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Sunday 26 May 2002
Sunday - gone on vacation.

Monday 27 May 200

Memorial Day. A day to remember those who fought for their country and paid the ultimate price. My father had a friend, Johnnie Fry, who died on a pacific island near fifty years ago.  My father survived, as did my grandfather, and numerous uncles. I guess there are people who feel nothing on this day,  but I'm not one of them. My brother and sister served their country, but did not have to fight - though nuclear submarines and air bases in Germany in the 1970's put them on the front lines of the cold war.

It was a nice, if busy weekend. I'm going to save the description for later, but it included a nice barbecue at Crown Point, 'chuckwagon' dinners, a shopping spree at Fry's , and more!

Tuesday 28 May 2002

The theme for dinners  in San Diego was "Chuckwagon" - our hosts nickname was 'Chuck'. There were beans, chicken, beef, melons and even lasagna! Plus wonderful place settings - I'll have to see if I've a picture of the table with old fashioned lanterns (working, too) and so on!
Chucks' wife A put it all together - she has a Ph.D. in art and can do amazing things - which is where the trip to Fry's comes in. She is going off to Africa to research for a book and wanted a new digital video camera and a new computer to edit on - and that's what we walked out with. You know, it's fun being a resource for someone - until you see the bill they are racking up and start to worry you've steered them wrong! But apparently it's working out very well - though a G4 & OSX isn't quite as friendly as the old 'classic mac' a friend tells me.

Wednesday 29 May 2002

We put together a little progress memo and schedule at work, and sent it out. By lunch it was obsolete - we decided to do more work with out current model because after 2 months we still have no new data from Langley. So it goes I guess.

Thursday 30 May 2002

Thursday we worked on getting the new model up to speed. Everything is going well - we discovered a short cut using the preprocessor that will speed up things a lot,  only a bit of coding needed. Typing one handed it takes me a while to code. But one of my first computer course instructors used to tell us that thinking-to-coding should be at least 2:1, and even 5:1. He was right!!

Dinner has been moved to Thursday nights, to work around some schedules. We were concerned that there might be a larger crowd at the restaurants, but it seemed OK last night at "Vince's Pizza and Pasta'. Then all eight of us went off to see "Star Wars". I liked it, though I missed Jar Jar not having a bigger part...  I want to see it again - it's truly a visual extravaganza

Friday 31 May 2002

Friday extended into Saturday as we tried to get a task done. Usually it's fine to go home and come back fresh, but if it is a complicated modeling effort the advantages of sticking with it and keeping it all in short term memory can be considerable.  It's one reason hackers and coders work late into the night ( the other being they have no personal lives! ).

Speaking to my father earlier in the week he mentioned buying a new scanner. Apparently it does slides. My brother Bob liked it so much that he went out and bought one himself! Reading up on Linux the other day I learned that one reason scanners are so cheap these days is that all the 'smarts' are in the software loaded by the pc Windows driver. Which is great for everyone except people who aren't using windows...

I don't seem to have a pic of Tim's' barbecue - maybe I'll dig one up from last year...

Here is a shot of  the dinner table 'Chuckwagon" from last week. That is our host Chuck himself, second from the right, and me just to his left. I'm looking at someone taking another pic from the stair landing, and our hostess A is taking this shot. The lei's are from a visit to the wholesale flower market earlier in the day ( A has a wholesalers license).

chuckwagon dinner table

Saturday 1 June 2002

Saturday I was a bit of a slug, hence the late post. So, a little apology, in the form of a list of the last months links....

Fry's , a great place to shop for cumputer gear in southern california,  27 may
Lancaster Photography Association , Lancaster California, 22 May
 "Bully for Brontosaurs" and many others , S.J. Gould's (RIP) books at Amazon.com, 20 May
Yahooligan's , a safe site for kids on the net, 19 May
Brother 1440 , monochrome lasrer printer review, 15 May
OSU Benchmark , CFD Benchmark on different Computers, 11 May
" Deep Thoughts: Inspiration for the Uninspired" , Amazon.com review, 11 May
"Roommates from Hell" , Amazon.com review, 11 May
"I'm So Tired Of Other People, I'm Dating Myself" , Amazon.com review, 11 May
H.M.S. Sackville , a Flower Class Corvette, 10 May
Nicholas Monsarrats' "The Cruel Sea" , Best Sea Book of all time,Amazon.com, 8 May
"The Psychology of Sailing" , Amazon.com web page, 8 May
  Plot of asteroids , in our solar system, 8 May
Netscape Composer 6.2.2 ,  better web page building, 6 May
NGC 4676 , Colliding Galaxies, 6 May
Robot rats: rats controlled by implanted computer stuff, 4 May
Penguin Cam : a web cam at the nort pole, 4 May
Maglight ,flashlight, cops use 'em as clubs I'm told, 2 May
ZoneAlarm , indispensable firewall for your PC, 3 May
http://www.dictionary.com , which is an on line dictionary, 3 May
U.S.S. IOWA , BB-61 , the battleship, in the mothball fleet, 29 April
"Tin Cup" , the K. Costner movie, 28 April



Picture of the Week
    ed sailing on sf bay

Photo Notes: This is yours truly, sailing on SF bay, some summer.



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