Primitive conditions

Here's Loyal Reader Number Two Way Back When in the Fortress of Solitude, putting up with the primitive conditions we had to suffer there. A box for a computer desk indeed! How did we survive?

Greetings from the Ace train! Of course there's no WiFi. I'm writing now and publishing later. I'm kind of settling on riding the train on Mondays and Thursdays (or possibly Fridays), driving the Honda on two of the other days, and driving the truck on the other day (don't want to put too many miles on the Honda, you know). Or maybe something else.

As is evident above, I'm again running out of Great Art for the blog. Gotta get out over the weekend again. The demands on a Great Artist can be heavy.

I also need to make a couple other runs this weekend. Sadly, my next-to-last pair of reading glasses broke a couple of days ago. Time to get to Costco and get a bunch of new ones. Hopefully, they'll have some. I also need to go to the auto parts store or WalMart or someplace and get shiny new license plate bolts for the front of the truck. Gotta stay legal.

It's General Conference weekend! On the one hand, it's really nice to have a change and we always enjoy Conference and we can watch all the sessions but one from the comfort of our own home and our own jammies. Also, we can snack. On the other hand, we need to schedule both days around it. Not to worry, though - we'll be Tivoing it just in case we get busy at the auto parts store or something.

It's hard to believe September is already essentially over. Time to get going on the Christmas shopping.

I absolutely, positively, am going to finish something for the HRVA this weekend. Any Loyal Readers care to publish something there? Book reviews, historic camping articles, how-to articles, campground reviews, pictures of old RVs you've seen, or anything else relevant is welcome. Send me a query letter!

Time to quit. Have a great weekend!

Roof

Here's a truly Artistic Photo. Fame and glory to anyone who can figure out where it was taken.

It'll have to be another short post tonight, as it's pretty late and I just got home. Went out with the missionaries tonight and talked to a couple of nice people. Then I brought them to our house, fed them ice cream and cookies, and took them home. That pretty much took up the whole day, though.

I drove the truck to work today. Those new tires really make a difference. There's much less noise and a much smoother ride now. I guess I don't mind so much spending a bunch of money on one of the cars as long as I can tell the difference when it's done.

I don't think I mentioned earlier that Loyal Reader Number Four and I went to a used book sale at the library on Saturday. We happened to be there when they announced the "buck a bag" sale, so we got a couple of bags and stocked up on a bunch of books we only sort of wanted. We can throw them away when we're finished with them. The upside is that I have a large stock of obscure books for Morrowlife Book Club fodder. I'm sure my Loyal Readers can hardly wait. Mine are mostly books from the 70's about auto racing. That was a really good era for racing, so I'm looking forward to reading them. I also got one about fly fishing, which I would very much like to have the time to learn how to do. I think there's a gardening book in there somewhere too. LRN4's books appear to be mostly kids' stuff - Newberry award winners, etc. I'll add to the Book Club list as I get to them.

Speaking of which, I've finished everything previously on the list, plus another Wodehouse title whose name escapes me right now. It was about high-school-aged boys at a boarding school and their shenanigans. Nobody could write light fiction about upper-class twits quite like Wodehouse. I added a couple more of his books to my Gadget this afternoon, which will make it to the book club list Real Soon Now.

That's all for tonight. See you on Friday!

Overlook

Here are Loyal Readers Two and Four overlooking one of those beautiful valleys in Pennsylvania. What a beautiful place that was.

Went out and visited the Faulkners tonight. It was the first time I had met them, and they're very nice people. It was a pleasant way to spend the evening. Their football-playing son is just recovering from a broken jaw. No, he didn't get it in a game (warning: while it's certainly not a disgusting picture, squeamish Loyal Readers might not care for it) or even in practice. He got it while roughhousing with buddies after a scrimmage. Oops. He's out for the season.

Apple has updated iTunes 7 already, but it didn't help me at all. It crashes all the time! I got on the Apple website and looked at their forums. Somebody suggested turning off the Sound Enhancer function. I tried it and it seems to have worked. Until it crashes again, that is. Apple really has a huge black eye on this one - it was bungled massively. They were apparently in such a hurry to get movie downloads before the competition that they pulled a Microsoft and released software for their customers to beta test. Very bad form indeed.

LRN4 got the license plates for the Suburban today, so all we have left to do now is the trailer. She also got the front tires replaced, which was overdue. I still need to get some license plate bolts for the front. The ones we had on there before got rusty in Virginia, so I threw them away when we got to Pennsylvania, one of several states that issue only one plate per car.

It's late again, so I have to go to bed. Maybe I can find time to write some more tomorrow. See you then.

After

Here's the pool as it appears now. Much better than that last picture, I can assure you.

Well, at least it was sold for a day. It appears that our buyer's buyer is having some kind of financial problem, and the Gardenville house remains unsold. Very sad. It was fun while it lasted, though.

The Pool People showed up again this morning to make the automatic filler stop filling (it was a couple of inches too high when we noticed it last night - I hate to think of what might have happened if we hadn't gone out there) and give us a chemical test kit that wasn't oozing. Big improvement. At least they're always prompt and pleasant. Except for that PDA incident. And even that seems to have turned out okay.

Loyal Reader Number Four got official California license plates on her car and mine today. Only the truck and the trailer left to go. It took her a good portion of the day, but she reports that at least the DMV People were reasonably pleasant.

Nothing else to report today, so I'll quit and go to bed. See you tomorrow.

Before

Here's a "before" picture of the pool. Look for "after" tomorrow. Now you have something to live for.

