Friday
- I did order new halyards, but it'll be nearly two weeks before they
arrive. Well, I started talking about doing this last March, so I can't
really complain too much, I guess.
Not much else going on.
I did get the MyBook Duo
to work, when directly connected to the Mac. Directly connected with,
supposedly, a gigabit port on either end it acts like a very very slow
USB 1.0 connection. Clearly it has problems...
Thursday31 January 2013
Thursday
- Up to feeling 85% or so. I went out to run some errands - go by the
library, and pick up a few items, cat food and kitty litter at Walmart,
some printer toner at Staples across the way.
While in Staples I had to check the model number of the cartridge
online, since the store had a couple of different items and I got
burned by that with my old Epson CX7450 last year. The smartphone
reported that the cartridge was a Brother TN-450 and that it sold from
$45 at Amazon, and in the display directly in front of me was that very
item - priced at $76.50.
A thirty dollar differential! I like to support my local brick-n-mortar
stores, but that's too much. So I went home and ordered it online. I
have Prime, so shipping is
free, although Amazon is now (illegally in my opinion) collecting sales
tax for California. My Blu-Ray burner arrived the other day, and it
seems I need disks for that, so I ordered some of those while I was at it.
Since I was on a roll, ordering stuff online, I also sent rigging department at Defender.com
the specs for my halyard, and asked for a quote. We'll see how that
goes. I've been thinking about replacing them since last March, so it's
time.
The main halyard would be
Samson XLS, 85'
7/16" diameter
White
Captive Shackle at upper end
Whipped at lower end
I might actually order two, (solid blue for the second) and use one as the topping life/backup.
An old pet peeve of mine surfaced while going through the Defender catalog. Take a look:
So item "P", the Ronstan, lists
the load in English pounds, which while it is archaic, is at least a
unit of Force, which is correct. The Wichard, item "O" gives the breaking load in kilograms, which being a unit of mass in the metric system is incorrect for this use. The use being what load will cause this shackle to break.
You have to multiply kilograms by the acceleration of gravity
(9.81m/s^2 in metric) to get the actual breaking load of about 11,242
Newtons. Then, to get the English measurement divide by 4.45 to
get 2526 lbf. [Of course, since "working load" and "breaking load" are
different, you now have to go research that!]
Or you can take the shortcut, forget the dimensional analysis, and just
remember to multiply kilograms by about 2.2 to get pounds-force.
This confusion between mass and force is endemic throughout the metric world.
Wednesday 30 January
2013
Wednesday
- Feeling a bit "off". Not in pain, mostly just tired and drippy.
Hopefully it's just a cold, not the really bad flu that the paper says
is going around. Didn't get a lot done, despite the best of intentions.
Fiddled with the inventory for a bit. Started printing stuff out, and
ran out of toner in the little Brother laser printer. I'm guessing it
was one of those 250 sheet "starter" cartridges.
The software to run a PC in virtual mode on the Mac laptop, Parallels
V8, arrived. It, plus a copy of Win7 cost about $150. Cheaper than
buying another PC, if it works out. I wasn't feeling intelligent enough
to install it though, best to do that when feeling (and hopefully actually being) mentally sharper.
Talked to S
about business matters, we are working our way through a Nolo Press set
of incorporation papers. Very useful as an exercise, because you start
to get a feel for what is involved, though I think we'll still get some
professional advice on all this. Still wondering about Nevada vs.
California incorporation.
Tuesday 29 January
2013
Tuesday
- I came down, almost instantaneously, with some sort of head cold on
Monday evening. It was so sudden and violent that I called a friend
that I'd had dinner with earlier to see if it was an allergic reaction
to the food . Sneezing, nose running, sinuses so congested that my teeth hurt. Ugghhh. Very strange.
By afternoon today I was much better, but there were some issues with the work I did whilst suffering....
I did finally finish another new book. I think I mentioned that I had accidentally reread Barbara Hambly's Blood Maidens, which was Book #43 in 2011, so it doesn't count against this years total. Annoyed, I read the next book in that series.
Book #4 was therefore The Magistrates of Hell, by Barbara Hambly. This is another in her vampire series, this time set in Peking (Beijing, but see the author'
s apologia for using the old style of transliteration at the beginning
of the book). Overall very similar to the last couple of books in the
series - I think writing Star Wars knock-off's may have accustomed
Hambly to the running-in-place
method of writing, where nothing really bad ever happens to the
characters. I seem to recall that she had another series where she
killed off the (very likable) protagonist in the third or fouth book.
I received an email from my brother mid-morning. His cat, Rita, passed
away in her sleep last night. She was 13, and was suffering from kidney
failure, so it wasn't unexpected - he was doing the hypo of water
under the skin thing, but it was her time I suppose. There is a picture
of her in lasts week's posts. I know how hard that is - I lost Phoebe
just a while ago and my Riley is pretty old and creaky these days
himself, and I am steeling myself for the sad day when it comes.
Monday 28January 2012
Monday
- More fun with the old laptop. I'm transferring files to/from the
backup USB stick, and it starts telling me that the disk space is low.
And indeed: only about 100MB left on the 60GB disk. So I spent another
hour cleaning off old junky files, old projects, someone's music
video's from 2004, and so on. and I'm back to 15GB+ free, but it's
another time hit. Still, things are progressing.
An old t-shirt I found while cleaning out my closet.
Sunday 27 January 2012
Sunday
- Cool and windy. The cat was beside himself, wanting out, wanting in,
wanting out...
Not too much else going on. I was going to watch the Pro Bowl, but
forgot. It doesn't do much for me, really. No one is going to play
hard/well enough to risk an injury, so though it's cool to see all the
players gathered together in one spot it's unlikely that you'll see
them play up to their actual abilities....
I was reading a fiction book, and it started seeming familiar. After a
while I realized that I'd read it a couple of years ago...
Oddly my Kindle 3G hung up, and wouldn't show my home page and list of
books. I had to do the "hold for 20 seconds" thing with the switch for
it to reboot to be able to get to that and the settings pages. It seems
to be OK now though.
Put in a few more hours on the GIS job. After a scare where the old
laptop overheated and froze I'm careful to keep a backup of my
project on a USB drive, shutting down for a half hour every couple of hours, and making sure to keep blocks of blue ice
under the decrepit piece of junk, next to the cooling fan intake..
Picture of
the Week Photo Notes: Desert,
with Joshua trees and clouds, Jan 2013.
