Saturday
- whoa. I went to some yard sales with my friends and ended up with a
Tivo for $50. Pretty cool. It seems that my friend and the astronaut,
Gordon Fullerton, has seen it at a yard sale a while back, new in box,
and Gordo had bought it. Then, yesterday, a yard sale turned out to be
at Gordo's and R asked him how it was working. When it turned out that
Gordo wasn't using it I bought it for $50. Cool. Now, to see if it
works...
Friday - still just
working away. I heard from my father - he had a plumber come by and
repipe the gas line to the new stove and it is now working well. Heh.
Add plumber's fee to the cost of the new range and it's the most
expensive three baked potato's he ever ate!
I put in a few tomato plants, an eggplant and a pepper plant into the
vegetable bed yesterday. Overnight the beetles devoured the eggplant - there is
nothing left. Ugh. Since the last official frost day in the AV is the
15th I was loaned some plastic mill cartons that have been cut in half,
to use at night to protect the plants from the frost. I should mention
that the weather here has been wonderful, in the 70's, and perhaps into
the 80's.
Thursday 10 March 2005
Thursday
- still busy. I did go out and buy a new laptop. The old laptop was
just too slow and too limited in memory to work with the code I
develop, which caused various sorts of trouble when traveling. The new
laptop is a Sony Pentium M, 1.73Ghz, with 1Gb of Ram, and runs the OSU
STARS benchmark in 409 seconds, which is neck and neck with a
standard 3.2Ghz P4 benchmark of 404 seconds. Very respectable.
It has built in wireless as well - but I turned off the wireless
transmitter in my router/firewall a few weeks ago and now I can't get
back into the setup. It won't accept the password, and the hardware
reset button is not working. It's always something.... None the less,
the wired ethernet through the built in RJ45 connector works fine, and
I can access my LAN or the internet through that.
Wednesday
9 March 2005
Wednesday - busy, busy, busy.
Tuesday 8
March 2005
Tuesday - working away, not a lot to say.
There were a couple of teevee shows I wanted to watch, but some moronic
basketball game was going on instead.
I saw part of a show on seismic retrofits to the Golden Gate Bridge.
Apparently they are doing a lot of work, while keeping the overall look
of the bridge intact. In fact they claimed that eventually the
structure of the bridge would be entirely replaced, bit by bit. I
wonder how they plan to replace the main suspension cables?
Monday
7 March 2005
Monday - Saturday we went to the San
Diego Zoo, and it was a lot of fun. I'd never been there before - it
was quite a place. We did see the Panda's. They are bigger than I
thought, but rather immobile. They had mole rats as well - smaller but
much more active. Also gorilla's, elephants, tigers, polar bears,
giraffes and much much more.
I loaned out my digital camera to someone and haven't gotten it
back yet, I should have some pics when I do....
Sunday 6 March
2005
Sunday - the Saturday night party, for a
friends 80th birthday, went well. There were several nice speeches -
all mercifully short, and I had the good fortune to be seated across
from a classmate of the guest of honor. A high school classmate. He had some
interesting stories, and we agreed that it was probably a good thing
that the statute of limitations exists.
Drove back, at night, on Highway 138. I hate that road. Something weird
and/or dangerous seems to happen every time I am on it. This time,
apart from the slow semi's, the tailgaters and a constant wall of
oncoming headlights it was punks in two or three cars doing donuts on
and off the road directly in front of me. Stupid jerks.
Picture of
the Week
Photo Notes:
Sailboat on San Francisco Bay,
California.