Big news today - we have an official buyer for the Gardenville house! We loved that place and have been discouraged that nobody else seemed to love it too. These folks have made it clear to our agent that this is the house for them, so we're glad it's going to them. They were waiting to get their old house under contract. It finally happened for them and they made an immediate offer on our place. We countered, they re-countered, and we accepted. We still have to get it in writing through our relocation company tomorrow, but we believe it's a done deal. Cool. And we're not even in the poor house yet! Soon, though. We're fully committed to Lardville now - there's no turning back. Not that there was before.

Everything else that happened over the weekend and today pales in importance, especially since there's a rumor that Thursday's post was actually written on Sunday afternoon. I'm neither confirming nor denying, of course. The Loyal Reader will have to draw his/her own conclusions.

Anyway, nothing happened over the weekend that my Loyal Readers don't already know about. So what shall we discuss here?

Let's see. I rode the train this morning and enjoyed the ride. Slept practically the whole way. A weight-challenged passenger sat next to me and made me a little uncomfortable, but I'm only paying for one seat, so there's not much I can do about that. But I can still complain. Anyway, the ride was otherwise uneventful. I'm on the way home as these words are being written. No fat people next to me. So far, so good.

My boss was home sick today. I attended her boss's staff meeting for her. We had one other guy out sick too, and the guy in the cube next to him should have stayed home. We've got the plague going on there. I'm avoiding all human contact, just in case.

We're about to stop in Fremont. Fat person alert!

Later - Somebody sat down next to me, but he wasn't fat, so he wasn't a bother. I did put the computer aside for the rest of the ride, though. I read an RV book (not too good so far, but that's a subject for the HRVA) and listened to my iPod for the rest of the trip.

Done for tonight. See you tomorrow.

Cool museum

That museum was definitely cool. Downright cold, in fact. But it was one of the cooler museums around too, in the other sense of the word.

Loyal Reader Number One pointed out that when I cheat and use Blogger's superpowers to back date a post, I ruin the deception by admitting it. So I won't do that again.

It's a beautiful Sunday morning, about two hours before church. I've been relaxing and doing a little reading. We're watching a talk on BYU TV from Education Week. This year's? I don't know. It's a pretty good talk, though. BYU TV is a pretty good channel from time to time.

I've been struggling with Real Player this morning. I noticed yesterday afternoon that it wouldn't allow any sound to play. This is something of a problem with a program whose purpose is to play sound. I've tried reinstalling it and resetting it. I've looked it up on the internet - no help there. I've restarted my machine and tried logging in as a different user - no joy. LRN1 has the same program version as me, and his is working perfectly. Mine was working a few days ago. As of now, I have no idea what the problem is. I could reinstall the operating system, but that seems a little extreme, doesn't it?

The reason I want Real Player to work is that Car Talk comes only on Real Player, and I like Car Talk. They had dumped the terrible Real Player software sometime back, but Real Networks apparently made them an offer they couldn't refuse and they changed back. More worried about getting their palms greased than about pleasing their listeners, apparently. Now I have to decide whether to keep trying to get RP to work or just quit listening to CT. Yet another tough decision in a life full of tough decisions.

We invited a family from the ward over to breakfast this morning. Unfortunately, they called late last night and cancelled. Since we had already bought all the stuff, we had a great breakfast by ourselves this morning. Delicious, but alas. Maybe next time.

Went to the wedding reception of the son of some friends from Pennsylvania last night. He married a girl from Turlock, so the reception was only half an hour away from the Secret Undisclosed Location. It was great to see them again. Their son was one of LRN2's best friends and has even been featured on these pages a couple of times!

Back to life. Look for Swimming Pool Pictures in a day or two.

Christmas statue

Here's another look at that James Monroe statue from last Christmas's trip to southern Virginia. Cool statue, although it was covered with moss or mold or mildew or something that made old Monroe look pretty bad.

I'm just about out of Great Art for the blog. Need to get out on the weekend and shoot some more. I also need to remember to bring the camera on the train and get some shots of the Patented Beautiful Scenery. It's so hard to keep up with my insatiable Great Art demand.

Another day of perfect weather. I'm not sure whether any of my Loyal Readers have gotten in the pool today, so there's no Swimmability Report. The Pool People are scheduled to come over on Friday morning for the official training session. I don't care much about what they have to say (I'll listen politely and nod in a grave fashion, of course) but I do want the PDA. We're all getting tired of walking through the dirt with wet feet to turn things on and off at the panel. We need grass, of course, but it will be a little while before that happens. Besides, we don't want to walk a bunch of grass clippings into the pool either. The PDA's the way to go.

I saw an ad for an old Taurus on the company ad website today. It's a '93, they say it's in good shape with new paint (why?), it has a little more than 100,000 miles, the air conditioner doesn't work (they say it needs something cheap, but if it needed something cheap they would have had it fixed themselves), and they want fifteen hundred dollars for it. I contacted the guy and he told me the car belongs to a retired friend. My experience with retired people says their cars are either absolutely perfect or absolutely horrible. I may have a look and see which this one is. I would rather have a pickup or minivan or something else that can haul lots of stuff as my station car, but this might work. I'm still not sure whether I really need a station car in the first place. It might placate my boss's occasional raised eyebrows when I have to leave to make my train, but I'm not sure I want to be able to stay later than scheduled. If it's possible to stay, I'll be pressured to stay. On the other hand, it's always good to make the boss happy. Decisions, decisions.

Started looking for rebuild parts for my old Coleman lantern for the HRVA last night. There wasn't any clear indication on Coleman's website that they still carry parts for it, so I asked via email. We'll shortly see whether they support their old, old stuff or not. If I can get the parts, I'll get an article written and posted Real Soon Now. Need to finish the Vagabonds writeup first, though.

