WEEK 51 2012
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Saturday 22 December
2012
Saturday - It was cold in the morning -
the overnight low was 10F, which matches the low from a couple of
decades ago. It was 13F yesterday morning, which was another record. Not
exactly Global Warming.
Though of course GW's mostly being downplayed now, with the emphasis on
Global Climate Disruption and Global Weather Extremes. There isn't any
statistical basis for those, just as there is none for Global Warming,
but I guess that people like to talk about the weather, and the various
researchers feeding at the money trough being continually
refilled by the government and the NGO's aren't going to let a little
thing like reality get in their way...
Not much going on. Sent a couple of bills out, returned some books to
the library, etc. Pretty quiet, really. Pretty much everyone I know is
sick or out of town, so it's just me and the cat. My friend S
always said I'd turn into my Dad, living alone and with my social
interaction limited to a phone call once in a while - guess I'm almost
there ;-)
Windy and cold - there is a storm predicted to blow into the area
in the next few days. If we get a lot of rain I'll probably head down
and check on the boat, the vast amounts of dirt in the air from the
construction continually clog the drain lines in my lazarette.
I'd thought I'd get more work done over Christmas, but I'm feeling fairly uninspired, so mostly it's just TV and reading.
I did finally defragment the disk on the old Vaio. Things seem a little
snappier now. I also removed some of the programs from STARTUP that I
didn't want to see - MS Messenger, various old backup software
packages, etc. There also was a little suite of programs for my old
(long gone) Zen MP3 player, and it caused the most difficulty. I
removed the program, and the removal program in turn installed some new nagware into STARTUP trying to get me to reinstall it.
And, oh yes, Apple wanted to update my QuickTime player. I happend to
read through the update boilerplate language and discovered that
if I did it would break my existing QuickTime Pro license, that I'd
paid for. Scum.
Abuse by software developers is nothing new, but my tolerance for this
stuff is declining. Commercial stuff is provided by companies with the
morals of psychopaths, and the free stuff is hardly worth it.
Book #94 was The Sorceress of Darshiva, and Book #95 was The Seeress of Kell, both by David Eddings. These end Edding's Malloreon, which is the sequel (and not as good as) the Belgariad.
Friday
- Went over and picked up the ham at Costco - that store already busy by 10:15am.
Quite a bit more than the other day at the same time. I had a bit of a
scare when I went in and the hams were gone. It tuns out that they
just moved them to another location...
Thursday 20 December 2012
Thursday
- Out doing a bit of shopping, gifts for children of my friends mostly. And
some stocking stuffers for adults. I'm a lousy shopper, I generally just
wander around for hours until inspiration (or boredom) makes me buy
something. So, Trader Joe's, Barnes & Noble, Staples, Costco,
Lowe's, Sports Chalet and Best Buy all got a visit. And nothing grabbed
my imagination at all, in the gifts-for-others department.
I didn't see any hams at Trader Joe's, so I guess it's Costco.
There was temptation for me in the form of a display of Win7 laptops in
Staples, open-box and display items, but it really wasn't all that hard
to restrain myself. I don't need one, really, so why waste $500?
I talked to the salesman about the Nook HD+ tablet - to my surprise it
won't run stuff from the Google Play store, despite being Android
based, but just stuff from the Barnes & Noble app store, which is a
lot more limited selection. Pretty stupid move on B&N's part.
Book #93 was Demon Lord of Karanda, by Dave Eddings. Which is a sequel to ....
Wednesday 19
December
2012
Wednesday
- eh. Doing a bit of work on this and that.
My friends boy returned the old XP desktop I'd given him years ago. He
has a nice Alienware laptop that he loves, and hadn't even turned the
desktop on in years. And it shows - apparently the graphics card, an
old Verto AGP unit, is shot. I hear it booting, but after a brief
initial Windows logo there isn't anything displayed. Ah well. Maybe I'll use
the Windows license for a virtual PC on the little Mac laptop.
Or I could build myself a desktop system with a PCI-e slot, and get one of the
modern PCI-e 3X cards and do a bit of parallel processing - the GFX or
RADEON cards sound neat. The Radeons don't sell in the numbers that the
GeForce units do, and don't get the hype, and the software isn't well
put together at the Cuda stuff; but (and this is a big but!) the manufacturer
doesn't deliberately break the double precision capability of their
cards in order to force engineers and scientists to pay 5X for the same card with an enabled DP capability.
Or I could try to find a cheap AGP or standard PCI card somewhere and use the existing box as my new windows desktop....
Tuesday
- Not much going on. A bit depressed at not seeing the relatives, but
so it goes. My friend's here will have me over despite not bringing my
family, and I'm going to bring the ham for Xmas eve. Costco reportedly
has some nice ones - since I'm not heading down to Ventura there won't
be a Honey-baked ham. Talking to another customer at CostCo they
suggested checking in at Trader Joe's for their hams, so I'll try that,
before buying.
Book #92 was King of the Murgos, by David Eddings. The sequel to #91, which is turn was a sequel to #90...
Monday
- Well, no visit from K and family this year.
There were some things that came up, and it's just too bad. I was
really starting to look forward to seeing everyone at Christmas, but it
can't be helped.
Sunday
- A fairly busy day, doing this and that.
I didn't do much TV watching, no 49'ers football being televised around
here. Continuing with the cleaning and organizing for my sister's visit next week.
Book #91 was Guardians of the West, by David Eddings.
