and small.  The big ones came with his laptop and the little ones came with his iPod.  Of course.  Slightly fuzzy Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam and (a merely symbolic) part of my famous Machinery series.

I have tons of those Apple stickers, and I can never figure out something cool to do with them.  I even have – get ready for it – a few of the old-school rainbow Apple stickers.  Those are certainly collectors’ items by now, no?  I just looked them up, and somebody is trying to sell a single one on eBay for twelve bucks.  If that’s not cool, I don’t know what is. Anyway, I don’t want to look like either a geek or a jerk, so they’re all in a drawer right now.  Any suggestions?

Greetings from the train! I’m trying hard to improve how I use my train time, and doing a bit more blogging is one part of that. Right now, I’m on the morning train, in fact, having finished my hour of work already and not quite having reached the Great America station. Also listening to Car Talk on my iPod.

Arriving now. See you this afternoon.

That didn’t last long. Good afternoon! I’m back. Had a good day at work. Lots to get done still this afternoon. I need to finish this post, index 200 names, get the Arduino data transmittal function working right, attend two church meetings, and remember to put the magnet I bought at the Grand Canyon into my briefcase. Everything but the meetings and the magnet will be done in the train, time and laptop battery permitting, fortunately.

Had a good iPhone telecon today. We’re very close to our initial release – just need to get the final name incorporated and get final Legal approval. Any minute now. I’m excited to get it into users’ hands. That’ll get the trouble ticket pipeline started up too, I expect.

I found another interesting and highly meaningful website today: The Art of Manliness.  Very entertaining and a good read.  I particularly enjoyed the article on man caves, which was linked to by Instapundit.  It got me thinking – I have my own office now, and it looks terrible.  I need to turn it into a really cool man cave.  I’ve always been kind of partial to the old English club look, but I’m open to suggestions.

I guess I have a garage I could do something with too, but I really want to start with my office.  Or should I call it my study?  My library?  What sounds coolest?

Not much else exciting right now, so I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: hamburger-related injuries!

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 are LRN2 and LRN4 looking at a big tree at Calaveras Big Trees State Park.  As mentioned before, that’s a great place to go if you want to look at big trees.  Since that’s where the big trees are.  Pretty cool bench, no?  Part of my famous Camping series.

No post yesterday.  I came home early from work after having a lovely lunch with my former co-worker Dan.  Half an hour after returning to the office, I started feeling sick.  Sometime around mid-day today, I started feeling well again.  Very unfortunate.  But I’m better now.

Didn’t do much today except lie around getting better.  Fortunately, it worked.  Also got in the pool for a little while this evening.  The water felt great.  It’s been a good summer for swimming.

On the bad side of the pool, our PDA (Pool Digital Assistant) stopped working yesterday.  Dead as a doornail.  Those things cost a bunch, sadly.  I know because I ordered a new one today.  Sigh.  We should be back up and working again in a week or two.  In the meantime, I believe the pool is still running its automatic program every day.  We just can’t heat up the jacuzzi until the new one comes in.

Also spent a bunch of money ordering LRN2’s new Mac laptop last night.  It’s supposed to be here by Friday!  His iPod Touch will apparently be delivered sometime later – still don’t have a date for that.  He’s pretty excited about the whole thing.  He’s been hoarding money for this thing for quite a while.  Have fun with it, LRN2!

And I’m about done for tonight.  I want to do some iPhone documentation reading.  Sounds exciting, no?  I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking potential food violence news: Eggo shortage!  Let’s all share out there.

See you tomorrow.

Here’s a very large tree in Calaveras Big Trees State Park.  Where else would you go to find big trees?  It’s really hard to photograph them in a way that shows their true scale.  This work of Great Art did not achieve that.  Part of my famous Camping series.  Also part of my brand-new famous Vacation series.

I decided I needed a new series because we’ve started taking non-camping vacations, and I think there are more of those to come.  We might just get out of the camping business.  I think we’d still like to visit beautiful nature-filled locales, but we might start staying in cabins, lodges, and other such places.  In the long run, it will probably be less expensive than maintaining, licensing, and storing the trailer, not to mention to cost of hauling it around.  The Suburban certainly never gets into double-digit fuel economy when we’re pulling that thing.  Plus, we think we just want to do other things for now.  Time will tell.

Had a nice time at the Grand Canyon with the extended family.  The train ride was fun.  Sadly, they discontinued the steam locomotives sometime in the past couple of years, so it wasn’t nearly as much fun as it could have been.  They’re being “green” these days.  Pity, that.  The weather was mildly uncooperative – it was sunny and hot the first day in the park and drizzly and cool the second day.  I think we would all have preferred sunny and cool both days, but it was not to be, alas.  Also, LRN4 mentioned that the Grand Canyon is kind of like the coast of Maine – once you’ve seen it from one vantage point, it’s pretty much the same everywhere else.  Still, the most fun was being with family.

Maybe the canyon looks different from the bottom.  It might be fun to find that out one of these days.  We could either ride the donkeys down or go down the river on a raft.  Or maybe even take a helicopter ride.  One of these days.  Maybe.  Or not.

Anyway.  We had a nice time and it’s good to be back home again.

Speaking of the extended family, I have two new Loyal Readers!  Have a look over there on the right, and help me welcome Christy and Candy, Loyal Readers Numbers 28 and 29, respectively.  It’s great to have you with us LRN28 and LRN29!

Put a new battery in the Suburban this afternoon.  I don’t remember whether I already mentioned it, but its battery died just before we left for Arizona.  LRN2 and I jump-started it to get it onto the driveway the morning we left, and he and LRN4 bought a new battery this afternoon.  Installation was pretty simple, of course.  I also took the liberty of unplugging the lights on the sun visors – both of them have suffered broken mirror covers, leaving them susceptible to burning down the battery without us really knowing it.  It was a fairly simple matter to unscrew three screws each and unplug their wires.  I don’t think I’ll replace the visors at this time.  Although I absolutely hate to watch the truck deteriorate.  Which it’s doing – the driver’s seat heater isn’t working and needs an $800 repair and a few of the dashboard lights have burned out (easy to fix – just never have gotten around to it yet).  And a couple of the little knobs on the radio have split.  And now the sun visors.  Sigh.  It’s turning into a junker right before my eyes.

Anyway.  Nothing much else going on around here.  LRN2 and LRN4 went nuclear in our battle with the moths today – they lit off a bug bomb.  We found another moth in the family room this evening, so the effectiveness of the tactic is in question.  Double sigh.  We’ve got to win this battle at all costs.  We will fight them in the family room.  We will fight them in the pantry.  We will never surrender.  All I have to offer is blood, sweat, tears, and insecticide.  This will be our finest hour!

And I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife employment opportunity: Monkey-annoyance expert!

See you tomorrow.