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WEEK 50 2016

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Saturday 10 December 2016

Saturday - Another nice day. Too nice really - where's the winter rain we need?

Working away in the garage, trying to clean a path to the drill press for some parts that need holes. This is trade, for the labor S put in on the sail cover I'm to help with her kinetic sculpture.

Lunch with S and R at the Red Salmon here in town. The food was good...the service had issues. My friends got their food quickly, but my off-the-menu standard bento box of a couple of rolls took nearly half an hour to arrive.

I suspect that the chef's, all three of them, were too busy chatting up the pretty girl at the counter to do their job properly. This is a problem with the manager & waiters - they weren't busy, it shouldn't have happened and the wait staff should have gotten on their case about it before we had to flag them (the wait staff) down.

#1 Madness in Solidar, (Imager Portfolio #9) #2 Solar Express #3 The Aeronaut's Windlass #4 A Call To Arms #5 Proven Guilty (Dresden Files, Book #8)	#6 Turn Coat (Dresden Files, Book 11) #7 White Night (Dresden Files #9) #8 Small Favor (Dresden Files #10) #9 Changes (Dresden Files #12) #10 Ghost Story (Dresden Files #13)
#11 Cold Days (Dresden Files #14) #12 Furies of Calderon #13 Skin Game (Dresden Files #15) #14 Academ's Fury (Codex Alera #2) #15 Cursor's Fury (Codex Alera #3)	#16 Captain's Fury (Codex Alera #4) #17 Princep's Fury (Codex Alera #5) #18 First Lord's Fury (Codex Alera #6) #19 The Lost Gate #20 The Gate Thief
#21 Son of the Black Sword #22 Hell's Foundations Quiver #23 Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (#1) #24 Iron Chamber of Memory #25 Rosario & Vampire Season 1	#26 Rosario & Vampire, Season 2 #27 The Rook #28, Into The Storm #29 Don't Make Me Think, Revisited (3rd edition) #30, The Long Earth
#31, The Long War #32 The Long Mars #33 The Long Utopia #34 The Long Cosmos #35 Stiletto: A Novel (The Rook Files #2)	#36 Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children #37 Hollow City #38 The Alien Way #39 League of Dragons (Temeraire #9) #40 Earth Unaware (The First Formic War)
#41 Earth Afire (The First Formic War) #42 Earth Awakens (The First Formic War) #43 The Kindred of Darkeness #44 The Swarm #45 Darkness on his Bones	#46 Pathfinder #47 Blood In The Water #48 Swan Knight's Son (The Green Knight's Squire #1) #49 Feast of the Elf's (The Green Knight's Squire #2) #50 Rachel and the Many-Splendored Dreamland
#51 Awake in the Night Land #52 The Sinking of the Prince of Wales and & Repulse #53 Two Necromancers, a Bureaucrat, and an Elf #54 Two Necromancers, an Army of Golems, and a Demon Lord #55 Two Necromancers, a Dragon, and a Vampire	#56 Ninth Euclid's Prince #57 Ruins #58 Visitors #59 The Cunning Blood #60 City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis
#61 Swan Knight's Sword (The Green Knights Squire #3)

Friday 9 December 2016

Friday - Another nice, warm day.

I worked away on the app, but my tooth was hurting a bit and the neighbor came home and was making noise, so not really a full day's work.

Book #61 would be Swan Knight's Sword (The Green Knights Squire #3), by John C. Wright. Enjoyable, but maybe not quite as fun as the first book, to me.

Thursday 8 December 2016 Thursday - Nice weather. Not even worth lighting a fire in the evening.

Working on the app mostly.

I went for a walk, 8 miles, and was sweating by the time I got home - it was 70F and I was dressed a bit too warmly. So it goes.

While researching the Windows tablets I mentioned discovering the 2-in-1 tablets. Doing a bit more research I discovered that they come in two flavors, essentially.

First Flavor is a tablet type: they will have 2GB ram and 32/64GB of solid state storage - and not the good SSD stuff, but basically microSD cards soldered to the motherboard. They have very mixed reviews, even for very light duty work. Cost is $100-200.
Second Flavor is a PC type: they have the same screens and mobo's etc as above, but 4GB of RAM, and a 500GB drive. These have good reviews, for the most part, if they are name brands: Dell, HP, Lenovo. Cost is $250 on up.

