Travel's and Image's

WEEK 29 2011

Last Week- Sun- Mon- Tue- Wed- Thur- Fri- Sat- Next Week

Picture of the Week

MAIN PAGE

Oxnard Weather Underground

Lancaster Weather Underground

Martinez WeatherUnderground

First Post, 17 March 2002

Nine Years Ago, This Week, 2002

Eight Years Ago, This Week, 2003

Seven Years Ago, this week, 2004

Six Years Ago, this week, 2005

Five Years Ago, This Week, 2006

Four Years Ago, This Week, 2007

Three Years Ago, This Week, 2008

Two Years Ago, This Week, 2009

One Year Ago, This Week, 2010

Saturday 23 July 2011

Saturday - So, I'm sitting under a shady tree this morning and my yard sale fanatic friends call. "Do you want some bricks?" Well, sort of. I want them to mysteriously appear, already laid as a patio, in a bed of sand and gravel, but that's not like to happen. So, for under $60 I bought about 360 clay bricks, which is a pretty good price. I loaded and moved them all in the Explorer, in two trips, and the seller was thankfully close by.

Then I showered and took my friends out to a nice Korean BBQ lunch. Their son had just arrived home from a week in Scout camp in the Sierra's, and is heading overseas Monday to the World Jamboree in Rinkaby Sweden, on Monday. He was trying to decide between napping and doing wash after his lunch...

These, plus some bricks I already have, brings the areal coverage close to 100sf, which is what I need for paving part of the side yard.

Friday 22 July 2011

Friday - Houston, we have tomatoes! Actually I had my first little cherry tomato a few days ago, but now they are ripening fast.

On the Vine.

In the Hand.

One thing I was trying to do was to make a contact sheet of photo's from the 4th of July vacation, so that my friends & family could pick and choose what they wanted. There are over 1200 photos, so just burning a DVD wouldn't work, I'd need three of them. Unfortunately none of my software wants to do that. I can resize images, one by one, but my version of Paint Shop Pro is so old that it doesn't support scripting, my version of Camedia Pro doesn't seem to work on Vista, and Microsoft hasn't ported over their PhotoToys tool. There was a clone, from Sourceforge, but although it says it installed I can't find the executable anywhere. I tried the built in windows search function without luck; then even tried using TREE from dos, redirecting the output to a file and searching that; but no executable. Annoying.

Thursday 21 July 2011

Thursday - It's warming up these days. It's nice in the mornings, but kind of toasty later. I had Costco rotate the tires in the Explorer. My card was expired, so I renewed it there. I got a lift home and back from a friend.

While talking she mentioned that she'd been part way through a book, Wild Swans, while on a trip earlier this year, and had to leave it with her in laws. A bit of checking allowed me to discover it at the Quartz Hill library, so I checked it out for her as a thank you.

I also checked out two books for myself, The Hot Gate by John Ringo, and Drood, by Dan Simmons. Sci-Fi and Horror, respectively. New branch library = new selection of books.

Mathematician humor-

“Theory — you know everything, but nothing works. Practice — everything works, but nobody knows why. In our department we merge theory with practice: nothing works and nobody knows why.

via

Wednesday 20 July 2011

Wednesday - Hmm. Went looking on Netflix for Veronica Mars, to restart Season 3, and the show was gone. WUWT? I wonder if getting rid of the DVD's means my selections are now censored in some way? But I've heard that NetFlix stuff comes and goes. Update: Yep, ended in June. Apparently they sometimes come back though, so it may not be a permanent loss.

Cycling my DVD player a few times got the door to work OK again. But if I keep it I need to keep, at least, the amplifier for the stereo.

Tuesday 19 July 2011

Tuesday - Kind of a slow day.

I logged onto Netflix and changed my account to streaming only. I haven't used a DVD in so long that my player is frozen up and won't eject.

As is my CD player. I think I'll pull all the component stereo stuff - it just sits there burning power, and I haven't used the VHS player or the cassette deck in at least a year. Every month I go over my baseline, perhaps this is part of the reason why.