Too late for many links - enjoy what's here. See you tomorrow.

Birthday cake

See if you can figure out how old Loyal Reader Number Two is. The first one to guess will win honor, glory, and acclaim.

I drove to work again today, so no work got accomplished during the commute. It turned out to be fortunate because I ended up needing to stay for an hour or so after my go-home time. The bottom line, though, is that today's post is short. Also, no progress on the HRVA article. It will be really interesting when it gets done, though. I need to learn to work on a deadline, huh?

Our digital video recorder crashed yesterday and lost all its saved programs. Loyal Readers One, Two, and Four took it back to Comcast to get it swapped out today, but had no joy. They're on backorder. Apparently, everybody's DVR is dying. We're hoping they have another one for us within a week or so, but apparently they're not promising anything. I never thought that thing was working right. It was supposed to record "up to" 160 hours' worth of programming, but we never got more than 40 hours on it before it reported itself totally full. Feh. Time for a new one.

I must admit that I like iTunes 7.0, in spite of its habit of crashing frequently. The new iPod interface is especially nice. It was hard to find the list of folders to be synchronized to the iPod with the old design. No more. I also like the fact that they split things up in the left-side menubar into easy-to-recognize categories. All in all, a much slicker interface. If it would just stop crashing on me now.

LRN1 pointed me to an interesting application that installs the LAMP suite on your Mac (they call it MAMP). It looks pretty cool. I'm downloading it even as we speak and will try installing it on Curly, even though I'm a converted LAMP afficianado with Larry.

Time for bed. See you tomorrow, with more content from the train.

Carnival

Here's a scene from this year's Trier Carnival. As I probably mentioned before, the streets were covered with paper and junk by the time it was over. The street cleaners worked all night - we saw them on our way back from dinner - and the place was spotless as usual by morning. Typical German efficiency. Not that that's a bad thing.

Well, another week has begun. As usual, the weekend was pretty much a blur. The pool is officially up and running, and we haven't yet had our first problem. If you don't count the crack in the deck, of course. Anyway, Loyal Reader Number One and I have officially been In the Pool, although we were only there very briefly. That water is cold! It's just tap water, of course, and it appears to be slowly warming up, but summer is definitely on its way out here in Lardville, so we're not entirely sure when it will be warm enough to swim.

On the upside, the spa is working too. I've been in twice (or was it thrice?) and enjoyed it immensely. Loyal Reader Number Four and I agree that it's much more pleasant than the Gardenville spa. That one was a big fiberglass monstrosity that had shaped seats and adjustable jets, and all sorts of cool stuff. The trouble was that the shaped seats had nothing in common with our shapes and the adjustable jets failed to jet anyplace comfortable. We now have a big circle with two-level seats and upper and lower jets all around. We can turn the upper jets, the bubbles, and the light on and off and that's about it. It's big and comfortable. Super. We're definitely satisfied. And we can venture briefly into the pool, knowing that we can warm back up immediately in the spa. I have activity at home evening tonight and I think you can guess what it will be.

We went over to visit the Pool People on Saturday. They analyzed our water and gave us a $100 gift certificate towards pool chemicals. We got a bucket of giant chlorine tablets, a couple of gallons of acid, some shock treatment, and a chlorine floater. That came to $99.83. Seventeen cents left! I think we might get our future chemicals from someplace a little more inexpensive, like WalMart or Home Depot. The Pool People offer unlimited free water analysis, however, which I fully intend to use.

Then we went over to the Pool People's outdoor furniture store to decide how to spend our outdoor furniture voucher. We were somewhat surprised to learn that they wanted us to spend it essentially immediately or lose it. We found a beautiful teak bench and matching side table and a difficult-to-describe big fire bucket/giant candle thing with two matching metallic tiki torches. We lit the bucket o' fire on Saturday night and is it ever neat. I'm excited to try the torches too. Maybe tonight.

LRN4 and I also went over to the garden center at Target, where she had earlier seen a big ground cover plant sale. There were some very nice plants on sale, all right, although the sale wasn't anything to write home about - some of them were a whopping 20 cents off. Be that as it may, we bought about fifteen plants, which are now gracing our wasteland of a backyard in their containers. We need to get the watering system at least figured out, if not actually installed before we get too much further on this thing.

On our way to Target, we saw an old pickup truck for sale along the side of the road. It was a '91 Ford Ranger and appeared to be in reasonably good shape for its age, in spite of a fairly large dent in one of the front fenders that had been mostly pushed back out into shape. The price wasn't great but was pretty much in the ballpark for a truck in pretty good condition. We called the guy and he came out to give us a look. It seemed fine - until we started it. The guy had a pretty tough time getting it started, and when I drove it, it hesitated very badly from time to time as if it was running out of gas. The needle was pretty much bottomed out so, just to be sure, I took it to a gas station and put in a couple of bucks' worth of regular. No change. The overly-friendly owner then tried to convince me that "it probably needs a little tune-up." Right. If it won't run right for him, it won't run right for me. It pulled pretty hard to the right too. I got suspicious when I noticed that they had scraped off the old registration stickers. Did they try to register it but fail the smog test? Something fishy was going on there and the guy was trying way too hard to talk me into it. So I didn't buy it. Someting better will come along.

Sunday was busy. I taught Gospel Principles again this week and enjoyed doing it. Loyal Reader Number One spoke in sacrament meeting. He did a very fine job and we heard numerous compliments. After church, LRN1 and I went home teaching. We dropped in on one guy we hadn't heard of before - he was very welcoming and pleasant, if a little crusty - and visited some people we already knew. They're moving as soon as they can sell their house, but we'll keep visiting them until then. I worked some on the HRVA website, but only got partway into my article about Henry Ford's famous camping trips. I'll try to find the time to finish it up during the week.