A remark by someone on the web then led me to the Microsoft Store. Here they sell the name brand machines, Dell, HP, etc, but with absolutely no bloatware on them. This is called the Signature Edition, and they are actually cost competitive with Amazon's vendor prices.

Wednesday 7 December 2016

Wednesday - Nice weather.

Not a lot to say, working away on the app, doing this and that. The audible portion needs some major re-writing, so that'll take a couple of days to do.

I finally realized part of the reason the cats are squalling so much: Suzy is defending me. Oh, they growl and bat at each other all the time, but the really loud and angry snarl's and ears-flat-to-the--head attitude only happen when she's between me and Budd, defending me from the "evil one". Huh.

I see, looking at the Kindle and comparing to the Table and blog, that I never mentioned reading #60, City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis, by John C. Wright. Good stories, though a bit depressing when read all in an evening in sequence.

Tuesday 6 December 2016

Tuesday - Back in Lancaster. Probably just freezing overnight here - despite the cold snap predicted for the rest of the nation it's actually been getting warmer at night for the last few days.

I went back to work on the app for most of the day, hitting the bug list and the punchlist, implementing some new artwork and language that S came up with, and a couple of UX changes to make it a better tool for the kiddies.

My books are a bit out of order I noticed. I missed a couple and misnumbered, but am too lazy to go back and correct. I'll number them appropriately from here, and in the upcoming Table Of Books.

Read a weekend or two ago was what I'm calling #59, The Cunning Blood, by Jeff Duntemann. This was a good read with a 'hard sci-fi' feel to it, though I suspect the abilities of nano-tech to be somewhat less than described here.

Monday 5 December 2016

Monday - Week 50 already. Yikes.

OTR. It was cold overnight at the boat - probably in the low 40's. I have a little electric heater somewhere on the boat, that I've misplaced. Since I arrived at 11:30pm (after stopping and picking up a check at the office) I just put a bunch of towels on top of my usual blanket when I woke up in the early am hours feeling the chill. When I got up I realized there was a nice comfy sleeping bag that had been sitting right next to my head all night...

It was so dark and cold and late when I arrived that I didn't even try to put the new sail cover on :-(

Work went OK. I was up, showered and on the road by 5am, and onsite at 6am at the first client's place. This was a largish surgical practice that wanted us to do the inspection before their patients arrived. Understandable. So we donned bunny suits and did our thing.

Then we headed over and tried to audit the two remaining office buildings on the punch list. Unfortunately the power was out there and a lot of tenants weren't in or coming in late (including the property management people with master keys). We did a first pass through, did the paperwork, then did another pass and the paperwork for those tenants that had arrived late.

Then I left the paperwork with my assistant who was heading back to Ventura, and headed back to Lancaster myself just before noon.

Sunday 4 December 2016

Sunday - OTR. Sunny, but reasonably warm for a winter day in the high desert.

I did my usual WinCo & 99-Cent store shopping in the morning.

I also swapped out the two empty propane cylinders for full ones, $19.50 each, at the Lowe's next store. Then I went to Walmart to see if they had a regulator in stock (they didn't) and discovered that they were swapping out exactly the same darn cylinders for $15.50. Bah. Eight dollars wasted.

I fiddled a bit with the heater and the BBQ. The heater just had a bad ignitor, however using a BBQ lighter worked just fine. It puts out a fair amount of heat, enough for a small room or garage. The regulator for the BBQ started working after I tapped it on the counter a couple of times, and blew air through it. I'm not sure it's 100% working though, the flame seemed a bit small.

I then cleaned and did various chores around the house until early evening.

My friend S came by in the afternoon and we finally finished the cover for the mainsail. What with one thing and another it's just been sitting, awaiting the last couple of small finishing touches.

Then I headed down to the boat for the night, since there's an inspection tomorrow. I took the new sail cover with me.

Picture of the Week

Jimmy on my knee

It's nice to have a warm lap to lay on while watching pigeons...

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