Saturday - just laid about and watched
some football. They were playoff games, but rather than being
nail-bitingly close each was almost a blowout - I'd hate to be the
Cardinals or Raven's coach tonight!
Book #2 was Wireless by Charles Stross. This is a collection of stories & a novelette, well done, if a bit depressing.
I've been reading both #1 and #2 since before the new year. There are more half read books in the queue - nothing that really grabs me though.
Friday 15 January
2010
Friday
- It's good to be home, after nearly two weeks away. I can finally
unload my car of stuff from Martinez - and even some stuff from Christmas in San Diego.
Riley as a kitten, Feb 2000, taken with my first digital camera, a "Jam
Cam".
Thursday 14 January
2010
Thursday
- just as long.
I found & tried out some free s/w to automatically caption the
inspection stills. Once the spreadsheets are done we can run a script
to do this for all of them, if desired. Location, description, date,
GPS coords...whatever.
Video captioning looks a bit harder - the various players are
apparently very inconsistent in their support of the various codec
'standards'.
Wednesday 13 January
2010
Wednesday
- a long day, just working away on stuff.
Tuesday 12
January 2010
Tuesday
- back at work, doing the final quality control audit of the data,
starting to assemble the hyperlinked excel defect and feature sheets.
Tedious is too kind a word for this auditing, but our summer hire
didn't come through, so...
Book #1 was Sailing
from
Byzantium,
by Colin Wells (MP3 on a CD). This is an exposition on the
legacies that the Byzantine Empire bequeathed to the West, to Islam,
and to the Slavs - particularly to the Russians. Very interesting,
detailing how the old greek texts survived, were translated and
transported to various locals - usually by monks. The odd rise of
mysticism and the failure of reason in both the Byzantine and Islamic
civilizations is detailed. Recommended.
Monday
11 January 2010
Monday
- worked until early evening at the house, then headed south. It was
late, a little foggy in the valley, not too much traffic, but I still
didn't get to Ventura until about
1:30am.
One thing I did before leaving was to put a tarp over what I think is
the leaking
portion of the roof. It's supposed to storm soon and there is some
minor damage already. I bought sandbags at the local ACE hardware
store, and filled them at a neighborhood sand station, just up the road
at a park. Last year they had a little table, with holes, usefull for
filling the bags, this year it was just a big pile of sand.
Sunday 10 January_2010
Sunday
- working away on the house. The main thimg is prepping for painting,
but also cleaning and tossing out some things, packing a few items to
take south with me tomorrow.
Went over to my brother's place, watched the game, went out to a local
Mexican place in Benecia for lunch.
