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WEEK 50 2010

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First Post, 17 March 2002

Eight Years Ago, This Week, 2002

Seven Years Ago, This Week, 2003

Six Years Ago, this week, 2004

Five Years Ago, this week, 2005

Four Years Ago, This Week, 2006

Three Years Ago, This Week, 2007

Two Years Ago, This Week, 2008

One Year Ago, This Week, 2009

Saturday 18 December 2010

Saturday - another slow day. Rainy and wet, staying indoors mostly. Feeling a bit better - tired and sore, but able to keep down crackers for lunch and, for dinner, chicken soup; all with only mild pangs.

Chicken soup because the mushroom soup, decanted in a blob from a can, didn't liquidate after five minutes in the microwave. A quick check showed that this particular can expired in 2001. Hmmmm. I'd gone through the cabinet and thrown out expired canned goods just this summer, but I missed some, it seems. Well, the chicken soup was fine, I bought it recently.

I entertained myself by watching Season 1, Disk 3 of the Mentalist (via Netflix). There is, occasionally, even some snappy dialog.

Book #88 was Line War, by Neal Asher. This is the fifth book in the series, and, as far as I know, the last Ian Cormac book. About the same as the rest.

My sister sent me a picture of her cats sharing a couch...

Lela and Roxy.

Friday 17 December 2010

Friday - Tired and achy with an painfully upset stomach all day. Great. I have things to do, but barely dared to leave the house :-(

In the early evening I checked on a friends' house, kenneled their dogs for the evening, and came home to a very light dinner of rice and chicken.

Big mistake. Up well past midnight again, with a bit of vomiting thrown in for good measure.

Book #87 was Polity Agent, by Neal Asher. Eh.

Riley and Phoebe, sharing warmth on a cool winter's day.

Thursday 16 December 2010

Thursday - Well, the morning started off poorly. The accursed lazarette drains were blocked again - 1/2 lines with right angles, very poor design - and there is a storm predicted for the weekend. So I pulled the line off under the cockpit, like I always do, and this time the plastic L fitting through the cockpit sole broke. Since I had work to do, and not much time, my "fix" was to clear the other drain line, and put stoppers in the defective starboard side lines.

The inspection went fairly well, though there wasn't much to actually inspect. Then I headed back to Lancaster.

For dinner I had some soup that I defrosted a few days ago - perhaps a week. Maybe that was it, or maybe it's a stomach bug, but I didn't get to sleep until 2am. Nasty evening. Not what I was hoping for upon my return home.

Wednesday 15 December 2010

Wednesday - Well, it looks like I've an inspection tomorrow, so I called up my cat sitter and plead myself another day down here. It's a bit irritating - it's the Christmas season and I'm stuck 100 miles from home, barely making my gas money. Bah.

Book #86 was Brass Man, by Neal Asher. This is #3 in this series, and much like the other. Reading candy. They guy does have an imagination, but his plots are pretty pedestrian and rely to a truly extraordinary degree on coincidence. Ah well. In this book the mysterious alien attacks continue, the evil Skellor puts the evil Golem Brass Man back together, and a knight looks for a dragon.

I did find a flaw in my VbScript (during a demo, naturally). I used "stop" instead of "Wscript.Quit". The client had a couple other minor requests that shouldn't be too hard to incorporate.

If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.
E.W. Dijkstra

I did order a present online: a Corning Ware Visions 2.5L saucepan. Someone asked for it for Christmas, so I walked around the mall looking for it. After checking out Macy's, Sear's, Target, Penny's and Kohl's without luck I called them with the bad news. "Oh," they said, "they don't sell them any more, you have to buy them online from Ebay or somebody like that."

Tuesday 14 December 2010

Tuesday - Not much to say. The weather is turning cold and foggy - rain predicted for this weekend. I'll probably head back to Lancaster tomorrow afternoon.

Monday 13 December 2010

Monday - I was hoping to get started out in the field, a couple of quick inspections, but can't seem to get the County interested in their own projects...

So, I did a bit of programming, updating some stuff, and trying to figure out more about VbScript automation. It's like pulling teeth to get information on this stuff - generally as the stuff gets harder the hits from Google and Yahoo get fewer. I have to look at VB.NET and C# stuff in order to get the syntax/object/properties I want.

Book #85 was John Scalzi's Agent to the Stars. This is a quick fun romp, in which smelly Jell-O like aliens hire a Hollywood Agent to make them look good to humans. It was Scalzi's first book, and he literally gave it away, just wanting to see if people liked his work.

Sunday 12 December_2010

Sunday - Trying to relax, and to get some work done on the boat. I wasn't feeling 100%, but I got started on the compass replacement. The old compass failed due to the plastic of the compensating diaphragm failing, due to age. The new compass requires a hole 1/4" bigger than the old unit.

Book #84 was The Pirate Hunter, by Richard Zacks. This is a biography of William Kidd - "Captain Kidd the Pirate" as I grew up hearing, and makes a fairly detailed case that Kidd was wronged. Kidd, in his early life, was a successful privateer, a military hero in New York, and a successful businessman. In the late 1790's pirates were running amuck in the Indian and Red seas and he wrangled a commission to hunt them (and the French) from the British. His backers were four very important lords, and the King of England (William). It started well - he had a ship specially built in England for the purpose (a galley, with sweeps, to be able to move when there was no wind) and outfitted there. He has a pass that kept British Navy ships from impressing his seaman - something hard to get. He had a contract that allowed him to sell re-captured goods anywhere without having to take them to a slow and expensive British prize court.

Despite a good beginning it turned out badly, due to a number of factors. He made enemies of the East India Company and the British Navy, who before he even reached his cruising grounds started spreading reports - official reports - that he was a pirate. Then he had the misfortune to re-take a ship belonging to the Mogul of India - someone the British in these early days of Empire were desperately courting. Then his own crew mutinied and ransacked another ship.

After this Kidd locks himself in his cabin, alone, with twenty pistols protecting himself and the treasure from an entire ship of mutineers and pirates. He outlasts them, and they finally leave. Believing himself innocent of any wrong doing he finally rebuilt another ship, and sailed back to America with the treasure, intending to turn it over to the authorities.

Who then, to cover their political butt's and curry favor with the ruler in India, imprison him for two years incommunicado without charging him, and then hang him after a one day trial in which they hid the evidence, and in which his lawyer's disappeared the day of the trial, and in which he was forced to personally defend himself in court against charges which he had never heard until that day (if he didn't defend himself the default judgment was guilty). And, oh yes, the prosecutors offered pardons to crew members to testify against him, and the said crew members simply made things up, in particular conversations and statements by Kidd that happened when the witnesses were not even on Kidd's ship.

It runs to about 19 hours of audio, on two MP3 CD's, so I've been listening to it for the last half of the year, off and on.

But you learn a lot about how pirates really worked, how British justice really worked, and the history of both New York and the West Indies.

Between re-reading a couple parts of Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, the biographies of Newton and Hooke, and this book, I seem to be spending a lot of time in the late 1690's...

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: Sierra Nevada mountain, ca. 2006.

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