WEEK 41 2012
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First Post,
17 March 2002
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Saturday - Since the old Seth Thomas
Regulator #2 stopped working I finally took it off the wall downstairs,
where it tended to confuse guests (and myself). I had it laying on the
spare bed, but when I was fooling about with the new bed I hung back it on a
wall, out of the way. On a lark I gave the pendulum a little push,
thinking it would stop in an hour or so. Days later it is still
running. Go figure...
We went out to lunch at the Korean place. Excellent food, as always.
It's kind of a pity that it's located in an old beat up strip mall,
rather than a nice venue, the food (and Kathy, the owner/cook) deserves
better.
In the evening we tried to go to Famous Dave's, but there was a long
wait. Instead we went over to the nice Italian place a mile or two to
the north. The food was excellent and they had a nice acoustic guitar
player, doing an interesting medley of songs. It was a bit loud to talk
over - we had guests in from out of town - so we asked for a table in
the adjoining room and tipped him well. So, he came in with the wait
staff to sing "Happy Birthday" to my friend R!
Friday
- Did a bit more painting on the french doors, inside. This is unsatisfactory because you have to
- sand the door and all the zillion little dividers,
- Wipe down,
- putty up bad spots,
- sand bad spots,
- wipe down again,
- tape off nearby areas you don't want painted,
- paint frame and the door and its zillion little dividers,
- scrape off the paint next to the zillion little dividers.
- Remove tape and paint that snuck under the tape.
And when you are done, after hours of work, you have an old beat up
door, still. Oh well. The frame around it had never been painted, it
was essentially primer white. The carpenter hadn't even bothered to use
a punch to drive the finishing nails below the surface of the wood.
It's mostly hidden by the curtains, but still, lousy workmanship. The
contractor/foreman, Brian, was a good guy, but he had a habit of trying
to 'help' down on their luck people from his church. I'm guessing
"luck" was associated with "doing their job right" in this case. He
made his guys tear out and redo a lot of stuff, but he missed this.
Oh well, the door is done. One of these days I plan to put a nice insulated door in there, so it's no big deal.
I watched a bit of the VP debate the other day. It was kind of strange,
Biden was ... I don't know what he was. It was just weird. Ryan came
off as a pretty decent guy, though he hardly set the stage on fire.
Thursday 11 October 2012
Thursday
- I went by the Vet and picked up the food, some pellets and soft
canned stuff, and some vitamin drops to put on it. He's always been a
picky eater, so it'll be interesting to see how he reacts.
Working on the iOS stuff. I had Xcode freak out and crash on me, for
the first time. I've heard that it does that, but it hasn't happened to
me before. Fortunately it was just a small sample program. Still, it's
a bit unnerving.
Cold and windy, no rain.
Wednesday 10 October 2012
Wednesday - So, the vet called, and
Riley does show some signs of kidney problems, the proteins (or
whatever) being about 25% higher than they should be. The vet called it
a very mild, very early case, and we'll put him on a special diet with
vitamin supplements. So, no death sentence. He may just go of old age
after all.
Did a bit of work out of the house:
- Talked with CB about the plan and profile of the pipe I mapped a couple of weeks ago, cleared up a few questions he had.
- Talked to TD about some coordinate transformations from the old
California State Plane (NAD27) datum to WGS84. When we tried the
utility last week we got nonsensical results, when I tried it today it
seemed to be working fine. Go figure.
- Talked to SH about the iPad app, and looked at some of the other
teaching stuff out there for hints on what or what not to do. Mostly
it's all too high functioning and too fast for her kids. Simple and
slow, and using techniques that she knows will work, that's the ticket
They are still predicting bad weather for tonight and tomorrow. We'll see. They always get excited about that first storm...
I see the Red Bull Stratojump got canceled again. High winds at the launch site.
Tuesday
- I did paint the door I'd previously (roughly) sanded. When the wood
is smooth it looks OK, a nice glossy brown, but it'll need a good
sanding and recoat for a lot of it. And of course the weather was just
fine, no rain, no snow, no hail - not an F5 ice tornado in sight.