Today I worked. Still love it.

-- Later --

It's late at night now. We jacuzzified for activity. To our general satisfaction, we discovered that the pool has warmed up even more and is now just a little bit chilly. The boys spent a lot of time in it, and I jumped in a couple of times too. It's getting better!

No links tonight - just too late. I'll come back tomorrow and add a link or two.

That's about it for today. See you on Tuesday.

Sick reader

Here's Loyal Reader Number One. He's a little sick today, so I thought I'd let him demonstrate exactly how he feels.

It's Friday afternoon and the living is easy. Went to work on time and stayed a little late, making up for the day I came in a little late and went home on time. I rode the train for the first time this week and had a pleasant trip. Still no internet connectivity, but no traffic either. My emails had built up during the week to the point that I had 79 unopened messages. Got through all of them on the way in. And now I'm doing a little writing on the way home, after which I plan to read some of the very strange guide to Ruby I downloaded the other day.

The Pool People came today and got the pumps going. Loyal Reader Number One has been playing with some of the controls. He knows how to turn the waterfall and lights on and off and make the spa do its thing. Apparently, there was a pretty big dust storm yesterday afternoon and it left a lot of dirt in the pool, so it was a good thing to start filtering the water. We'll see if it can clean it up all the way. They left us the creepy-crawly vacuum, but we can't use it for a week so it won't mar the plaster while it's curing. No problem.

Productive day at work today. We're getting ready for a major presentation next week, and I think I have all my inputs finished. I found out this morning about a couple of backup charts I needed to make. Knocked them out in the early afternoon. Did a bunch of other generic things and completed all the A items on my list and even got to one of the B's. Not bad.

I instant-messaged with Andy, one of my former colleagues this afternoon. He got out of our commercial operations a month or so ago and is now in the building next door to mine. We're going to get together for lunch on Tuesday.

There were no links yesterday. Sorry about that. As I mentioned in that post, I cheated just a little and actually wrote it this morning. I posted during a quick break at work but had no time to put links together. I'll make up for that by including plenty of links today. As soon as they get the internet working on the train again (grrrrr), I'll be able to do the whole thing during the trip. Happy days to come.

Loyal Reader Number Four and I are going to a Root Beer Social this evening. It starts at 7:30 and we can't be there until about 8:00, but that's fine. We're looking forward to getting to know some people in my High Priest group a little better.

Time to hit the Ruby book. Have a great weekend and look for an update to the HRVA by Sunday night.

Twins

Here's a hitherto-unrecognized pair of twins. The resemblance is amazing.

First, a small disclosure. Thursday was such a busy day I never got the chance to post. Thanks to the magic of Blogger I'm back-dating this so nobody will ever know the difference. Thanks to my loyal readers for their patience.

So what kept me so busy all day? For starters, I actually left work half an hour early to go to the Lockheed Martin Macintosh User's Group. They have a meeting on campus every month and I wanted to check it out. Sadly, the jury is still out. It turns out the overwhelming majority of members have been retired for many years - or at least have been eligible for retirement for many years - and the level of discussion was at a somewhat elementary depth. On the upside, they showed a fairly interesting training DVD on iMovie. While much of the training was pretty elementary too, I did pick up a couple of pointers (and the most elementary parts made for a very good nap for me and several other meeting-goers). They had some door prizes, most of which I would have been very happy to win. On the upside, I did get an Apple User Group pen, which they said they give to all new members. So I can't decide whether to pay the ten bucks a month to get their newsletter, which they say runs to about fifty pages a month. Decisions, decisions.

The LMMUG lasted until about 6:00, after which I drove directly to Stockton for a church meeting. They had a general authority giving some leadership training. Unfortunately, I didn't get there until 8:00, so the only speaker I heard was the GA. His talk was really good, though, and I'm glad I went. Went home after that, had some dinner, and went to bed.

I also had a look at the pool. It's full now and looks pretty cool. At least it looks cool at night - the pumps still aren't going and they tell me there's a lot of crud floating on the surface. Nobody has gotten in yet, although Loyal Reader Number Two did stick his head in and most of the rest of us have waded a little bit. We thought the Pool People would be over sometime during the day to get the pumps started up, but no. Friday, hopefully. I'm working on getting Pool Training on Saturday, but still don't have confirmation. They want to come do the training during the week, but I told them I'm not taking a vacation day for that. We need to bring them a bottle of pool water for chemical analysis on Saturday and spend our gift certificates for chemicals and patio furniture. Busy, busy, busy.

Other than that, Saturday looks pretty open right now. I need to make some home teaching visits to the people who would probably just as soon not see me. Need to let them make that decision, though. Maybe they'll all turn out to welcome us with open arms. There's also a lot of other Ward Mission Leader work that hasn't gotten done yet this week.

It's time to get to work on the back yard now that the pool is in. Saturday is my only realistic opportunity to do anything there, so I need to put in a significant effort. We're still struggling with how it ought to look, but there are many things we can do until then - flatten the dirt back out, get the deck drains hooked up, etc. I think we're pretty close to at least a basic decision on the overall theme and can start getting ready to at least put in the lawn soon. We need to do that - there's a lot of dust out there.

I've also decided that weekends would be the perfect time to work on the HRVA website. Morrowlife on Monday through Friday and the HRVA on weekends. I'm planning to work a little on the lantern rebuilding project this weekend and research and write an article on the famous old Ford-Edison-Firestone camping trips.

Time to move along. See you tomorrow.

