Saturday - I got up late and tired, not getting back to Lancaster and my bed until 11:30 last night.
In the morning I discovered that my friends had watched and fed the
cat, covered my tomato's against the frost, and fixed the broken
drawer's in the kitchen. The last was pretty unexpected, it was
something that I was planning to get to, someday...
It is getting cold. I had the inside thermometer set to 55F, and it
kicked on the heater several times during the night. Riley had begun
crawling under the coverlet to keep warm...
Friday 28 October
2011
Friday
- The day was spent in the office, generating candidate repair sites
for the client to look at. We'd hoped to get into the field, but that
didn't happen. But the candidate sites look good, and the client was
pleased with the similar presentation we did earlier in the year, so
that means possible work in the future.
The HP Touchsmart in the office died. Back in 2009 it's first
incarnation died in weeks. This one lasted a couple of years, but was
always slow and a bit buggy. One problem was the vast amount of HP bloatware on
the system, but the hardware had issues too: it couldn't connect
properly to the wireless printer three feet away, for instance.
Anyway, it said it couldn't boot, registry issues. All the registry
backups were corrupt, and it couldn't find any restore points. Not one.
I created a Linux rescue disk and when I left in the evening it was
scanning the system for some sort of virus or malware. There is a
warranty on it, so we can get it repaired/replaced, but it'd be nice
not to lose the info on the disk.
Thursday 27 October
2011
Thursday
-
Wednesday 26 October 2011
Wednesday -
Tuesday
25 October 2011
Tuesday
- Annoyances.
One thing I've written about before is the problem of backing things
up. I had found some more pictures, and added them into the appropriate
folders on the Vista laptop. I then tried to sync the various folders
with an external drive, and then the external drive to the Ubuntu 10.10
machine upstairs. For some reason the Ubuntu backup copied the entire
directories of about half the folders, rather than syncing their
contents. It started out OK, I was watching, but at some point after I
left it copied something like 50GB of folders over. Bah. From what I
can tell it was an ownership issue: for some reason, although I set the
"Microsoft Windows" checkbox to true, it decided that files of the same name, date and size were different, so it copied them again.
Jeez, I am so tired of these backup issues, it never seems to end.
Also, there was a prediction of an Aurora last night, an Aurora visible from California!!! So it was overcast.
I spent hours looking at the video of the insides of pipes. Technically
this isn't an annoyance, as I get paid for it, but, well, flight test
engineering was more fun.
Monday
24
October 2011
Monday
- I'll probably head down to Ventura on Wednesday, go over the video inspection files with the boss.
On the other hand, using the purported speeds of 15-75km/sec, and a 24
hour period, the train of 1,400 purported comet fragments would be a
minimum 1.3 to 6.8 million kilometers long, impossible to miss visually
at night or at dawn/dusk at other latitudes and longitudes.
Sunday
23
October 2011
Sunday
- Another nice day. Warm, but not too warm. Generally we have a few hot
days in October, before fall really sets in, but it seems milder than
usual this year. Which is fine.
My tomato's are still producing, indeed I saw a bunch of new blossoms
on them this weekend. I should get some clear plastic tarps ready in
time for the first freeze, and see if I can continue growing into
January or whenever...
I've been reviewing video on the PC, stuff from 2006 and 2007 for work. Tedious stuff, but it pays.
At first I used Windows Media Player but it has no fast forward or frame capability - the controls are there under an advanced tab, but they don't work. I need to be able to stop, single step, and take screen shots, and it was just too clunky.
Windows Movie Maker has
somewhat better capability, you can pause, single frame forward and
backwards, but still lacks an automatic screen-grab-to-file feature.
And, if you get too busy with the pausing and single-stepping it loses
track of where it was and hangs, and you have to restart the video.
Picture of
the Week Photo Notes: My nieces Kim and Ashley, May 1995.
