Travels and Images
WEEK 26 2003
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Picture of the Week
Lancaster
Weather
A Year Ago, This Week
Saturday 28 June 2003
Saturday - off in San Diego at a friend's yearly beach
barbecue, down at Crown Point on Mission Bay. As usual I got lost and had
to phone for directions...I was basically within a half mile or so, but the
road I was on just didn't go through.... The weather was perfect, and the company and food even better!
I was having too good a time to take pictures :-)
Friday 27 June
2003
Friday - a warm day, and fairly busy. I just returned from
a walk at 10:00 pm - it is probably in the nineties still. The weather page
says 83 Fahrenheit, but that is out at the airport, away from the urban heat
island.
It's clear tonight. I have the urge to drag the
telescope out and look at Mars, but it's getting late...
The tree after trimming and before - everything below about ten or fifteen feet went.
Thursday 26 June 2003
Thursday - The door guy was here, but he'll need to come back again...
Deja Vu all over again.
This morning they came by and trimmed, for free, my tree's. Well, I assume
that my taxes pay for it. I talked to the guy for a bit - I think he was
relieved I wasn't out to complain, but rather to thank him. He said that
they keep busy year around, and in fact it was now taking four years to complete a circuit and get back to a particular house.
I'll try to take a picture so as to do a before/after thing. I noted that
my digital camera is losing date and time lately. I've reset it a couple
of times, and a day or two later it is back to 1/1/2002. It still works fine,
but it is a little confusing when I save the pics.
I had some mild success with the PVM machine today - wrote a code that went
out, did calculations with multiple processes on multiple machines
( returned the nodal hostnames just to make sure ) and returned results to
the parent process. It's one thing to run other's demo programs, but quite
another to write your own. It's how you learn what argument 3 of some particular
command/subroutine does, how to debug, and just how it feels when writing and debugging, and failing to run such stuff.
For example, in Fortran, there is no pvmfgethostname routine to get
the node name, despite what the book says. Instead, in a child process I
shelled out to the linux shell ( got to include the -Vaxlib option in the Intel compiler switches to get call system() to work - go figure ) , do a hostname, redirect that to a file, return to the program, read the file to acquire the name, pvmfpack the name into a string and return it to the parent process. It was a hack, but it worked.
Wednesday 25 June 2003
Wednesday - The door guy was here, but he'll need to come back again....
We had some visitors in at work, so I spent some time talking to them and
giving them the cook's tour - although the lucky stiffs had been up at Mojave
earlier in the day and got to see "Spaceship One" and "White Knight" there.
They were doing interesting stuff - putting a small infrared telescope on
a Gulfstream G5 for example. (Note: Actually its a G-IIb) The big blister and open door of the optical
bay were carefully designed and have zero effect on the G5's flying qualities
- apparently the original flow was so dirty over the top, just rear of the
cockpit, that their careful aerodynamic design helped enough to offset the
increase in frontal area and wetted drag!
I spent an hour and a half spraying for weeds on the lawns - I think the
fungus is on the increase in the back lawn. Drastic measures may be needed
there.
Tuesday 24 June 2003
Tuesday - not a lot to say. Working on various things.
Went to dinner at Zuma's in Rosamond with some folk from work. I half expected
it to be another Sierra Highway dive, but it was clean and the food was good
:-)
The door guy was here, and the doors now are at the same height and the framing mostly completed.
Monday 23 June 2003
Monday - the door guy arrived, and my cat sitter,
so I was off to work. When I got home I found it still a work in progress,
but looking better:
The new french doors, partially installed.
Sunday 22 June
2003
Sunday - worked around the house in the morning,
wash, yard, and so on. Took it easy for the rest of the day as I had a bit
of a head ache.
I read a couple of books late in the week and through the weekend, "Pyramid Scheme" and "Hidden Empire". Not much really - fun reads but not run out and buy all those author's books
level stuff. Both were clearly set up for sequels as well, which sort of
annoys me, even though it seems more common than not these days.
All that reading may have something to do with my headache - 850 pages or
so. I don't think my prescription is all that it might be.
The internet seems to be having trouble tonight. My own site, amazon, and
yahoo have come back at various times as "page not found." Hmmm.
Picture of the Week
Photo Notes: Every
year the town of Port Townsend in Washington state has a wooden boat festival.
This shot was taken in 1998 and it appears to be a gaff rigged (wooden, I'm
sure) schooner. Note the lack of any square sails at all - downwind might
be interesting.
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