Travel's and Image's

WEEK 29 2012

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Saturday 21 July 2012

Saturday - Mostly not doing much, letting that pulled muscle relax.

Friday 20 July 2012

Friday - I made a quick trip down to Beverley Hills with a friend. She was picking up a barber's chair for her daughter, and someone on Craigslist had a decent one there. Traffic was decent, late morning to early afternoon, and I got a very nice lunch out of it at Joan's On Third. And the little TomTom still does a grand job of directing on to these strange addresses in strange towns.

I did slightly pull a muscle while loading it, so unloading will have to wait until tomorrow.

Just before heading north for the 4th of July vacation a friend returned a spare foam mattress to me. In a hurry I just piled it and a bunch of other stuff on top the the Probe. The other day Riley was out there napping - the 90-100F temperature in the un-airconditioned garage is apparently just right - and found it a new and comfortable place to sleep:

Thursday 19 July 2012

Thursday - Hot today. I went to mow the lawn at noon and it was 97F! Tomorrow, then.

Up at 1:00 with the stomach ache. Not as bad as the other night though.

Last week would have been Dad's 89th birthday. I miss him. As a very young child he told us that the 4th of July was his birthday, and that the fireworks were for him. I was probably seven or eight before I realized the truth. While looking for something to do with him I got this targeted ad in my browser window:

Interesting, as what family lore I know points towards Maine, New York, and Pennsylvania. Supposedly the original Hahn came over as a Hessian mercenary, and not perturbed by being on the losing side in the Revolutionary War, decided to stay on after seeing the New World.

One of the things I did this week was rescue some data off a USB stick for a friend. Essentially the protruding metal male connector had broken from the little circuit board contacts. I took it apart, then held the circuit board against the metal while downloading it to my computer, then rewrote everything onto a new USB drive and gave it back. Nothing important apparently, pictures of quilts and Ebay sales, but a pain to lose.

My brother Bob had called me last week, and said he'd torn a muscle in his calf, a few days after I left. Just going up and down a ladder - it's reminiscent of my tearing my Achilles last year, just going down the stairs. We're getting older I guess. My calf's ached for several days last week, after carrying those 55# brick up, and manhandling them about the construction site.

He and Mike were going to start work on the upper retaining wall later this month - I'd guess that's on hold for now.

Wednesday 18 July 2012

Wednesday - Feeling a little better. Went for a walk in the morning anyway. Not feeling very well in the afternoon/evening though.

Watched some Gintama episodes in the evening, streamed via Crunchroll. Crude, but amusingly off the wall. Should I cancel my cable? There isn't much on it that I watch, the NetFlix part is good enough for me, and I could save $70 a month. I finally finished S3:D1 of Veronica Mars, and put the disk back in the mail. I think I've had it over a month. Maybe two. Crazy, since I'm paying for the service, but I got busy.

My sister emailed to say that she was enjoying her new Kindle. I sent her a link to the Redshirts book - as a teenager she wrote some Star Trek humor fanfic, long before it was popular.

Tuesday 17 July 2012

Tuesday - Feeling quite ill, some sort of stomach bug. Gah.

Some more library books that I picked up last week. Glad I didn't buy them...

Book #65 was The Domino Pattern (Quadrail Book #3) by Timothy Zahn. Eh.

Book #66 was Judgment at Proteus (Quadrail Book #4), by Timothy Zahn. Eh. And Eh again. I think I actually fell asleep while reading this.

So, except for a few library books that I can't recall, we have, for the year:

