Saturday
- I didn't go north to Lancaster, thinking I'd get a jump on work here
in Ventura. Unfortunately I didn't feel well, and although I spent
nearly six hours at the office only about two would be honestly
billable.
I did install an external USB 1TB drive and start copying some data
over to it - there isn't enough room on the internal drives to make a
complete copy of the imagery for the OC report. Right now a 500GB drive
is about $65 at Fry's, the 1TB was $79, and a 2TB was about $150.
It took hours to copy the data - USB 2.0 and Firewire have the
same data transfer specification, about 400Mb/sec, but Firewire is a
hardware based solution and that is pretty much the steady state while
USB 2.0 is software based, and that's just the peak transfer speed.
If they'd had a Firewire1TB drive I'd have gotten it, but what we have is good enough.
I left early, feeling lousy but hoping to meet up with a friend for a
visit to a haunted house after taking a nice refreshing nap - and
didn't wake up until after midnight :-(
Friday
- the field work is progressing. The plans that we are working from are
not the best, so there is a lot of field direction going on, so it's
taking a lot more field time than I had hoped. The big OC report has to
be done, and it's detailed spreadsheet and database and GIS stuff, hard
to stop/start on a dime for only a few hours a day.
My sisters cats: Lela and Roxy (as a kitten), ca. 2002.
Thursday 22 October
2009
Thursday
- another long day in the field, then in the office.
Sadly our intern, J, is leaving
us to go back to school. We really benefited from her organization and
energy, and it'll be a quieter and more boring office with her gone.
Her brother flew down to LAX, D picked him up from there, and
after we treated them dinner at a great Thai place they headed off
north up the 101, hoping to stop in San Jose about midnight, then
making a one day run to Seattle on Friday.
We hated to see her go; but it was sweet to see how delighted she was
to see her brother, bubbling over with happiness and talk, despite
about two hours sleep (school assignments done remotely & packing).
I've been having trouble sleeping myself. So, when I awake at 2am or
so, I would read a chapter or two from the Sony E-reader ( I do like
the book cover with the light that I bought). Thus we have Book #62, The Time Traders,
by Andre Norton. Her books were always fairly short and spare, and this
is no exception, only 140 pages or so. It was OK, though there wasn't
much in the way of character development or hard science fiction.
They have a number of Andre Norton books there, including The Defiant Agents, which is, I think, the sequel to The Time Traders.
Wednesday 21
October
2009
Wednesday
- I note that I have not keeping things up to date.
Well, it's been kind of a crazy week. Also the computer at the Ventura
rental is not my laptop, but an old desktop that doesn't have any of my
usual resources on it - pictures, links, etc. I have an external drive
that I intend to copy this all onto, and over, if there is room on the
desktops drive. It's an old box with a Dell mobo that I bought on Ebay
for $15.00 or so, several years ago, with an 845 chipset, and a Celeron
2.4 (plenty of horsepower for surfing the web and writing blog posts).
With Dad gone the need to keep him up to date is also absent, but
blogging is enough of a habit that I'll keep it up. Too be honest, in
the last few months I had called him daily, multiple times when he
seemed low or unwell, as he had pretty much lost the energy (and eyesight) to read
the blog.
But, coming up on the 8 year mark, I'll probably continue to continue,
with the usual insightful commentary about my cats and Los Angeles
traffic.
Tuesday 20 October 2009
Tuesday
- on Sunday another big task was collecting and delivering Halloween
decorations for my friend Roger. We completely filled his mini-van, my
Explorer, and the utility trailer. He generally takes off days of work
to put his display up - it's impressive. It's hard to believe that it
is nearly Halloween already.
We all went out to Thai for lunch first, feeling that we were going to
earn it....
Monday 19 October 2009
Monday
- Up at 4:00am and down to Ventura. As construction manager I have to
be at the site at 7:00am. It is only a few blocks from my rental in
Ventura, but it makes for a long drive on Monday.
In this case we were mostly just laying out some work to be done later
in the week. Unfortunately I still spent a lot more than the one or two
hours I was hoping to spend there.
Sunday 18 October_2009
Sunday
- the big task, besides a lot of cleanup in the garage & house,
was putting some books that I brought back from Martinez into order. I
cleared the bookshelf most filled with junk - the odd written flotsam
and jetsam that one accumulates over the years - and put them in that.
I didn't have the heart to take count, but it's in the neighborhood on
100 volumes.
The cleanup was made a little more annoying by Phoebe's peeing on the
lower shelfs previous contents, earlier in the week. I noted some kitty
litter on the floor, and reminded my cat sitter that it needed cleaning
daily,
otherwise feline annoyance would be expressed! It was mostly old papers
that were damaged - college notes & copies of some old NASA
papers, and I'll go through them later (ugh) to see if there is
anything that needs to be kept, regardless of cat pee. I think my notes
on tensors were in there, which is a pity, since I'm hoping to one day
revisit them.
But the Internet has so many resources that hanging onto old notes and
books is probably pointless.
I also shelved the various audio books - mostly tapes - from the trip
before this last.
