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WEEK 7 2004

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Saturday 14 February 2004

Saturday - still cleaning, for some reason. Used the truck to help a friend move a Koi Pond. Actually it was just the plastic lining, made of the same tough plastic that truck bed liners are made from, and it didn't weigh much.

Went out with a friend for dinner and a movie: 50 First Dates. It was funny - and there was actually a bit of thought behind the basic premise. The supporting cast and characters are funny as well.

Or maybe I should just be pirate captain? "Pieces of eight, pieces of eight..."

Friday 13 February 2004

Friday - taking care of various errands. Cleaning and putting stuff away.

"My Fair Lady" was fun. They had real water for the "Singing in the Rain" number, which was cool.

I tried to set up the 'Hobbiton" cluster here at home and discovered that two of four machines are dead - Bilbo and Pippin. Probably the power supplies, which are the original, low wattage, and cheap. If I can scrounge a couple of ATX power supplies somewhere they'll probably work OK.

The desktop computer is acting up still - not recognizing USB keys and such. Probably I will have to reinstall Win2k to get things to work. First however, I'll need to back things up.

More exciting: a career as a whaler, with a harpoon! Call me Ishmael...

Thursday 12 February 2004

Thursday - not too much writing tonight - there is dinner and then "My Fair Lady" at the LPAC. Took the car in, and it did not need new brakes, but the tranny did need refreshing.

Still cleaning and reordering things.

Maybe for my next career I should be a sea captain?

Arrgghhhh - anchors away, matey!

Wednesday 11 February 2004

Wednesday - finally found the Intel drivers disk for the 845GBV motheboard and got the desktop machine up and running again. Annoying at any time, it is particularly irritating when you are job hunting and your resume is on the inaccessible system!

When I got everything working again I received this from my dad:

Hi Ned

The dog was General Holland (howling mad) Smith's,

not Commodore Flannagin's.

love Dad

Don't get the 4th marine division after me, I could

hold them off for only a few minutes. The dog was

a dalmation, name unknown.

I changed the oil in the Explorer today. The car in a bay next to me was a corvette that was apparently the pace care at the 1998 Indy 500. It was a nice car but the owner was a bit of a jerk, from what I saw. This seems true of many sports car owners - maybe there is some truth to the old adages about 'compensation' after all.

Tuesday 10 February 2004

Tuesday - working on various paperwork issues, a resume, trying to untangle year old medical bills, trying to find out exactly who is insuring my house, and so on.

Did an oil change on the Ford Probe - 264K miles so far ( 422K kilometers ). It's getting a bit long in the tooth - the oil change folk said that the transmission casing has a moderate leak now, but they wouldn't refill it - as they expect something might break if they remove the speedometer cable ( which is where you refill ). So, since it also needs new brake pads, I made an appointment to have everything done at my mechanic, Scott, the Wizard of Nicobar, this Thursday.

I should sell it while it still passes smog tests I suppose - Kelley Blue Book prices it out as $1650, private sale. But it was the first car I ever owned new and I have a sentimental spot for it. On the other hand the cost of insuring it is a factor.

Monday night I tried running a Linux distribution from a CD on my main machine, Feather Linux. There had been a good review of it over at extremetech and it sounded interesting. It worked well enough - it was a very minimal install, but it then trashed drivers on my Win2K installation! I lost the network drivers, the USB drivers, and the embedded video drivers - and who knows what else. It shouldn't have - the whole point is an OS that runs off the CD and in the computers memory (an ample 513MB), for demonstration purposes or whatever, but it did. Which means I was off line, except for the old laptop!

In other news I provided emergency tech support at a friends. Their daughter's laptop ( yes, that laptop! ) overheats when doing any heavy computing and she had a homework assignment involving video creation. So we quickly drove to the local Best Buy store and picked up a PCMIA-Firewire card and an external Firewire hard drive. It all installed very smoothly - they could have done it without me, but I did get a free dinner out of it!

Monday 9 February 2004

Monday - over Christmas I found a streaming audio site, radioparadise, that I like. Since KFOG still doesn't seem to work for me...

I was thinking a little more on the battleship series and a conversation I had with my dad. Occasionally the big guns, battleships and cruisers and such would disappear - off chasing japs. My father remembers an island landing when all the big ships pulled out. And then, each night, almost all the transports would pull out as well - but not his, as it had the landing commander on board. He said it was a very lonely feeling. On the other hand when the fleet would come back in the morning some of them would be all bashed up due to collisions sailing at night.

He also said that Admiral Turner, credited in most history books as being in charge, wasn't. He had come down sick and the actual person doing the commanding was Commodore Flanagan. He has a couple stories about Flanagan, apparently an amiable and somewhat odd irishman. One was "being ordered to carry his damm dog up to the bridge, strangest order I ever got". The other story was when as a signalman trying to read a signal through binoculars someone walked in front of him and he barked "get out of the goddamm way". It was the commodore, and the commodore said he was "quite right" to do so.

Sunday 8 February 2004

Sunday - feeling much better, thank you! I practically sprang out of bed in the morning. Worked on the laundry, shopping, cleaning, read a bit. I also did some bills, balanced the checkbook, and started collecting all the tax information in one place. When unemployed there isn't any sense in me giving the IRS a zero interest loan for any longer than required.

In the evening I went to the LPAC with some friends. The evening was a show by "Leahy", a musical family from Cape Breton in (off of?) Canada. They do sort of a Scottish/Irish modern fiddle combo thing - very fun, very energetic, and very good. Well worth seeing!

A publicity still of "Leahy"

Picture of the Week

View from Mount Baden Powell in So. California

Photo Notes: A couple of years ago I was hiking with my brother in Southern California. The is a view from Mt. Baden Powell there.

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