#1 His Majesty's Dragon: Temeraire #1 #2 Throne of Jade: Temeraire #2 #3 Black Powder War: Temeraire #3 #4 Hitch-22 #5 The Wave: In Pursuit of the ... of the Ocean	#6 Empire of Ivory, Temeraire Book #4 #7 Victory of Eagles, Temeraire #5 #8 Tongues of Serpents: Temeraire #6 #9 Return to Dakistee #10 Villains Inc, Episode Four: Endgame
#11 The Innocence of Father Brown #12 How Firm a Foundation #13 Death on an Autumn River #14 Westerly Gales #15 The Cruise of the Albatros	#16 A Larger Universe #17 Neptune's Inferno #18 The Man Who Knew Too Much #19 Sweet Silver Blues #20 Bitter Gold Hearts
#21 Cold Copper Tears #22 Old Tin Sorrows #23 Dread Brass Shadows #24 The Hunger Games #25 Catching Fire	#26 Deadly Quicksilver Lies #27 Red Iron Nights #28 Petty Pewter Gods #29 Whispering Nickel Idols #30 Angry Lead Skies
#31 Gilded Latten Bones #32 Scholar #33 Programming in Objective-C #34 Temeraire: Crucible of Gold #35 Into the Hinterlands	#36 Pandora's Legions #37 Shadows in Flight #38 A Rising Thunder #39 Beginning IOS Game Development #40 Timeless
#41 Surrender to the Will of the Night #42 A Path to Coldness of Heart #43 The Wisdom of Father Brown #44 Star Carrier: Earth Strike: Book 1 #45 Center of Gravity: Earth Strike: Book 2	#46 In The Lion's Mouth #47 Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three #48 The Chequer Board #49 Tricked (The Iron Druid Chronicles Book 4) #50 A Fire Upon the Deep
#51 The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Invincible #52 The Black Opera #53 Poison Flower #54 Hammerhead #55 Princeps	#56 Caliban's War #57 Double Share #58 Quick Fixes - tales of Repairman Jack #59 The Girls from Alcyone #60 Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter
#61 Blue Remembered Earth #62 Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas #63 The Day the World Discovered the Sun #64 In The Beginning Was the Command Line #65 The Domino Pattern	#66 Judgment at Proteus

Monday 16 July 2012

Monday - Trying to get back on the Ipad programming thing. It's been a long while, weeks really, since I did anything serious. I'm considering getting a little MacBook Pro. There are two reasons:

It would allow me to work on the road
It looks as though the Mini won't support the newest version of OSX, coming out in August, which will probably be needed to program the new iOS6.

I'm not going to rush into it, we'll see what happens in August.

Unfortunately, with the internet out most of the day, I didn't get very far.

In preparation for the Time-Warner tech I pulled the TV cabinet away from the wall, and cleaned up the wiring a bit.

A quick look on the internet told me that a signal strength of 55db was needed to get any sort of connection, mine was 55.2, using the little utility built into the router and accessible by 192.168.100.1.

Removing an unneeded coupler brought that down to about 54db, and there was limited connectivity. The tech arrived at about 5pm, checked the pedestal vault across the street - no vampires taps there, removed another splitter at the box at the house, and replaced another inside the house with a better unit. It then dropped to 51db (other numbers also improved). TW says 53db is good enough, my brother says 50 is what they use at ComCast. I'm getting 51-52, and except for what I think must be an HD stream, everything seems OK.

My brother is curious as to what I'm getting at the house feed, but I'll need to take the modem outside to check that.

HD streams really need 3Mb+, and I'm not getting that on Road Runner Basic, but it's good enough for now.

Actual "dead tree" books read sometime in the last few weeks. Just a couple that I can think of:

Book #63 was The Day the World Discovered the Sun, by Mark Anderson. This is the story of the observations of the transit of Venus, June 3, 1769. This allowed the determination of the actual distance to the Sun, and also to the other known planets. Pretty neat stuff. The hazard's of world travel in the 1700's weren't trivial, various astronomers endured plague (died from it, in fact), naval battle (Mason & Dixon), the snows of Siberia, and more. Anderson isn't Glieck or Davies, but he writes a decent story.

Book #64 was In The Beginning Was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson. An interesting riff, circa 2000, on the cultures of Apple, Microsoft and Linux. A little dated (BeOS was still a contender!), but still interesting, with some still pertinent observations on what the corporations are actually selling.

Sunday 15 July 2012

Sunday - Taking it easy, doing a few chores.

I really do need to keep up on the "books read" thing, I was on the road a lot so it was hard to keep updating. Here's a quick go at it. Kindle stuff is pretty easy, I have folders for various things I've read (SciFi, Mystery, Biography, Science, etc.), but I don't move the books into them until I've listed them here, so it's easy to see what I need to list. Actual physical books, well, sometimes I just forget.

Book #58 was Quick Fixes - tales of Repairman Jack, by F. Paul Wilson. Entertaining "punisher style" stuff. Apparently there is a whole series of this. It wasn't good enough to go out and buy them, but I'll keep my eye's open at the library.

Book #59: The Girls from Alcyone, by Gary Caffrey. Gahhh. It was free at the time.

Book #60: Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, by Seth Grahame-Smith. Pretty bad, if you stack it up against Fevre Dream or any of Anne Rice's stuff.

Book #61: Blue Remembered Earth, by Alastair Reynolds. Not bad.

Book #62: Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas by John Scalzi. I don't agree with Scalzi's politics, but he writes some wicked dialog.

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: Rural scene, outside Lemoore Ca., July 2012.

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