Travels and Thoughts

Travels and Images

WEEK 52 2006

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

Picture of the Week

MAIN PAGE

Lancaster Weather NOAA

Lancaster WeatherUnderground

First Post, 17 March 2002

Four Years Ago, This Week, 2002

Three Years Ago, this week, 2003

Two Years Ago, This Week, 2004

A Year Ago, This Week, 2005

Weekly Picture Archive

Sunday 31 December 2006

Sunday - New Years Eve. How about those Forty Niners', spoiling things for Denver? Maybe there will be a winning season next year!

And congratulations to the Chargers as well - I suppose I'll be rooting for them in the playoffs this year.

Interesting. On the Linux version of Nvu the horizontal line can be edited as before. Maybe I just messed up? I'll have to check again.

We gave the dog some tranquilizers, so that helped calm her down a bit during the fireworks and gun shots at 9:00, 10:00, 11:00 and 12:00. My father says she slept outside my door, which hurt his feelings a bit. Heh. He just feeds, houses' and pets her - I take her for walks!

Saturday 30 December 2006

Saturday - a nice quiet day, not a lot going on. We watched a bit of college football, and were going to watch the NFL game, but it was on a channel we don't get here.

Nvu has some minor issues. It's allows one to put in a horizontal line, as above, but only at 100% width - and then you can't select it and change the width property as you can do in the old Netscape Composer. Instead you go into the source and modify it there.

I was able to get the streaming MP3 support, by installing the VLC media player, using the Adept package manager built into Kubuntu. It worked rather well, actually, and was easier to use than the old Fedora RPM utility. First I added the 'universe' and 'multiverse' repositories and tried to upgrade Amarok and XMMS, without getting the MP3 support. Finally I found a reference to VLC at a SUSE site, and used Adept to get and install it - and it immediately worked. Sometimes being obsessive pays off.

Apropos to my Mars theme, the last two Martin Mars forest fire fighting planes are being retired, and museums are scrambling to get them. It's kind of sad to see them go, but at 60+ years it's probably time. Better that they be exhibited for the pleasure of all than crash due to airframe fatigue.

Book #53 was All Fishermen are Liars, by Linda Greenlaw. I think I've mentioned her other two books, The Hungry Ocean was #28 in 2005, and The Lobster Chronicles, which was probably a read in 2004. All are good books. This particular copy was a Christmas present from my friend S - thanks!

The results for the 50 book challenge for 2006:

#1 The Italian Secretary #2 Gravity Dreams #3 Master and Commander #4 I've Been Around #5 Homeward Bound	#6 Post Captain #7 The Battle of Brooklyn #8 Napoleon: A Penguin Life #9 Wildtrack #10 Fastnet, Force 10
#11 Shadow of the Giant #12 Old Soldiers #13 The Pirate Coast #14 Black Bodies & Quantum Cats #15 H.M.S. Surprise,	#16 Sailing the Wine Dark Sea #17 The Secret Life of Lobsters #18 A Princess of Roumania #19 StormChild #20 Washington's Crossing,
#21 Alector's Choice #22 The Mauritius Comma #23 The Lobster Chronicles #24, His Excellency: George Washington #25 Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince	#26 John Quincy Adams #27 The Golden Rendezvous #28 In The Last Analysis #29 The Best Western Stories of Loren D. Estelman #30 The Radioactive Redhead
#31 Holmes on the Range #32 The Martian War #33 Sea of Glory #34 A Rose Red City #35 The Know-It-All	#36 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer #37 Andrew Jackson #38 Sharpe's Escape #39 The Eternity Artifact #40 Dark As Day
#41 A Rope - In Case #42 Adams vs Jefferson #43 Hunters of Dune #44 Open Boat: Alone Across the Pacific #45 A Beautiful Mind	#46 The Path Between the Seas #47 Monstrous Regiment, #48 Scurvy.... #49 James Madison, #50 The Incredible Inspector Poirot.
Book #51 was The Burning of Washington: The British Invasion of 1814 #52 was The Tyranny of the Night, #53 All Fishermen are Liars

Friday 29 December 2006

Friday - not a lot to say, just hanging out, doing a spot of work on this and that.

I'm trying Nvu for a web page editor, since I don't have Netscape Composer on this computer. We'll see how that works out. It seems very very similar.

I did take the dog for a walk. On Wednesday she surprised the cat below, who didn't seem to have a lot of backup in him. She was on a leash, so they didn't come to blows, but someday one of these big Toms is going to let her have it...

Thursday 28 December 2006

Thursday - I've been trying to do some work, but it's slow going, I seem to lack concentration for some reason.

I installed Kubuntu 6.10 on the office computer downstairs. It went well enough, but the sound is messed up. Apparently the distribution comes without MP3 support. Typical in-your-face stupidity that Linux is rampant with: 'let's create an easy-to-use distribution, but make people use the package manager to play the most common streaming music format!". Oh well. Maybe I'll put a newer Fedora or perhaps SUSE on it next trip.

I mentioned the Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs a couple of weeks back. It turns out that there is a video tribute to A Princess of Mars on YouTube. Heh. Safe for work, through artful fogging and careful panning when the upper torso of Dejah Thoris is in the frame...

My sister and brother-in-law did manage to stop by for a few minutes on their way out of town, so my niece loaded up on her presents...

Wednesday 27 December 2006

Wednesday - on Saturday last, while getting ready to get on the road, a friend stopped by to tell me there was a garage sale, across the street. I went by and picked up a couple of small items. One was an old laptop, for $35.

And I mean old: it is a Fujitsu Lifebook 420D, which uses a Pentium 120Mhz CPU, with a 1GB disk, running Windows 98. The battery is bad, but I figured as much. I've been having fun booting it with Puppy Linux off the live CD. It seems to run that reasonably well using Xorg as the X server, though the Xorg test hangs the laptop. I brought along a PCMCIA ethernet card, but apparently either the card slots are bad, or, more likely, they are old 16 bit slots and don't understand the newer 32 bit card. I've an old card at home I'll try sometime.

My sister and brother in law were supposed to arrive again, but didn't make it.

Tuesday 26 December 2006

Tuesday - dealing with the "day after". Actually it was a nice slow day, no complaints. We were hoping to do dinner with the sister and brother in law, but they got caught in a winter snow storm, coming down from Reno via the I-80.

Monday 25 December 2006

Monday - Merry Christmas to both of all my readers!

Sunday 24 December 2006

Sunday - there was a lot of food. I brought a bunch of stuff up and then bought some more on Sunday morning. There were only four of us here on Christmas eve, so there was more than enough to go around!

We set up the new Panasonic Plasma TV, and it's amazing, even with the old cabling and just SD input.

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: A yule log for 2006!

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