Saturday
- Still down in Ventura. I finished some work, but wasn't feeling good and didn't get as much done as I had hoped.
I did finish Book #7, The Lord Protector's Daughter,
by L.E. Modesitt. Eh. Another in the 'Corean Chronicles' series. At
least it was free - a library book. A Ventura County library book I
might add. I mailed another letter to myself at the Ventura apartment and used it as proof of residence, so now I have a 'real' card.
I finally ordered an EVDO router, a Kyocera KR-2
(which is really a rebranded Cradlepoint unit with a PCMCIA card slot).
I will use my broadband card with this and drop the home DSL and phone,
and save about $100 a month. I first started considering this a year ago,
according to my own blog. Oh well. The hardware has improved since
then, and is more compatible and reliable than it was. The Linksys unit
I was looking at, on more thorough investigation, had more problems
than I had originally thought, so I held off, and the D-link and other
units were pretty much junk.
Friday
- The county coughed up some help today, so things went pretty
well in the field, good footage. Of course the mapper crashed, 20' from
the end of the channel, and would not
re-open my GIS map. I'm actually afraid to try to download that data -
what if the mapper has zeroed out an entire days work, again?
Riley and Phoebe, enjoying the morning sun.
Thursday 19 February
2009
Thursday
- another long day. After work I stopped by to see the boss's new digs, nice, if a bit further away from my Ventura apartment.
The old landlord, despite an economy in the dumps, refused to
renegotiate terms on the lease, which was ending. So, it's a new office
location, at one third the cost per foot of the old office. You have to wonder what landlord #1 was thinking.
On the way home in the evening, looking to the west, there was a trace
of an obvious missile launch out over the Pacific, beyond Santa Cruz
Island. A golden pillar of cloud again the reddish sky after sunset,
slowly being torn apart by the winds. Was is a missile launch from a
submarine, or an practice aircraft-to-ship strike by a fighter out of
Pt. Mugu? There was no way to measure the scale or distance of the
cloud, but it seemed much too westerly for a Vandenberg AFB launch.
Wednesday 18 February 2009
Wednesday
- back to work, about an 11 hour day in the channels. The weather is
gorgeous, clear and cool. Hopefully it will stay that way through the
weekend.
I downloaded some of the pictures I took on the way north, of the snow
in the west valley, and of snow on the Techachapi's as seen from the
north, on the coastal range, and on the Sierra's. All unusual to see,
and some of the pics might end up as pictures of the week soon.
I was listening, this trip, to a book on tape called Simple Courage,
about Captain Kurt Karlsen and the saga of the SS Flying Enterprise, in
early 1952 (some remarkable pictures, here). After the ship being hit and severely damaged by a couple of rogue waves the captain sent the
crew and passengers to safety, and stayed aboard the listing, dead in
the water vessel, waiting for a tug. It was apparently quite a story at the time. Oddly,
last night while flipping around the channels I ran across an episode
on the History Channel entitled Rogue Waves. It was a bit
sensationalist, but it did cover the basic big stories - the QE in WWII, the Flying Enterprise,
the overturned oil platform, and the more recent damaged ocean liners (Norwegian Princess?)off the Cape of Good Hope.
Apparently there are several more books and films on the subject. I
have seen the picture of the listing vessel before, but never heard the
story.
Entertainingly, if that's the word, just a few weeks ago I found a web site mostly devoted to freak or rogue waves. Freaque Waves, as it is entitled by the author combining the two most common descriptions of the phenomena.
Tuesday 17 February 2009
Tuesday
- more work on the new laptop in the morning. It is doing odd, annoying,
things, to the desktop shortcut icons. Changing them, or not changing
them. Very irritating to me, and to Dad.
By late morning I hit the road, and was back in Ventura by about 5:45.
It rained all the way down, off and on, and the hills at the Grapevine
were covered in snow. But the roads were dry.
Monday 16 February 2009
Monday
- Because of various issues with my father's laptop we bought
a new one. It's a nice big fast beast, but sadly it runs Vista. I've
spent a lot of time trying to tame it, and make it work in a simple
straight forward way. Not everybody wants to start anew, and the
various default's are extremely annoying, particularly if you are
trying to work at a relatively low resolution.
I did manage to migrate the Outlook Express files 6 over. Vista does
not use OE6, but rather "Windows Mail", which looks very similar to me.
There is an upgrade tool, which corrupts your files, or a manual
method, laid out in detail on some forums, that works reasonably well.
Anyway, after many hours and much cursing I got the thing at least
semi-usable.
Since the I-5 and CA-58 were closed I couldn't get home, or down to
Ventura, so I decided to stay one more night.
Sunday 15 February 2009
Sunday
- It's nice to be up in Martinez, listening to the rain. Very soothing.
Which is good, because it's been raining a lot. There is a tiny leak in
the front room, when the wind blows strong from the east. I bought a
tarp to put up there, but the wind direction and force changed, and it
hasn't restarted. Basically the house needs a new roof, the current
asphalt shingle's have been up there for 25 or 30 years now.