Piano guy

Here's Loyal Reader Number Two playing the piano in the Old House Museum in Ogallala. As I think I mentioned before, that was a different kind of museum. They let you play the antique piano and pump organ, just to name two examples.

The pool people came and went and did their thing and there's now a hose filling up the pool. I must have just missed them, since there were only a few gallons of water in there when I got home. It looks great. We can find all kinds of defects, of course, but it looks great anyway. It's supposed to be full by tomorrow sometime. We can hardly wait.

Time for me to go pick up the missionaries. They have a Very Special Message for us. See you in a bit.

I'm back. The missionaries have come and gone. Their message was Very Special. Loyal Reader Number Four made some of her delicious peanut butter hot fudge sauce, which we had with ice cream and bananas. Yum.

The pool is even fuller now. It hasn't covered the entire bottom yet, but it's getting there. I think we have no reason to fear it overflowing during the night, though. Sometime tomorrow. I've already been in the water, if you count taking off my socks, hiking my pant legs up a little, and wading in to just above my ankles. I just had to be the first.

Tried to listen to Leo Laporte's Futures in Biotech podcast for the first time this afternoon on the way home. I tried the first three or four editions. Sadly, it's a non-starter. It's an unfortunate combination of too "inside baseball" and too boring. As with most of his other podcasts, they interview a leading figure in the industry. Unfortunately, it turns out that leading biotech industry figures are a dry lot. I doubt Leo will keep it alive for long. Or maybe he'll find a way to make it interesting. I hope so, because it is truly a fascinating industry that ought to make for some really interesting discussions. The other thing handicapping the podcast is that Leo is teamed up with a young biotech industry insider who is from outside the entertainment industry. Way outside. He can't ask a simple question without tripping all over his tongue. He can't complete an intelligible sentence. He's not cut out for radio, which is essentially what podcasting is. Of course, it might be an acquired skill. Or maybe not. Anyway, you can sense that Leo himself is bored with the whole thing and can tell it's not making for compelling and informative entertainment. Too bad.

I downloaded the new version of iTunes last night but didn't get to play with it at all. Loyal Reader Number One did, though, and he says it's the neatest thing ever. You can finally copy music from your iPod back to your computer, for one thing. There are now movies for sale. Granted, they're just Disney movies so far, but it's a start and Disney has some pretty good stuff in its catalog. I wouldn't ever pay the price they're asking, but I wouldn't pay the price they've been asking for TV shows for months now, and they've been pretty successful with those. They have iPod game downloads too, for which I wouldn't pay their asking price either. I'm so cheap.

Still haven't done anything with WordPress, short of printing the installation guide. That's a start. I'm hoping for something to happen over the weekend.

Loyal Reader Number Four just found out that her uncle Cecil passed away earlier today. We're very sad about it. He was a happy, kind man and will be sorely missed. We're finding out about funeral arrangements soon. I hope LRN4 can go.

I'm even sleepier than yesterday, so that's it for now. See you tomorrow.

Cool

Here's Loyal Reader Number One being cool back in Philly.

The first time I tried uploading that file I didn't notice it was a .tif, rather than my usual .jpg, and I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't transfer. Turns out it was just too darned big. Every once in a while I save my pictures in the lossless TIFF format. It's probably a good idea and it keeps the picture quality as high as possible (my camera can't save in RAW format, sadly), but it seems to take forever to save a picture to disk after I shoot it, and it certainly uses up a lot more disk space when I copy to my computer. I may start doing it anyway. JPEG's problem, they tell me, is that the image quality degrades every time you save it, since it compresses each and every time. I don't know if that's true, but it probably wouldn't do me much hard to save in TIFF more often, just in case. Disk space is cheap, and I can always save old images onto CD-ROMs if necessary. But I need to remember to convert to JPEG in Gimp before I upload to my blog and/or Flickr. Neither place will accept a huge TIFF file.

I read a little bit today about WordPress, which is a pretty cool open-source blogging tool. I'm thinking of installing it on the Computer on a Dime sometime soon to see if it will work as a replacement for Blogger, which is pushing an "upgrade" version that is causing trouble for a lot of people. It might be time to migrate to a solution I host myself (on my ISP, that is - would that I could legally host the whole website and email server on my own Linux box - dratted Comcast!). The first step is to get a test installation working on my own network, and then we'll see about moving it to the web server.

I've been installing a lot of web tools on the CoaD lately, and they all work great. It turns out to not be too hard to get a webserver and all of the associated trendy tools up and running. I haven't tried setting up mailserver yet, but I'll bet it's equally easy. I'll have to try that over the weekend too. The tough part, of course, is getting the security right. There's plenty of internet help available, but you really have to stay on top of it.

No more content today. I got up, showered, dressed, went to work, worked, came home, changed, ate dinner, checked my email, picked up the missionaries from the church where they had two flat tires, got some audio clips ready for LRN4's seminary lesson tomorrow, got gas in my car, and it's now 10:19 PM and time for beddy-bye. I'll definitely have some content tomorrow, though. Water will be in the pool.

See you then.

Wheelbarrow

This sort-of picture of a wheelbarrow is in honor of our neighbor who kindly loaned his real wheelbarrow to Loyal Reader Number Four and even helped her move some sand from the front yard to the back today. Thanks, neighbor!

It's 9/11. A moment of silence, please.

Pretty good weekend. Didn't do much on Saturday other than get Ruby on Rails installed and working on the Computer on a Dime. It was a challenge to get the database portion working right, since RoR doesn't include any tools to manage MySQL and it wasn't easy to find a really good free GUI to do it. Loyal Reader Number One finally suggested PHPMyAdmin, which runs in a web browser and works great. Highly recommended to my many Loyal Readers who need to manage MySQL databases.

