Travels and Thoughts

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WEEK 29 2006

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Saturday 22 July 2006

Saturday - working around the house. I've been gone for a lot of Saturdays, and it shows around the house and yard. Mowed, cleaned, etc etc. Even did some washing - I ran out of work shirts, socks and underwear nearly simultaneously this Friday.

Plucked some peaches from the tree - they were delicious!

I felt guilty for working around the house, and not on the boat. Last week I felt just the opposite :-)

Book #30 is Holmes on the Range, by Steve Hockensmith. It's not bad. The premise is that an illiterate cowboy ("Old Red") in in the late 1800's Montana, encountering a suspicious death decides to emulate the great detective, after having had the stories read to him by his younger brother ("Big Red") out of dime novels. The brother ends up writing the tale of their detectivin', and therefore becoming Watson to his older brothers' Holmes. It's a first novel, and suffers a bit from that, but it's much better than a lot of the dreck I've tried to read recently. And it looks like Hockensmith is writing a sequel, which I look forward to.

Entertainingly, and it took me a while to figure it out, the tale is set in a world in which Holmes is real. This isn't unusual, there is a whole sub-genre of mysteries involving the great detective. But I wasn't sure until late in the book, when a villainous sort tries to demoralize them by telling them about Reichenbach Falls that I knew for sure they weren't just gullible cowpokes reading fiction from dime novels and mistaking it for the real thing.

Friday 21 July 2006

Friday - well, I finished the abstract - about 7:00pm. I'm not sure it's any good, but it's 1,010 words long. With eleven references, one image and one drawing. I sent it to my tech lead, per his own request, at his home address. I pointed out that I had written 1,010 words on a software package that didn't have a name yet!

About noon I discovered that the equation editor wasn't installed in Word. So I got temporary admin rights, went in and tried to download it from the server. Heh. It's a checkbox under the update's tab, and the updates for everything else - Excel, Powerpoint, Visio are also checkboxes, and were checked. So, I unchecked them, not feeling the need to update all those applications at the same time (I was in a hurry, only 643 words into the abstract, 347 short!). Then I clicked run, and the installer updated Word with the equation editor and then uninstalled all the other applications!

You're probably thinking that I got mad, swore and cursed. Nah. It's just Microsoft. Their days are numbered - and Open Office is the one doing the numbering.

In other news the little portable tape player that I've been using the the Probe gave up the ghost. It hums, but the tape capstans won't turn. Bah. I am on the last tape of Philbrick's Sea of Glory - and I can't finish it. Does Wilke get out of the court martial with his career intact or not? I suppose I should get a new radio/tape player for the car - but when will I find the time?

Friday Night Critter:

Peg, tongue hanging out, on our more recent walk in the hills above Martinez.

Thursday 20 July 2006

Thursday - another long day. The Systems Engineering class continued, and I was working on the abstract for a paper.

In the late afternoon there were signs of a thunderstorm - that smell, the wind, the dark thunderheads. But it never came through - not at work anyway. Apparently it was a pretty good show in Lancaster. A (non religious) friend referred to it as "God throwing lightning about!" By the time I arrived home in the evening there were just puddles and a few downed limbs and leaves.

It also knocked my ethernet router/WAP for a loop. I was sitting down to post, and kept getting NETBIOS intrusion alarms from Zone Alarm. These had stopped years ago - from the first time I installed a hardware firewall/WAP, so it was a sign of something amuck. I then turned on the laptop and discovered that my home wireless SSID was missing - just a couple of unsecured wireless networks. Acckkk. I turned off the desktop, and the laptop, unplugged the router - and forgot to turn anything on for an hour or two. When I restarted the router and the laptop my secure connection was back, and one of the unsecured networks was gone. I'm guessing that the storm and an electrical event of some kind - an over or under voltage out of the phone line, and under or over voltage on the power - knocked out the firewall and WAP portion of the router and left it as an unsecured link. Weird.

My guess as to the NETBIOS alarms - they were probably a neighbor's network trying to hook up to the new equipment they'd found. Harmless. A lot of people don't bother to secure their wireless and their own laptops will simply connect to the strongest signal in the air, in this case mine.

Wednesday 19 July 2006

Wednesday - busy. Went and looked at some hardware in the hangar because we didn't have good drawings and properties for some items. Started rejigging the formula's in my spreadsheet - the one's I had been using (out of a mil spec!) were incorrect. Also had another loads question thrown at me. I responded by a quick back-of -the-envelope analysis, which turned out to be within about 40% of a "real" solution someone found later. ( I do have issues with the "real" solution - a larger acceleration over a larger distance resulting in a smaller velocity that I got? )

Then the systems engineering class all afternoon. It was interesting, but the chairs in the conference room are almighty hard after two or three hours.

Tuesday 18 July 2006

Tuesday - I've an abstract to write by the end of the week, a thousand words for a paper. A thousand words - plus references and important diagrams and plots. Ridiculous - a paragraph should suffice, but it's not my call. Also on tap this week: two meetings on loads, two classes on system engineering, a CEV meeting, a control room checkout, possibly a control room manning, and who knows what else.

And I've been neglecting my CFD, parallel processing and optimization stuff. I need to get on that....

Monday 17 July 2006

Monday - back to work. About a twelve hour day. With other work projects looming I need to get the loads analysis off my desk, pronto. But there are issues.

Last week I showcased the poor writing skills of a local Carls Jr. manager. Today - the writers and editors at a major book publisher, Tor. From the back cover of Poul Andersens' For Love and Glory:

Do you think they perhaps meant "starfaring"?

I can't add it to my list of books read because I didn't read it. Read the first few pages and the last few pages and just couldn't get interested in it. Andersen wrote a lot of good stuff in his early years, but the last few years were rather dull. To me, anyway. Taste's change, too. But I note that the cover blurbs compliment the author, and not this particular book.

On the other hand, the weeks have caught up to the number of books read. Perhaps I will now start falling behind? Ackkk.

Sunday 16 July 2006

Sunday - On Sunday we went down to the boat and started seriously looking at things. Plumbing, mostly.

The surveyors' report was that "one sink was disconnected". In fact the plumbing systems (freshwater, saltwater, waste) are a shambles. About half way through our inspection my friend turned to me and said it'd be easier to completely rebuilt than to fix. I think he's right, and that's what I'll do. I'd planned on re-doing the electrical, and this is a cinch compared to that.

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: Morro Bay, this July, from the southern peninsula.

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