Saturday - back in Lancaster, lots of
snow on the hills last night. Just rain here on the valley floor -
missed it by only a few hundred feet. Too bad.
The Michael, as imagined by Scott Lowther. (About 400' tall. And, yeah, those look like battleship guns bolted on.)
I picked up some replenishment
bird seed at the supermarket. This was a 'song birds mix' because they
didn't have any of the usual Nyjer/Thistle seed mix. The blurb on the
package claimed other birds would be interested - and they were right.
There were doves (on the ground), and two other species in addition to
the usual Lesser Goldfinches. Quite a crowd, all gorging themselves.
The cats went nuts at the sight, sitting at the french doors, licking their chops & making little hungry noises.
Friday 22 January
2010
Friday
- since they were predicing snow to 3500' and below I tried to get out
of work early. I made it home OK, but the CHP was (unnecessarily, in my
opinion) doing 'round robins' on the freeway just ahead of me, keeping
the speed to about 45mph.
CHP doing a 'round robin' on the 14, in snow, via the 'droid camera.
Thursday 21 January
2010
Thursday
- just another work day.
Wednesday 20 January
2010
Wednesday
- the weather continues atrocious. But we need, as always, even more
rain. I have yet to hear a serious complaint about the constant storms.
When home I try to get Phoebe, labeled by the vet as "affectionate but obese",
to exercise. I tried the laser pointer over the weekend. No luck. After
some initial interest he just sits & waits for it to come to him.
Smart, if lazy.
Can you believe that Brown
beat Coakley? A Republican beating out a Democrats for Ted Kennedy's
old seat? Obamacare is probably dead - perhaps there is hope for the
country after all!
Tuesday 19
January 2010
Tuesday
- back to work. Not much new to say about that... Still not feeling 100% - I had a lousy night, aches & pains. Even my toenails hurt. My roommate had to put up with the noises of me taking a shower at 1 a.m...
I found somebody on line with
the pin out diagram for the LaCrosse 2310 serial cable. I'll have to
give it a try. I wonder if there is a way to hook it up to a hacked
WRT54G, as a low power weather server, connected to the internet.
So many projects, so little time :-(
Monday
18 January 2010
Monday
- not quite up to going to work. I did quite a bit of work at home - 8
hours, most of the audit is now done.
Plus two hours that I can't really bill for, trying to use the Vista
laptop. But it was just too much work, XP was quicker and easier.
I did get the dual monitor thing working on the Vista laptop, kind of
neat.
The weather station says we got 0.59" in the last 24 hours. Impressive,
but it was in the inches out near the coast. (My co-workers in Ventura
lost power and eventually just went home. So maybe I was as productive as they were.)
Heh. When I set up up the wind sensor I carefully aligned it facing due
north, assuming that was the default for the wind direction sensor
(zero degrees). Turns out that the default is due East, essentially the direction it was in before I "fixed" it. Ah well. I'll get up there with the ladder next weekend.
I found the WS-2310 manual on line. The base-station/PC connection is
apparently a serial connection, thru a phone jack on the console end
and, presumably, a serial in plug on the PC side that talks to a com
port.
I don't have that cable. Hmmm.
Sunday 17 January_2010
Sunday
- Not feeling too well. Mostly I napped and watched teevee.
The games were, again, kind of blowouts. I fell asleep while the Chargers were
ahead, woke up to find them losing. Bah.
The big storm looks like it will actually materialize. I had my doubts,
but once stuff showed up on the radar I began to be a believer. Also a
friend who is a big weather bug said it'd be coming in.
I set up my Dad's litte weather station, a LaCrosse 2310. It works
well, and showed us getting wind and rain. It's a bit addictive, you
find yourself picking up the console and checking it all the time.
I don't have the s/w but a Linux version, wview, is available on line, so if I can't find
the windows stuff I can try that. I'm not ever sure what the
console/computer interface is: telephone, serial, USB?