Ruby on Rails itself (other than the aforementioned lack of direct configuration of the database) is really cool. As advertised, it's a very complete and easy to use web application framework. You tell it what content you want on the website, set up your database to have a place to store the content, and RoR automatically sets up a skeleton website that just works and includes functions to enter, edit, display, and delete your content. You then go back and make your pretty HTML templates and write prettier functions to operate on your data in Ruby, which is a fairly easy language to understand - lots of English in it, which is kind of surprising given that it was written by a Japanese guy. Easy to learn and capable of some pretty impressive results. It even comes with its own mini-web server for development and has a very nice built-in testing function. You have to make it work with Apache when you're ready to go into production, but that's not hard at all. Unfortunately, I don't have a site up on the web yet, since I've just been working on a tutorial using the little local server. Besides, I'm not yet sure whether my hosting service supports RoR. It might turn out to be a much easier-to-use content management system than what I've started using for the HRVA website. Then again, it might not. Either way, it's nice to learn a new system. Besides, learning the RoR concepts has given me some clues about working with the poorly-documented PostNuke product.

Sunday I was busy with lesson preparation, my monthly PPI, church, correlation meeting, and an LMP web conference. We're buying 3M this month, in case any of my Loyal Readers want some inside information. Recommendation: buy anything other than 3M if you know what's good for you.

The Pool People continue to make good progress. We had our final city inspection this morning, the gas people installed a nice new bigger gas meter today, and they're coming to plaster on Wednesday. It's interesting - they plaster in the morning, acid-wash it in the early afternoon, and put a garden hose in it immediately thereafter. No drying time required. We should have it full by sometime Wednesday evening. You can't swim in it for a day or so afterwards, but we'll definitely be swimming by the weekend. We may freeze to death in the unheated water, but we'll be in the pool! Besides, we can heat up the spa to counter any chilling effects of the pool.

Drove to work today. There was more traffic than usual, but it still didn't take quite as long as the train would have. I listened to a bunch of TWiT podcasts, some of which were enjoyable. Unfortunately, TWiT has dropped from my very favorite podcast to well down the list. The same thing happened with Diggnation. They get into topics that just annoy me. In the case of Diggnation, they got cruder and cruder until I finally had to drop them from the list entirely. It's a shame - Kevin Rose can be very entertaining and articulate. I don't know why he has to ruin that with crudity. The TWit guys are just annoying, but not crude. If they start geting profane, they'll fall off the list too. Leo's other work is still very good, though.

Time for bed. See you tomorrow.

Shooters

Here are a couple of tough hombres. Stay out of their way.

Had to work about seven hours today, which was kind of high for my off Friday. Still, I got home pretty early and have had a pleasant afternoon and evening playing with various computers. I got a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) setup running on the Computer on a Dime. Installed MediaWiki and got it running as well. Thanks to Loyal Reader Number One for a few pointers he was able to give based on his experience getting the same software to run on his laptop earlier today. I must say, though, that mine runs a bit faster than his old relic. I wonder why his machine doesn't like to serve web pages so much.

The Pool People were here and not only cleaned up (a very nice job, I'm pleasantly surprised to say), but they also installed all the equipment. They tell us by this time next week we'll have a finished pool full of water! Jubilation reigns. The only downside is that, according to California law, I have to have these stupid alarms on each of the doors leading outside of the house that make an incredibly loud noise every time anyone opens them unless the happen to remember to push a reset button. They will definitely be installed on the doors during the time of the inspection on Monday.

The Crating People did show up yesterday and they took a whole lot of boxes away with them. Good riddance. Now we'll probably need a moving box next week. I'll bet we could scrounge one up if we really tried, though.

Time for bed. See you on Monday.

Chariot

Here's one more picture from my trip to Paris earlier this year. They had lots of nice old statues and sculptures and things.

I think it's time for me to quit being Held Hostage. I'm seriously wondering whether the Ace train is going to work for me. I'll probably switch to driving for a while. I can always come back to the train when I get sick of the car. Maybe if I can find a way to get a reliable, useful traffic report before I leave home, I can make a decision in real time. The train just takes a lot longer than the car, even on the worst traffic day. The good thing is that I have the choice.

The rumors of a sale of ILS (my former employer in Washington, as you know) have been confirmed - the company told the ILS people, sent out an announcement to all employees, and announced it publicly today. They've been sold to a completely unknown company, and they'll deal exclusively with Proton and Angara. I wonder if any of my former colleagues will move on. I suspect the company will refuse them in-company transfers, if recent experience is any guide. I'm really glad I got out when I did.

PEC went well last night. I like the other members of the council. It's a little hard to keep the group on task, but they enjoy their meetings. It's kind of nice the meeting is held on a weekday evening rather than Sunday morning. The atmosphere is just a little more casual. I got home a little later than I would have liked, so I've been sleepy today. That was especially hard because of all the meetings I had to attend. I've been able to get a little sleep on the train, but it's really not restful enough. There's just no substitute for shuteye under the old blankets. Maybe I'll get my eight hours tonight.

The Pool People are supposed to come tomorrow and clean up the backyard. Hopefully, that will include removing the many piles of cement all over the place and smoothing the yard back out. They're skipping a week after that - don't ask me why - and coming the next week (probably) to install the equipment. The plaster should follow shortly after that.

The Crating People were supposed to come today and take a bunch of boxes from us. I hope they did. I'm really ready to be rid of the head-high pile in the garage. Unfortunately, the Crating People aren't willing to take away the huge boxes full of paper, but the Moving People are supposed to come take care of that. They're being strangely cagey about the whole thing, though.

