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WEEK 9 2011

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First Post, 17 March 2002

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One Year Ago, This Week, 2010

Saturday 5 March 2011

Saturday - just sort of picking up, getting ready for work down below next week. My heel hurts a bit, so I'm also trying to take it easy - things are conflicting there a bit!

In the evening I went to a Boy Scout award ceremony for some of the local long-time scout and den leaders. It went well, reasonably quick and with a free dinner tossed in!

When I visited with my sister V last we had a long talk about the various environmental doomsdays in the media. Personally I think most of them are nonsense, but she's entitled to her opinion. One I hadn't heard of was The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, described as a vast mass of trash bigger than Texas. Well, no, not so, according to scientists and even Wikipedia. Essentially it's where currents meet and bits of stuff collect in the motionless eddys. You usually can't even really tell you are in it unless you look very closely. Which doesn't keep "environmentalists" from going on and on about it.

What brings it to mind is that I was reading an old book on sailing on sailing around the world, Heaven, Hell, and Salt Water by Bill and Phyllis Crowe, and the authors mention sailing through this in 1938! They didn't call it that, but the relevant text makes it obvious that they knew what it was:

"On the forty-fourth day our little schooner lay becalmed five hundred miles from San Pedro in what resembled an ocean junk yard. The place must have been at the junction of two great currents because there was debris of all description. Seventy-foot logs, an old life raft, crates and scraps of wood. With the dip-net we picked up thirteen barnacle-clad glass floats that had probably drifted all the way from Japan. Billie had a fit when I began using others for pistol practice. Soon crabs of various sizes were running around on deck. The mate wanted to start the engine to go investigate an overturned life boat that could be made out on the horizon."

Heaven, Hell, and Salt Water, pg. 15

Friday 4 March 2011

Friday - my tax appointment was in the evening, and it went pretty well. I had most of the documents necessary, and I'll get a few bucks back. I was hoping to offset expenses on the boat, where I've been staying, but one can expense only one home office, not two, and the house in Lancaster is obviously the place to expense.

There was a lot of cold weather in January, so the cats had to settle for sun through the window. The carpeted cylinder is part of a cat tree that I haven't put up. There are two reasons for that. First is that I have an "acoustic texture" ceiling, which the upper brace would crush. The other is that the cats already play "King of the Mountain" on the existing short cat tree, and Phoebe would probably injure his obese self falling from any height.

Riley, Phoebe, and afternoon sun.

Thursday 3 March 2011

Thursday - took a pile of books back to the library, none, for once, overdue.

Not too much else going on. No inspection, because of weather down south, but it looks like more work on the way. I did a couple of hours work on some map stuff in the evening, that was about it.

A couple of small nautical gifts from a friend on my last birthday were a small compass-

and a tin of mermaid Bait or Repellent:

Mermaid Bait or Repellent

Directions:

"Sprinkle a small amount of
this substance into the sea.
Sometimes they come close.
Sometimes the swim away
It's complicated."

Hmmm. Seems like mermaids have a lot in common with their land bound sisters...

Wednesday 2 March 2011

Wednesday - the new wireless router for the cable modem seems to be working out for my friends, no complaints yet. There was an issue with their USB printer not working, I'd plugged the desktop antenna into the port reserved for that. I stopped by, switched the cables around and things worked again. Important, at tax time... In return I went home with a dozen lemon cupcakes...delicious!

I've been catching up on a lot of TIVO, somehow stuff has built up, despite my being home a lot. House, Fringe, Smallville, Being Human, and White Collar make up most of it. I'll probably unsubscribe from Being Human, not really to my taste. Smallville I usually just fast forward through, I should probably unsubscribe too. I think this is the final season, maybe I'll gut it out.

Tuesday 1 March 2011

Tuesday - Book #22 was How the Irish Saved Civilization, by Thomas Cahill. Do you know, I finished it but then forgot to record the fact here. I'd listened to the last cassette on the trip down to San Diego and left it there (my friends may read it, if they can find a cassette player). It was interesting, going into detail on the fall of the (Western) Roman Empire, the life of St's Augustine and Patrick, and tied in with a number of books I've read in the last couple of years (Sailing from Byzantium, The Barbarians, etc). Recommended.

I had checked out a Charles Stross book from the library, The Trade of Queens, having read several other books in the series in 2008. The series, which had started well, had gotten a bit slow and weird and I'd forgotten to follow up. It's an alternate history series, where certain individual have the ability to "cross over" into a parallel universe at certain "gate" locations with a limited mass of trade goods. The alternates to our universe are rather primitive, and a few families with the correct genetic mutation to cross over control things in one of them. I was mildly looking forward to reading it after accidentally finding it in the Lancaster public library last week.

That is, I was until I read the blurb on the back: a nuclear war is deliberately started by the United States, in several of the universes, using bombs smuggled through the gates.

So I'll be sending it back to the library, unread. To be honest I really didn't like the few non-fiction articles by Stross that I'd read, some insulting to America and others rather tedious and pointless, but I generally try not to let an author's politics and beliefs interfere with enjoyment of their work. This though...

I have been pretty busy, not doing much reading, working on assembling tax stuff. Mostly done...

Monday 28 March 2011

Monday - Book #21 was Surface Detail, by Ian M. Banks. This was another "Culture" novel, similar to the others.

Working on tax stuff, mostly.

I did take some time off mid-day to help someone install a cable modem for their broadband internet connection, their DSL provider having given up trying to deal with Verizon, and Verizon refusing to install the service in any form of prompt manner. They thought Verizon was set up for the end-of-the-month handover after contacting them last week, but when they lost connectivity today they found that Verizon had them "in the queue" and wouldn't be able to even tell them if they could have service before next week. Despite the fact that they already had service running on Verizon's infrastructure.

So, they just went down to the cable company and signed up for real broadband, and it was turned on at the Time-Warner office immediately.

The cable modem installed without much trouble, but the ancient WEP router had to be reset to work. Their old provider had set it up for PPPOE, it seems, rather than a direct DHCP handshake that the cable modem expected. They'd kept it WEP because of an old Mac laptop that didn't understand WPA; but now they no longer use that laptop and so I stopped by Walmart and have picked up a modern wireless N router to install shortly.

Sunday 27 March 2011

Sunday - taking it easy, reading, watching some teevee, assembling some tax information.

There were a lot of errors in the blog forward/back pointers, I've tried to fix them, but some may still be lurking. I probably need a better WYSIWYG editor than Kompozer.

There was also, due to that, an error in the "books read" count, it's a grand total of twenty so far.

#1 Lords of the Sea #2 Kris Longknife #1: Mutineer #3 Kris Longknife #2: Deserter #4 Kris Longknife #3: Defiant #5 Kris Longknife #4: Resolute	#6 Kris Longknife #5: Audacious #7 Kris Longknife #6: Intrepid #8 Kris Longknife #7: Undaunted #9 Little Women #1 Good Wives
#11 Empress of Eternity #12 Quarter Share #13 Up Jim River #14 Betrayer of Worlds #15 The Bounty*	#16 Half Share #17 A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden #18 The Wreck of the River of Stars #19 Citadel: Troy Rising II #20 Live Free or Die

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: A view of San Diego, from Shelter Island.

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