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WEEK 24 2010

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Saturday 19 June 2010
Saturday - we had the big Boy Scout meeting in the evening. The guest of honor did an excellent job - the right mixture of humility, humor and earnestnest in his speech. A GREAT evening, and a GREAT kid.

I took a raft of pictures, most of which are blurred because of the low light, but there were also a couple of fixed video cams and I suspect thouse will turn out great!

Friday 18 June 2010
Friday - working.

Thursday 17 June 2010

Thursday - working.

Wednesday 16 June 2010

Wednesday - on the road, down to San Diego - and back. I was helping a friend's parents come up for their grandchilds big Boy Scout meeting on Saturday. Traffic was good, and it was a pretty quick trip, both ways.

Tuesday 15 June 2010

Tuesday - working at home. One desktop, two laptops, one with the external monitor hooked up. Quality control and auditing GIS is a pain in the a**.


I hasten here to include, Book #37, which was Keith Laumer's Assignment In Nowhere. This is classic Laumer, short, to the point, full of action and a most manly hero. This was one of his parallel universe (Imperium) stories.

#1 Sailing from Byzantium
#2 Wireless
#3 The Riddlemaster of Hed
#4 Heir of Sea and Fire
#5 Od Magic
 #6 Storm From the Shadows
#7 Krakatoa
#8 The January Dancer
#9 The Forest of Time
#10 Over the Edge of the World
#11 Harpist In the Wind
#12 Destroyer of Worlds
#13 Unknown Quantity
#14 Transitions
#15 The God Engines
 #16 The Garden of the Shaped,
#17 Shaper's Legacy
#18 Wizard's Bane
#19 The Wizardry Compiled
#20 The Wizardry Consulted
#21 The Wizardry Quested
#22 The Wiz Biz
#23 Flinx Transcendent
#24 Seize the Fire
#25 Iorich
 #26 To Say Nothing of the Dog
#27 Falling Free
#28 Babel-17
#29 Way of the Pilgrim
#30 Empire Star & The Ballad of Beta-2
#31 Blackout
#32 Eifleheim
#33 Limbo System
#34 Lady of Mazes
#35 Cobra Alliance		 #36 Deadman Switch
#37 Assignment In Nowhere
#38 Strange Encounters: Adventures of a Renegade Naturalist
#39 Spinneret
#40 Drinking Sapphire Wine

Monday 14 June 2010

Monday - Waxed the Explorer, it looks a lot better. Did the tire and rim foam cleanser thing as well.


Then, except for a brief outing for lunch, work. Fixing some data from early April. More quality control stuff. This took me a solid eight hours, about double what I expected. Tomorrow I'll see if I can get  it re-interpolate it and put updates into the Manifold GIS database.


Drinking ice tea in the evening kept me awake after knocking off at 11:00pm. So, until about 1:00am, I read.

Book #40 was Tanith Lee's Drinking Sapphire Wine. This is a bit of a riff on Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars (Against the Fall of Night), where robots maintain an eternal city of youth and happiness for the humans, and where eventually an inhabitant gets tired of the sameness (even though one may opt to be reborn and have their memory erased) and opts out of the nanny-state. Written in 1980 it features promiscuous sex, suicide and drug abuse - all in good fun since nobody can actually permanently die - that are absent in Clarke's 1948 book and it's1956 revision.

It wasn't really a copy of Clarke. Like the ur-world at the center of reality, or alternate universes, certain plot lines and situations are common in SF. It was reasonably well done, a respectable alternate imagining. Short and rather jumpy, but not bad.

This turns out to actually be a sequel to Don't Bite The Sun, 1979, though it stands on it's own. I'm not sure I have DBTS - this book was probably once one of my sister Kathy's, but I'll look on the shelves for it, just because.

Sunday 13 June_2010

Sunday - Cut some more metal rod and plate for the railings. I used the Sawzall, and the blade was getting pretty dull by the end of things, despite liberal applications of oil and using a wooden spacer to cut with a different portion of the blade as the work progressed. The cuts aren't all that great, a band saw would make straighter and more uniform pieces, but they'll do. They aren't really visible anyway. After cutting the rods and flanges they had to be ground reasonably smooth, and then a quick pass with sandpaper to get most of the sharp edges off. Again, they aren't where people would normally touch or even brush against them, but the pirate ships attracts lots of small children with inquisitive hands.

After all that I swept up the metal shavings and filings. Or tried to - they were a fine powder and just wouldn't sweep up, the floor remained gritty to the foot. So, in order to keep the cats from waking in it, and licking them off their paws I mopped. About half the garage - and it really needed it, it's been a few years since it was properly cleaned. And being a warm evening the floor quickly dried. I need to clean out and mop up the rest as well.


I also washed the cars - the Explorer, in particular, really really really needed it. Tomorrow I'll wax them, early, before it gets warm.

Picture of the Week


Surfers at Cayucos, Ca., 2009
Photo Notes: Body Surfers, Cayucos, Ca., 1979

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