Looks like I screwed up the book numbering, again. I was looking for Mike Perham's book, and realized that not only had I not listed it, I had restarted from #66 where it should have been #69. Too late to change now, but the table looks like this:

#1 Lords of the Sea #2 Kris Longknife #1: Mutineer #3 Kris Longknife #2: Deserter #4 Kris Longknife #3: Defiant #5 Kris Longknife #4: Resolute	#6 Kris Longknife #5: Audacious #7 Kris Longknife #6: Intrepid #8 Kris Longknife #7: Undaunted #9 Little Women #10 Good Wives
#11 Empress of Eternity #12 Quarter Share #13 Up Jim River #14 Betrayer of Worlds #15 The Bounty*	#16 Half Share #17 A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden #18 The Wreck of the River of Stars #19 Citadel: Troy Rising II #20 Live Free or Die
#21 Surface Detail #22 How the Irish Saved Civilization #23 The Name of the Wind #24 The Wise Man's Fear #25 A Galaxy Unknown	#26 Valor at Vauzlee #27 The Clockwork Universe #28 The Clones of Mawcett #29 The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet #30 Trader Vyx
#31 Origins of Life #32 Milor! #33 Castle Vroman #34 Outies #35 Origins	#36 Resurrection and Awakening #37 Triton #38 Frontline #39 Fracture #40 Fragments
#41 Into My Father's Wake #42 Heaven, Hell, and Salt Water #43 Blood Maidens #44 Dust #45 Saturn Alia	#46 A Lion on Tharthee #47 The Warriors Apprentice #48 The Vor Game #49 Brothers In Arms #50 Mirror Dance
#51 Cetaganda #52 Memory #53 Finder #54 Storm Passage: Alone Around Cape Horn #55 Barryar	#56 Komarr #57 A Civil Campaign #58 Unsinkable: A Young Woman's Courageous Battle on the High Seas #59 Altered Carbon #60 Broken Angels
#61 True Spirit: The True Story of a 16-Year-Old Who Sailed Solo, Nonstop and Unassisted Around the World #62 Chill, #63 The Lost Fleet #1: Dauntless #64 The Lost Fleet #2: Fearless #65 The Lost Fleet #3:Courageous	#66 The Lost Fleet #4:Valiant #67 The Lost Fleet #5:Relentless #68 The Lost Fleet #6:Victorious #66 69 The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Dreadnaught #67 70 The Undercover Economist
#68 71 The Silkie #69 72 The World of Null-A #70 73 The Players of Null-A #72 74 Angelmass #71 75 Sleuthing the Alamo: Davy Crockett's Last Stand and Other Mysteries of the Texas Revolution	#73 76 The Witling #74 77 Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse) #78 Sailing the Dream

Book #78, read some time ago, was Mike Perham's Sailing the Dream. At age 14 he became the youngest person to sail the Atlantic alone, and at age 16 he sailed around the world. By then Guiness was no longer doing age records, but it's a remarkable feat.

So we have this group of kids (teenagers) who did this, all in the span of a few years. American's Zac and Abby Sunderland, the Englishman Mike Perham, and the Australian Jessica Watson. Of the four only Abigail Sunderland didn't complete, being dismasted in the Indian Ocean. Oddly she seemed to be one of the most experienced of the four, but a knockdown can break any mast.

Three of the four have books reviewed above, Zac has just a DVD documentary for only the first part of the journey, and it gets pretty badly panned at Amazon.

Monday 18 July 2011

Monday - still tired, but unpacking luggage and clothing. In the evening I went for a swim at friends.

We'd installed at 12V constant duty pump running off solar electric panels to push their pool water through a thermal solar panel, but it failed after a couple of weeks. After talking to the tech support people for the pump it turns out that the probable cause was morning and evening brownouts, when the solar panel wasn't putting out enough power to turn the pump, but was still passing current through it. So the windings in the stalled motor overheated and failed. This is a common problem for ranchers using solar power to power their remote well pumps and the solution is a (rather expensive) voltage regulator, which she bought, along with a new pump.

Speaking of pumps, I noticed that my swamp cooler didn't shut down Saturday night, and was still running on Sunday morning. Checking, it seems that the timer was set to "always on", rather than 1pm:12am. Hopefully it hasn't been running non-stop for two weeks!

Talked to my Tehachapi friends, turns out they weren't there last night, anyway.

Sunday 17 July 2011

Sunday - The I-5 was still being worked on near the CA-46, so I took the scenic root, through Alpaugh (pop 1,000) and Earlimart (pop. 8,500) over to the 99. The road east-west was almost empty, and the towns are just whistle stops.

I tried calling my friends in Tehachapi as I was passing through there, but the hands free voice recognition let me down, again. The Droid stinks for that.

Just after passing through Earlimart I saw the sun going down in the rear view mirror, a red ball on the horizon. Coming down the Nine-mile grade on the west side of Tehachapi I saw the moon rising, just past full I suppose, bright enough to drown out the starlight.

I was pretty tired after the drive and didn't do much on Sunday. I did have a request from my old supervisor for an IGES translator that I wrote, back in the day. I was able to find something from 2002, originally written (at least partially) in 1997, and sent it off to him. I'm not sure it will do what he wants, but it's what I had.

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: Kid and Clown, Cayucos Ca., 2011.

Last Week- Sun- Mon- Tue- Wed- Thur- Fri- Sat- Next Week