The HRVA website is up to five members now! Of course, they're all family members and Loyal Reader Number Seven, but that's about right for now. I haven't been able to get any additional content produced yet, so my readership might not increase for a while.

Time to do some reading. See you tomorrow.

Fort Bridger

Here's Loyal Reader Number Two at Fort Bridger, near Lyman, Wyoming. It was an interesting tour that day.

America held hostage, day one million and seven. No internet on the train. Sadly, nobody from ACE is a Loyal Reader, so my plaintive cries don't carry any weight. Maybe I should stop complaining. Nah.

Busy day today for meetings. I was in a conference room from 10:00 until 2:00. It'll be even busier tomorrow, though. Let's just check my calendar here . . . Okay, I'm back. 9:00 to 1:00, 1:30 to 2:30, and 3:30 to 4:00. I guess that's not so bad, is it?

Short post today. I have my first 8:30 PEC meeting this evening. There's not much time to compute beforehand and I need to go to bed afterwards. Besides, I'm pretty much working, commuting, eating, computing, and sleeping this week; so there's not much to write about.

Here's one thing, though - the company has a Macintosh club that holds a monthly meeting. This month's meeting is on the 14th from 4:30 to 6:30. The subject is iMovie - how to work it, presumably. Here's the big question for my Loyal Readers: should I go? I've already created a couple of iMovies, so I at least know the basics already. Will they go beyond the basics? Is there anything useful there for me to learn? Is it a productive use of my scarce free time? Loyal Reader Number Four has an Enrichment meeting that night, so she won't care much whether I'm home on time or not. Besides, I'll bet I wouldn't be home much later than usual if I start the drive home at 6:30. So what's your opinion?

My (much) older sister's birthday is on Friday. Sadly, she's not a Loyal Reader, so she's ineligible for our usual hearty Morrowlife birthday wishes. I hope she has a nice day anyway.

See you tomorrow.

Lake Ogallala yet again

Here's a non-sunset picture of Lake Ogallala. That sure was a pretty place.

Back to work today. A few colleagues were busy over the weekend, but it was pretty uneventful overall. The schedule's unchanged and things are humming along. There was a big scare this morning over something that was more or less pointless, so I spent a little time whacking that mole. The good news was that if our Masters have enough to time to obsess over pointless things, that's a pretty good indication that things are going very well. We'll be zappin' down them missiles before you know it.

Loyal Reader Number Four and I spent a little while last night looking at the pool, the deck, and the backyard in general. There's a lot of difficult and expensive work ahead of us, but we're anxious to get started on it. We're seriously thinking about a shed. It would be much smaller than the one we had in Pennsylvania - probably about 6 x 8. We just need to store the lawn mower, trimmer, edger, blower, gas cans, picks, shovels, rakes, pool chemicals, pool toys, and whatever else comes easily to hand. There are a couple of spots in the yard where it might work, neither of which is perfect but neither of which is terrible, either. What to do, what to do . . . The bottom line is that there's no way we'll be able to conveniently fit all that stuff in the garage, so we need to figure something out.

Loyal Reader Number Two expressed some interest in coming up with a script for my upcoming movie. He's pretty creative, so I though he might want to do it. Get your nose to the grindstone, LRN2! My other thought was to look on the internet for acceptable scripts. I know there's a lot of stuff out there; I just need to look for it. Google is a wonderful thing.

America Held Hostage, yet another day. I'm sitting on the train right now and can't get to the internet. We're all still wondering why they had to disable the old system months before they install the new one. Grrrr. The train is moving through town at about ten miles per hour right now, so we're likely to be pretty late getting home. Grrrr. The service may be lousy, but at least it's slow.

Bulletin: the speed just started to pick back up. The internet is still dead.

Response to the HRVA continues to just skyrocket. There are four members as of now (thanks for joining, Katie!), only one of which actually owns an RV, and none of which own a vintage RV, but that shouldn't be construed as a less-than-stellar website kickoff. Slow, organic growth is what we're going for. Besides, I haven't printed any stickers or certificates yet. Or added any content either. So, the response is probably right where it ought to be at this point.

I got a few books at the library on Saturday. I'm putting one of them in the current Morrowlife book club reading list over there on the right, and the others in the On Deck Circle. I'm enjoying Quit Your Day Job. I have no plans to actually Quit My Day Job anytime soon, but the author offers some very solid advice on writing for money. As an example, he dismisses all the pointless writing exercises found in other writing books because they make no money, and his book is all about writing for money. Instead, he suggests writing and submitting one article a week as an exercise. He also talks a lot about writing quickly, the idea being that the faster the words go into the word processor, the more regularly the paychecks roll in. He thinks it's better to write garbage down quickly and edit it into an acceptable state than to write only perfect stuff, thus effectively writing nothing. He suggests that we accept the idea that we're not writing Art, we're selling prose. There's a big difference.

So I've decided to continue to write garbage, but to do it more quickly. Oh, and maybe do a little bit of editing along the way. Aspiring writers in the Book Club might do well to check out Don't Quit Your Day Job.

One of my new goals is to actually convince a Loyal Reader to read one of the books in the Book Club. Maybe I should start reading more interesting books.

With that said, it's time to quit. See you tomorrow.

Reader in rocks

Here's Loyal Reader Number Two climbing around in a rock field in one of those neat-o Pennsylvania state parks. Golly, how I want to go camping again.

I noticed that Loyal Reader Number Seven discovered and registered on the HRVA website. There's not much there yet, huh? I hope to add content over the centuries - things like pictures of Historic RVs we come across in our travels, interviews with owners of old RVs, reviews of old RVs and both modern and vintage camping equipment, and reports from campouts. Member submissions in any of those categories are most welcome. If multiple people actually become interested in the organization, I hope to even organize events, but that's probably somewhere down the road. On the other hand, we could just call all of our future family campouts Official HRVA Outings and see if we can get anybody to come along with us.

