Saturday - Did various bits of work
around the house, and some work-work as well. Lunch with friends at the
local Indian place, then a nap - still very tired.
In the evening we went to see Craicmore. We'd seen them before, in March of 2004, and they were good. The band was still a little low energy, I'd say, but still it was an enjoyable evening out.
I mentioned on Tuesday not
being able to generate a MPG file, just a WMV. My boss found a line to
a program that supposedly exported to an MPG. It worked fine for the
audio, but deleted the sound. I actually tried several programs,
without any luck. I think WMV will do the trick. I'm a little annoyed
at having installed all these bogus programs on my PC, and cluttering
up the Registry, probably even if I delete them.
Friday
29
March
2013
Friday
- Good Friday.
Home, but very very tired.
I
did get the tomatoes in, and watered them. I also put a bunch of
diatomaceous earth around the stalks, at the base, to hopefully deter
the roly-poly bugs that decimated things last year. I didn't actually see any, but I assume that they're going to show up with an appetite for tender shoots.
Thursday28 March2013
Thursday
- OTR. Down in Ventura. Went to the pre-con, and met with various other team members later.
Didn't
get a chance to drop off the GIS stuff with the other client. Well,
I'll probably be down in Ventura/Thousand Oaks every week for the next
few weeks, so that shouldn't be an issue.
Dave & I took a
quick visit to North Ventura, and a short walk along the bike path. I
was pleased to find the flood gate vault in the storm drain right where
I estimated it would be, maybe 30' feet off. It was under a tree next
to the freeway, which is why it was invisible in Google Earth. No
pedestal though, just a bit of rusted thread sticking through the
hatches.
I hung around and did various chores in the office, then headed home. Got into Lancaster about midnight...
Wednesday 27 March
2013
Wednesday
- Working away on this and that.
Down to Ventura in the evening, there's a pre-construction meeting tomorrow morning.
Tuesday 26 March2013
Tuesday
- Assembling the final data for the GIS project, for delivery, and
working up a bit of a report. All of which, as usual, took longer than
I expected.
One of the final tasks was
video editing. I'd used my old laptops before, but both the HP and the
Sony now defunct I had to come up with something new. Quicktime Pro
costs money and the this data was originally specified to use a Windows
product, so I decided to use Windows Movie Maker. After reading about
various problems with the newest version of WMM I decided to install a
slightly older version, WMM6.1. It worked fine. I created a little
video leadin and trailer for some clips, and also an ASCII overlay.
They were saved (published) as DVD quality, 3Mb/sec */WMV, which is
overkill for small black and white mpegs, but gave files of roughly the
same size.
I'd booted directly into Win7
via Bootcamp, and something interesting was revealed. I've complained
before about the My Book Live Duo drive slowness. When direct connected
to the MacBook running Win7 in Bootcamp - rather than in the Parallels
VM - the file transfer speed was very very fast!
Monday 25 March 2012
Monday
- Mostly spent doing some more yard work. The weather is too nice not
to take advantage of. The cat is not entirely happy with short grass
and fewer weeds - less opportunity to stalk an unwary bird - but seems
to be mostly enjoying himself as well. I have a lead on a set of
inexpensive lawn furniture, good since my resin Adirondack chairs are cracking and
failing, a menace to sit on :-(
Not
much else going on. Did a bit of app work, but not feeling really
inspired. Inspiration is always needed, sometimes you just grind away.
I did register a couple of domain names for the company, we'll
eventually need them to deal with Apple I think.
My brother Bob sent me a
picture the other day, one of the very few images ever released of the
Soviet Submarine K-129, that the CIA and Howard Hughes tried to raise
in secret from the seabed. It was a partial success, but the sub broke
apart while raising, and only a bow section was recovered.
Sunday 24 March2012
Sunday
- Another beautiful day, with another overcast evening. Hmmm.
I mostly did yard work - it's that time of the year. I had bought three
largish bags of potting soil, which I turned into one of the planters.
It seemed like a lot in the store, but when I was actually putting it
in the tomato bed it initially seemed rather pathetic. I'd say the
leaves I turned in a month ago (?) are about 75% decomposed, so along
with last years soil and the new soil & leaves things are
looking OK. I went out and bought another three bags but didn't get a
chance to apply it.
I'm down to Ventura for a couple of days, later in the week, and will
probably plant my tomatoes on the coming weekend. I think I'll install a
trellis of some sort, and give the west planter sun shelter with some
of that sunshade cloth - the plants seemed a bit heat-struck last year.
Picture of
the Week Photo Notes:Peach
Blossoms in the Antelope Valley, March 2013.
