Saturday - I spent the day working on some GIS quality audit stuff. Not very exciting, but very time consuming.
I was at a friend's place the other day, and noticed that there were
(plastic) snakes in her tree's. I asked what, exactly, was going on. It
was a defense against birds pooping on her car. They were sitting in
the trees over the car,and making quite a mess of it. The snakes
weren't much of a success, after a day or two the birds came back. Then
she put un an owl- and that was a huge success...
Friday 6 August
2010
Friday
- some more work in the morning, trying to get the specs straight on
the s/w I'm writing, and looking at the SEMS package some more. A
couple of calls to the tech support lady back there, Charlene, very
helpful. Also a bunch of to-and-fro on the spreadsheet stuff.
I headed back noon-ish, to get the rest of the blocks, offered at an
even better cut rate price. But, upon calling when pausing for a quick
bite, the lady said someone had stopped by and she had sold them all,
already.
Well, OK, I wasn't looking forward to the lifting and moving.
My friend watching the house says the cats are finally warming up to her, and allowing her to pet them. While they are eating, anyway.
Thursday 5 August2010
Thursday
- a long day, about 13 hours or so. Not all of which, alas, is billable.
Wednesday 4 August
2010
Wednesday
- my friend T bought lunch, so I guess that makes it a "plus" day. I'm easy.
I was talking to the guy across the dock, in the red boat show below. I
asked him why he had taken the downwind slip, rather than the upwind,
like me.
"The wife wants to be able to see the sunset through the companionway door" was the rather grumpy reply...
Tuesday 3
August
2010
Tuesday
- down to Ventura.
So far the new slip location is really working out. As far as I can
tell there aren't even any liveaboards in that section of the marina,
let alone annoying "section 8" apartment people!
Monday
2 August
2010
Monday
- doing various things around the house. One of the things I did was to
plant some verbena in the front little flower plot. Two of the plants
look bad, one might make it. We'll see.
Sunday 1
August_2010
Sunday
- doing various little chores around the house.
I found some landscaping blocks, useful for flower beds & such, on
Craigslist. They'd be good repairing some of the retaining walls at my Dad's place.
I couldn't contact the person who had my trailer, so I
bought and moved 120 of them to my house using the Explorer. This was a
two-trip job therefore, and I had the people selling load them, and friends to help me unload them, otherwise I couldn't
have managed. My back isn't what it used to be - they probably weight about 10 lbs each. But at $1 each they were a good deal.
Book #53 was Antares
Victory, by Michael McCollum. This was the last in a trilogy (Antares Dawn and Antares Passage being the first two), and
one that I didn't know existed until seeing it in the Kindle list.
Again, reading a book a paragraph at a time isn't as hard as I thought
it'd be. Still, I think I prefer entire pages. Kindle is dangerous, it just takes seconds to spend $7.88.
The universe in the Antares series is one in which "jumpgates" are
used. I think Jerry Pournelle invented this idea, primarily as a plot
element for battle scenes, years ago. Any number of writers have used
it, Pournelle, Weber, McCollum, and it makes an interesting
tactical/strategic plot element. At certain points in space, in a
fairly restricted region, if one sets up energy fields just so one your
ship will disappear and reappear in another spot, near another star. It
is instantaneous and one has the element of surprise. But the defender
can englobe the area and has the advantage of pre-positioned forces.
You can send bombs through, but the defenders can position mines. A
nice balance.
Here the humans, who have long been fighting an enemy that seems to
have near infinite resources discover that the enemy is really on par
with them, but has the advantage of internal communication &
transport lines, possessing a single star (Spica) with a number of jump points.
But this is a two edged sword - if the humans can capture the star
system and all its jump points they in turn will have a stranglehold
on the enemy and his commerce routes.
In this book that final battle is joined, and the result is.....