We've been joking about starting the HRVA ever since our terrible but beloved old 1973 (or was it a '74?) Starcraft popup. Everybody else in the campground had nicer campers than us, so we decided we should give our trailer a little cachet by starting the HRVA. The slogan was going to be something like, "It's not a beater, it's Historic." Ever since I got my own web hosting, I've thought I ought to actually try to get the club going. I had a few minutes yesterday and had been wanting to learn how to work a new web Content Management System, so I went for it. The CMS I'm using (one of the two CMS's included with my web hosting package) is a little bit more poorly documented than I would like, but I'm figuring it out. There are a couple of forums with some good information out there. Google is a wonderful thing.

Many thanks to LRN7 for finding the site and joining the club. You'll get your membership certificate and sticker as soon as I have them made. And rest assured that even if I have to start charging a membership fee, you'll always be a paid-up charter member. Along with Loyal Reader Number One, who also signed up today. Keep watching the website for more stuff.

Happy Labor Day! We went to the Lathrop Ward picnic, which was a lot of fun. The people here sure are nice to us. They provided the food, beverages, and activities. Each family provided a side dish or dessert (we brought some very good brownies/chocolate cake) and just hung out and had fun. We planned to only stay for an hour or so and ended up there for about three hours. Good times.

On the way to the picnic, we discovered that Manteca puts about 2400 American flags along many of the main roads for major patriotic holidays. There are holes in the sidewalks at regular intervals and somebody comes along and puts an identical flag in each one. The cumulative effect is pleasing.

Had to work on some work this evening, so my time is up. See you tomorrow.

Eva

Here's Loyal Reader Number Three's snake. Cool. Speaking of which, it's Loyal Reader Number Three's birthday! Happy birthday, LRN3!! What did you do on Your Special Day (link warning - smarmy reading of children's book)? Probably the same thing I did on My Special Day - work. Welcome to reality, unfortunately. I'll call you after I get home. Photography courtesy of LRN3, of course.

America held hostage: day I-don't-know-how-many-plus-yet-another-one. No wifi on the train. I saw an email from a Railroad Person today that said they've pushed back their first car's installation until the end of September, with the others coming on line as late as three months later. I'm searching for some reason to believe them this time but haven't been able to come up with anything yet. I'll sleep on it. In the meantime, why is it they can't get the old system to work anymore? Huh? Answer me! I thought so.

On a happier note, it's the holiday weekend! I'm home for three whole days! There's so much I want to do, I don't know where to start. I need to get Loyal Reader Number Four's car washed. I need to get a California driver's license (assuming the DMV is open on Saturday, which I believe they are). I have a lot of stuff I need to put away in my closet, dresser, and file cabinet. And then there's the garage. That truck's going inside there sooner or later, so it might as well be sooner.

I've been thinking about making another movie. I'll have to talk to my Loyal Readers and see if we can't come up with a script. Any budding screenwriters out there? I'm looking for something that runs somewhere between three and ten minutes and that can be made using next to no equipment and a camera that can't even take an external mic. Also, we'll have to use ourselves and any friends we can manage to find as actors. And we'll have to do all the shooting and editing ourselves. And we have no budget. Otherwise, the sky's the limit. Let me know.

Forgot to bring my camera on the train today. Maybe next week. The weather should be approximately exactly like it is today, so at least I don't have to worry about waiting for favorable conditions.

I got up at 3:54 (tried to make it at 3:45 but seem to have hit the snooze button without gaining consciousness) and took the early train this morning. Made it to work a few minutes before seven. The idea was to nap on the train and not do any work until I actually got to work, especially given the absence of Wifi on the train (grrr...). I slept some and felt fine all day (well, no more sleepy than usual, anyway), so I guess I can count it as a success. I'm not sure I got any more done, though, so I guess I can count it as a failure too. Like everything else today, we'll have to see how it turns out on a more permanent basis. I expect I'll drive to work at least one day next week too - Friday, in all likelihood.

I read a few pages of The Scientific American Boy last night and today. It's fun, as you might expect a 1905 book written for adventure-seeking boys to be, but it relies heavily on its many illustrations, and they're not included in the Gutenberg electronic edition. Most of the prose is descriptive of the numerous (and incredibly complicated) Projects for Boys, with related diagrams. It's still interesting, though, so I'm going to keep reading a little longer and see if I can treat the pictures as optional. In the meantime, I loaded three more Wodehouse novels (getting near the end of Gutenberg's list - a pity, that) on the Gadget yesterday (see them in the on-deck circle over there on the right), so I'm ready to move on if necessary. I'm also adding my new Dick Francis book and a couple of other things in my reading pile. My Loyal Readers require this information as soon as they can get it so they can get the most out of the Morrowlife Book Club.

Speaking of books, I got a Lardville library card a couple of weeks ago, but haven't checked out any books yet. I probably have plenty to read already, but I hope to get over there tomorrow and see what looks interesting. I'm lucky I don't have unlimited money, because I'd be emptying out the bookstores on a daily basis, and there's just not enough shelf room at home. Of course, if I had unlimited money I could buy a house with a huge library. Never mind. I wish I had unlimited money.

We're really ready for the pool to be full of water and swimmable. Not too much longer now. Must . . . be . . . patient. Okay, I'm fine now.

Well, this has become inane, so it's time to quit. Have a great weekend. The Morrowlife blog never rests, so we'll see you on Labor Day.