I then bit the bullet and took Riley into the vets. He's been drinking
water - not unusual, but more than usual it seems, so it was time. Even
a brief perusal of what that means is horrifying - renal failure,
leukemia, and so on. Cat's livers do not regenerate and there is no
"cure". He seems healthy and spry enough, for a twelve year old cat,
still chasing butterfly's and birds, still batting toys about. Better
safe than sorry though.
So I stuffed the poor guy in the carrier and took him over. He was VERY
vocal about his dislike of the carrier. Once we were in the treatment
room he huddled up against me, hiding his head against my stomach. They
weighed him, took his temperature, and took some blood and urine
samples, and will run tests and let me know.
We were both pretty stressed out and ready to be home.
Monday 8
October 2012
Monday
- I ran AVG, SpyBot Search & Destroy and Windows Defender. None
showed anything wrong. Before deleting programs I tried a suggestion I
saw on line: turn off the "indexing" feature of Windows Explorer. Which
seemed to have done the trick. Memory usage at idle is back down to
about 1GB, ridiculous but about where it was before, and it does let
the PC function.
The laptop with external monitor I'm using as a desktop has fairly
limited disk space - 200GB, of which about 110GB are my archived
photo's and videos. I'm down to about 10GB free. I think about
70GB is Windows OS stuff, but I'm still missing some. Maybe that has
something to do with it as well.
Did a little bit of picking up around the house, then settled in for
some iOS stuff. Did you know that there is no equivalent to Microsoft
Paint bundled with the elaborate state of the art OSX? Ridiculous. So I
had to download and install one of those to generate some Icons for
programs. Last time I generated stuff on the Vista box and transferred
them over via USB drive (I really need to get a shared drive), but
that's stupid. Then I started working again.
Only to be interrupted by the radio announcer saying that they expect
rain - 50% chance - in the next couple of days. Sheesh. It seems
unlikely, but the temps have
dropped into the 70's and one door is mostly sanded to bare wood right
now. So, I gathered up the (new) wood putty and went out and anointed
the french doors. I'll try to finish sanding them and painting them
tomorrow.
Voyager One is getting pretty close to interstellar. Recently the proton flux from the Sun dropped off dramatically:
Pretty neat to think I was around for the first man into orbit, the
first man on the moon, the first landing on Mars, and now (probably)
the first interstellar mission.
Sunday
- Working around the house still. I have the bed frames built - I broke down and bought
one for the queen after the old one from the attic broke - and in their
appropriate rooms. I've picked up debris in the den and library, and almost
all the books are now shelved. I found about an extra 5 linear feet
when picking up in the master bedroom, so there is more
tossing/donating to do... I had to toss a nightstand from the master
bedroom, since it was apparently graced by Phoebe back in the day, and
the particle wood had absorbed enough urine to swell to three times
it's original width, and was pretty whiffy still when I moved it.
I drenched the carpet in pet odor remover, but I should probably have
someone with a better sense of smell than myself check it out.
Unsurprisingly, I've discovered that it's hard to get volunteers for that sort of task.
Fortunately I usually kept the guest bedroom doors closed, so visitors won't have to deal with any ghostly odors...
I miss the little guy, but this anointing of various household items wasn't one of his more endearing traits.
The only game with a west coast team was the Chargers/Saints game. The Chargers had the lead, but then blew it. Dang.
I also recorded and watched the America's Cup race in San Francisco. If
I do say so, it's pretty amazing to watch in HD, and with modern
graphics overlaid on the water, and with camera's on board the boats!
The Red Bull jump from 100,000+ feet is Monday or Tuesday, I'll have to
try to catch that if it's televised. Supposedly the parachutist may go
supersonic.
My iPad app friend came by, with a couple of design books on the Apple
interface she really likes. I guess I can look at them, and then we'll
talk about how to implement things. I have more to do around the house,
but maybe it's time to spend some significant programming time on the
app stuff. I think the engineering work is winding down on the current
projects.
My PC is having issues, using a fabulous amount of RAM even at idle
(1.6GB) and sometimes locking up and overheating. I even had Windows
Explorer crash, something that hasn't happened to me in years. Task
Manager doesn't show any processes using extraordinary amounts of
space, so I'm not sure what's happening. I'll check on a few things,
recent upgrades to Firefox, AVG, Windows and the new printer driver
could all be culprits.
Or, it could be a virus or malware of some kind :-(
