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WEEK 14 2008

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Oxnard Weather Underground
 Lancaster WeatherUnderground

First Post, 17 March 2002
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Saturday 5 April 2008

Saturday - working on the lawn still. And various other unexciting household chores.


Are CNN reporters acting on the same level as my Dads dog Peg?


Book progress:

I am trying to finish The Runes of the Earth. My sister gave it to  me in 2006 and I've been nibbling at it ever since. I'm not a slow reader, when I've time I read rather fast. Yet this just doesn't hold my interest. Nonetheless, over Easter a sister and brother were talking about the sequel, Fatal Revenant, and how much better it was than ROTE and piqued my interest. So I'll try to finish ROTE, just to get to the better book. There are two other books in progress right now - Chernow's biography of Hamilton, of which I am only on tape 19, and The Year of Living Biblically. I'm about five chapters into the last, reading a chapter or so a night. It's a fun read, but a library book and needs to finished or renewed soon.


In other news - cleared most of the TIVO backlog. The series premiere of Battlestar Galactica was on, ehhh. Also some old NCIS, a couple of new (to me) Smallville's and a Medium, Amsterdam and Dr. Who. Not much, really. I guess the writer's strike did for much in the way of new episodes. I'm pretty busy, it doesn't bother me much. I had to cancel my Monk recordings - there are so many reruns that it fills the hard drive, the TIVO apparently unable to differentiate between old and new. Reaper isn't being recorded, nor is NUMBERS. Bionic Woman got canceled - justly, it was dark and slow - and the Terminator series is apparently not having any new episodes right now

Friday 4 April 2008

Friday - back in Lancaster.

I bought a new mower at Lowe's, as the last one is non-functional. I bought the old mower in 1994, so it's served well. (I may keep it and fix it to use in the back 40 only. The lawn fungus there makes me hesitant about using the same mower front and back.)

The new mower is 'self-propelled'. Pretty neat. The 6" high grass in my front yard was just...er...mown down.

It started on the first pull. Cool. That hasn't happened to me in a few years.

It means I'll have more time and energy for the big re-do project in the back yard later this spring & summer- an hour or two of pushing a mower in 95F takes the desire to do yard work & home improvement out of you. And the price was right - the mower had a tiny blemish in the paint so the salesman knocked off 10%, and it then turned out to have a $40 rebate, so about $220 out the door. Not bad.


Purchased a pci-to-pcmcia adapter the other day. The idea is to install it in a linux box and use that in turn as a wired/wireless access point for the house, using the Verizon EVDO card, and get rid of the DSL. I note that four years ago, this week I made another foray into Linux wireless:

Played around a little bit with the linux laptop. I had made the wireless work with my fathers access point a while back and it's lack of WEP encryption, but not my own. So I checked into it - easy, really. There is a plain text configuration file, /etc/sysconfig/nework-wireless/ifcfg-eth1 (or something, it varies with different distributions) which needs the settings for the WEP key. Put that in, do an /sbin/ifup eth1 from root and Bob's your uncle. Hell, it's almost intuitive, I could probably have figured it out from first principles without checking google...

Sarcasm, moi? Heh. Perhaps I should reconsider.

Thursday 3 April 2008

Thursday - a full days work. Not enough rain to stay home.

Wednesday 2 April 2008

Wednesday - well, the "storm" arrived. A few sprinkles, that's about it. They didn't hype it as much as usual, and indeed, most of it passed to the north I think.

Went down to the boat beforehand and checked the lines, all was well. It started to sprinkle while I was aboard, so I quickly rinsed the boat with a hose to avoid getting those little "dirt pancakes" on it.

My illegal live-aboard neighbor is gone, as is his boat. The old Columbia 27 is now replaced by a power boat. Nice guy, but his rock and roll music made visiting my own boat sometimes irritating, and overnight stays almost impossible.

Not to mention the contact high...

Tuesday 1 April 2008

Tuesday - not a lot to say. Beautiful moon in the morning, crescent in the east, about scattered clouds.

 Monday 31 March 2008

Monday - back at work. I've see a lot of orchards with ripe fruit lately, and it bothered me a bit. Seems like a waste. The other day there was a bit on teevee about some sort of moth pest in California. I didn't catch all of it but perhaps this fruit is infested, and can't be shipped. In that case, why pick it?

The satellites have been obstinate lately. The last several afternoons the PDOP has gotten huge and the mapper hangs. It's very annoying - if it would just print a message saying "Can't do it, bad Satellite Configuration" it'd be helpful. Instead it just stops responding to keypad and screen input and I have to pull the batteries. Bah.

Sunday 31 March 2008

Sunday - not feeling 100%, mostly just laid about and read. The weather was interesting: winds, clouds, even a smattering of rain. The cats were happy with a fairly short morning outside.

Not enough to affect work on Monday though.

Book #12 was A Day on Mars. War SF. Eh. Nothing special.

The end of March, already. Hard to believe. This year is just flying by.

You know, every once in a while I run across a blogger writing about American Idol. I don't get it. Never watched the show, never wanted to, probably never will. Whats the attraction of watching a bunch of people making fools of themselves, and being mocked for the privilege?

Picture of the Week
Moon over the marina
Photo Notes: Moon over marina.

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