Saturday
- up and out of the house in Ventura, back to Lancaster.
Tanked up the vehicle when I arrived, so that it needn't be done at o'dark thirty on Monday.
Then,
honestly, I didn't do a lot. Mowed the lawns, did some small
household chores, more laundry (there were about three weeks worth to
plow through) caught up on the TIVO. Supernatural, Smallville,
Medium, Burn Notice.
The Tivo won't record Reaper for some reason - I suppose I could set
the VCR to do the recording, but I've forgotten how. It was never very user
friendly, and after two years I don't really remember the trick. The
manual is still around, so it's doable.
Finished Book #17,
Lord
of the Silent Kingdom, by Glen Cook. Sword and sorcery stuff,
but for the genre well written.
And then there was Book
#18, GPS
for Surveyors and GIS, read earlier this year and not mentioned. It wasn't as technical as I'd hoped for. Oh well.
All of which puts me just one week behind a book-per-week rate, except that tomorrow it'll be Week #20 of the year and I'll be two books behind. Well, it's not a contest, so there's no sense it getting worried about it.
And Cook has another Tunfaire novel out, so that'll help
Friday
- I worked late, so I'll stay in Ventura tonight, do some laundry, and
head up to Lancaster tomorrow morning. The house seems to be mine for
the evening, which is nice.
Thursday
- received an email from my brother, with a picture of the quad-tiltrotor
concept:
"Hah!"
sez I, "I
see your measly four rotors and raise you six, seven, maybe
more:"
:
The Robur-dyne conceptual design for an "Arsenal Aircraft"
Wednesday 7 May 2008
Wednesday
- another long day. Not a lot to say.
I am trying to find out if the bookcase and desk left behind by my
rooms' old tenant are up for grabs, or if he intends to return and
collect them. Though it's like a mini-secretary and doesn't really lend
itself to use with a laptop computer. We'll see.
Tuesday 6_May 2008
Tuesday
- back at work. Up at about 3:30am to get down to Ventura, reload the
inspection gear, then get out to the Saticoy office at 6:30.
Note to self: keep the stuff in the Explorer or in
Lancaster, so as to be able to leave 4:30 or 5:00-ish.
Not too much to say, a long day, I was pretty tired after two long
drives and six hours sleep. The cats were happy to see me, however
briefly.
Time to do a few bills, then hit the sack.
Monday 5_May 2008
Monday
- Back on the road, down to Lancaster. After a fairly lazy weekend I
got a burr up my...shirt...and mowed (weed whacked, actually, and when
did that become a verb?) the back lawn, swept and did some hedge
trimming, and put some new redwood stain on the retaining walls.
Traffic wasn't bad. It's nice to have someone to share the driving (and
cost of gas). We listened to an old Louis L'Amour on tape, Lando,
written in 1962. It ended with a real twist: Sackett won.
Sunday
- we gave my brother a laptop for his birthday, yesterday. He was, I
think, surprised. Definitely pleased. Dual core Turion 64, 3GB ram
250GB of disk,
running Windows Vista without any of the problems my friend had. We ran
the STARS
benchmarks
from the OSU web site and it did very well. It was neat seeing the dual
pane task manager jump to 100% task utilization on the multithread
benchmark.
I bought an external drive to back up my laptop. My previous 80GB
external USB drive I'd cannibalized to fix my nieces' laptop drive last
visit, and when I went to Fry's this trip it was cheaper to buy a
complete 250GB Maxtor external unit then it was to buy a bare drive to
put in the old external USB case. I suppose all the cheap drives were
snapped up by the time I got over there. I was looking for under $100,
and the Maxtor was $99.99.
It apparently includes some software to back up a disk image, as well
as basic backup functionality. I'll have to try that out.
My Dad has a new wireless (supposedly) web camera. So far we've been
able to make it work with wired ethernet, but not wireless. I admit to
not having read all the documentation, but so far I don't see it
showing up as wireless link appearing on the laptops and such. There is
a bunch of port forwarding and stuff involved in getting it to work
through the router/firewall. Maybe next trip.
It was a pretty lazy day otherwise. We fixed the screen on one of the
bedroom windows, did a bit of grocery shopping, that's about it.
In the afternoon my other brother came by, and we had some pizza and
watched the Stars-Sharks game. I had to root for the Stars, of course,
but went to bed long before they won in fourth overtime.
So far, this year, I'm up 25 cents on Dad in baseball bets. Heh.
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