Travels and Images
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Picture of the Week
Lancaster
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Saturday 14 December 2002
Saturday - my friend Dave has invited me down to see
the boat "Parade of Lights" in Ventura harbor tonight. That should be cool.
With any luck I can get out of here by midday, after doing some laundry
and other chores that have built up recently...
Friday 13 December 2002
Friday - the 13th. Nothing all that bad
happened, the day being mostly taken up with trying to configure Linux software.
It's a bit humbling, how little I know sometimes. But it still shouldn't
be this hard.
Hmmm. Netscape crashed the first time I wrote the above. It does that,
apparently at random. Why should text entry crash a composer session?
It just did it again. The trigger - putting a space after the period at
the end of a sentence, and moving the mouse... Oh well, free software, and
worth every cent.
Thursday 12 December 2002
Thursday - therapy in the morning, work during
the bulk of the day, dinner with friends at 'Mahli's Indian Cuisine'. Then
a haircut, courtesy of a friend, and a listen to a couple chapters of Bertie
Wooster and Jeeve's various adventures, home to this page, feeding the cats,
and hopefully, bed...
I ran across
a review of a book
about math problems. Apparently the
Clay Mathematics Institute
is offering a prize for the solution of any or all of seven problems,
a million dollars each. Keith Devlin a mathematician, has written:
The Millennium Problems: The Seven Greatest Unsolved Mathematical Puzzles
of Our Time. Kind of cool to think about, but way beyond
a simple engineer....
Apropos of some other things going on, I had a discussion with someone
about the duties of friendship. I came up with a few ideas about what to
do when someone goes down a seriously wrong path:
(1) People can only help themselves, in the end.
(2) You have to act as if people have free will, regardless of the
monkey on their back.
(3) As a friend you need to do what's best for a person, not necessarily
what that person wants.
Obviously there are a lot of unanswered questions and assumptions. Who
decides what is wrong, and what is best? Sometimes it's clear, drugs, alcohol,
abuse. Sometimes it is a little more nebulous than that.
And maybe a zeroth rule:
(0) Don't butt in, if you can help it.
Photo Note: Yes, it's a monster, really designed
for dogs. I should have read the ad more closely....
Wednesday 11 December 2002
Wednesday - another frustrating day at work. I
eventually downloaded an evaluation copy of Intel Fortran 7.0 for Linux,
having lost patience with g77. It seemed to install OK, but I had just
time enough to compile and run "Hello World" before it was time to head
out to do a little shopping.
A couple of new shirts and a pair of new glasses. I had to go to four
separate optical shops before I found one with help that would wait on me.
I'm not a real patient shopper - if there are clerks available, and they
don't come over in a minute or maybe two, I'm gone. So, J.C. Penney's got
my business this time... The mall was pretty quiet, for two weeks before
Christmas.
My good friend Tim is now a proud papa of a little girl.
Tuesday 10 December 2002
Tuesday - tired. Not a real lot accomplished
at work, or at home.
Monday 9 December 2002
Monday - work, again. The day was punctuated
by the company christmas party and safety luncheon. It was a good party,
we had it catered by 'The Olive Garden', with company personnel bringing
the desserts. Quite good actually.
The safety luncheon was interesting as well, some stuff on identity
theft, and on holiday hazards. Someone burned down a $2 million house
the other day by overloading their electrical system with christmas
decorations . Also a note on holiday mall shopping - if you take
your goods out to the car, to store temporarily while you do more shopping
- move the car. Apparently burglars now sit in cars/vans/whatever and
watch for people leaving goods in cars, wait for them to leave, and then
break in. Car alarms - who listens to them any more?
Here is a shot of the lunch spread, just as the line is forming.
I also drove the Mercedes about. In fact I stopped by my brother's
place and we sort of toured the valley, up to the airport and back again.
Then I stopped and bought some tail light bulbs and installed them - they
seem to work fine, though there might be a problem with the right turn
signal still. I'd like to check the transmission fluid level, but there
is some sort of clever german lock on the filler tube.
I installed a little more software on the new PC, but getting it
hooked up to DSL will have to wait until I have an hour or two I guess.
The picture of the week shows Riley in his usual obstructionist place.
Generally it helps speed things along if I put the cats in the garage
(they like it, actually).
This evening we went to a performance by the "Boys of the Loch",
instrumental musicians from the Scottish Highlands, the Shetlands, and
Ireland. It was a lot of fun, and the audience demanded - and got - an
encore.
Picture of the Week
Photo Notes: When building a new
PC from scratch it is essential to have knowledgeable and experienced technical
support - perhaps that's why it's taken two weeks to get this far!
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