Travels and Images
WEEK 32 2004
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Saturday 7 August
2004
Saturday - on the road. Probably not a
lot of posts for a bit. My laptop has composition problems - Netscape Composer
mangles pages, I don't use Front Page, and sometimes GVIM is just
too much work.
Friday 6 August 2004
Friday - on the road
today. A Friday cat blogging picture is below. I read somewhere recently that cats
are definitely warm climate creatures, that their kidneys (?) are as
efficient as those of camels. Anyhooo, here Riley warms himself atop the
Explorer in the garage, though often both cats are even higher up, in
the rafters over the SUV:
Nope...wasn't me that made those paw prints on the car...nope...warn't me...
Thursday 5 August 2004
Thursday
- I received an email from my sister, with no text and just this attachment. Out to be 'fair and balanced' I'll post it as a Bush Campaign Follies
item. I saw it somewhere else as well, with the suggestion that harm
was, indeed, what politicians really intend. I doubt it. There seems to
be a lot of belief in conspiracy's out there, evil conspiracies by
Bush, by Cheney, by the Clintons, by the Jews, by the Muslims, by the
Dems. Personally I think pretty much everyone is too much of a doofus
for successful conspiracies.
She'll have to attach some personal stuff next time, because as I said, I'm not really into this political blogging.
Bush misspoke as he delivered a speech at the signing ceremony for a $417 billion defense spending bill.
``Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we,'' Bush
said. ``They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and
our people, and neither do we.''
Wednesday 4 August 2004
Wednesday - I hear from my brother that he
is getting the boat insurance taken care of - Hurray! Maybe I can go
sailing again, with the new sails and a fresh bottom job on the boat :-)
Ever
notice how a "smiley" looks like an anchor?
There are futures markets in a lot of things, and interestingly, in the presidential race as well. A daily plot is there, just click on the IEM Daily Prices Graph.
The Kerry Campaign Follies
July 30:
Stops at a Wendy's to show he's a man of the people. He pesters soldiers who are polite, but are going to vote for the other guy.
Billionaire Wife proves to be completely out of touch, asking what
"Chilli" is. To top it all off, reporter finds out the stop is totally
fake, and that the real lunch is a special seafood order from a yacht
club down the road.
In other news, his economic plans are going to remain secret until after the election.[link via Curmudgeons Corner]
August 1:
The Democratic Convention has caused Kerry to lose ground, rather than get a 'bounce'.
August 2:
Candidate doesn't know what city he is in, praises the Ohio Buckeyes to a crowd of Michiganders (Wolverines) to a chorus of boos. [via Transterrestrial Musings]
He's been confused before, it seems, and there are questions about his health.
In other news, his plans for Iraq are going to remain secret until after the election. [via Captain's Quarters]
You know, this isn't a political blog and this is just too easy. I
think I'll stop now, though a day-to-day recital is kind of fun.
I mean, there is the bunny suit picture, and it's possible Hatch Act
violation, the skiing incident, the (un)thrown medals flip-flopping,
the biking incident, the vets coming out against him, the botox, Moore
sitting in the presidents box at the convention, his wife assaulting
reporters, the 'enervating' Ben Affleck speech, running on health care
issues when his vice president choice is a trial lawyer who got rich
suing doctors, Wilson, Clarke, the missed Senate votes, Berger, using a
Rolls Royce logo in Detroit, and so on and so on... Though some of
those aren't really "campaign" issues I guess. Where does one draw the
line?
And to be fair, I'd have to run a Bush Campaign Follies as well, and it'd just take too much time. I mean, you'd really have to search for the quality stuff since he has a semi-competent staff - with Kerry, hey, the clueless are always easy targets...
Tuesday 3 August 2004
Tuesday - just working away today. Not a lot to say.
For your reading pleasure, Dean Esmay links to Colby Cosh who found an amusing review of The Day After Tomorrow
on USENET, by a Climatologist who refused to watch it until people took
up a $100 collection to pay him first. You should read the whole thing,
but it starts like this:
First I'd like to thank the following people/entities:
(1) Consolidated Theaters for providing a comfy chair.
(2) The makers of "I Robot" for providing a preview which
caused me to think "however bad this is, it isn't 'I Robot'".
(3) Dreamer.
(4) Those who contributed to the charity marathon.
(5) And above all, those who did *not* contribute as above.
The best summary of the movie comes from "The Simpsons"
"It's cold and there are wolves" - Abe.
Details follow.
Monday 2 August 2004
Monday - busy working away. Hard to believe another month has passed - this year is just flying past.
California is a big state, so
despite a population in the tens of millions it is still mostly rural -
here is some agricultural country just south of Marysville:
Sunday 1 August 2004
Sunday - after all the work yesterday
I managed to pull a muscle getting out of the shower this morning.
Acckkk. But it's the same old pull under the shoulder blade, it'll be
gone in a day or two, and Ibuprofen works fine on it.
Talking to my coworker down in San Diego, we've narrowed his problem
down to an interaction between his LAN subsystem and Norton's Antivirus
Autoupdate - if autoupdate is turned on it crashes the machine, hard.
If the LAN is unplugged or the autoupdate is running it works OK.
Though to be consistently stable he has to run SiSoft Sandra once, at
boot, otherwise the machine will occasionally hang indefinitely with
100% CPU utilization. Weird. It's a nice INTEL 865GLCL system, with the latest bios rev, so I don't know WHAT is going on there... Voodoo.
Another friend came up to reinstall system on his wife's PC, also
knocked about by the virus/worm that took his main machine. This didn't
go as well. We spent hours trying to get it booted and running, without
avail. We removed memory, cards, hardware and reinstalled and just
couldn't get past the bios setup, and sometimes not that far. We
replaced the CMOS battery and every other trick I could think of,
without success. Finally we swapped processors - his processor worked
fine in another machine, so we've narrowed it down to (I think) the
motherboard. Weird, it was a
nice INTEL 815EEA, but weird things happen. So, we got on line, ordered
another motherboard - a socket 370 from DFI so that we can use all the
old hardware (this isn't a primary machine after all) and had a beer,
some pizza, and called it a night about eleven...
