Missions Mostly Accomplished

Let's see what we planned for today:

After Fedex delivers the two drives:
This was a bad joke. I looked up the tracking page this morning and it said the drives, which were in Newark, CA about 20 minutes from me, had been taken to San Jose Fedex and then shipped TO SACRAMENTO! They arrived in Sacto at 1:24 am And then they were shipped back to San Jose, arriving at 7:15 am. At 10 am I checked in again and there was no update, so I decided to give it an hour and call Fedex if there was nothing new. At 11, it showed they had been delivered at 10:15. Fedex had not been by the apartment, so I went to the rental office and sure enough, the package had been dropped off there, but the Fedex bozoid did not even sign it in.

• Go to K&S Photo in Palo Alto and shop for a macro extension lens and maybe a light stand
  Done. I bought macro extension lenses which could give me 2x, 4x and 8x maginfication. Light stands cost too much, I'll stick with what I have at home. But I did stop by a lighting store and picked up a 100W spot bulb, to see if that was better than the 100W clear bulb.
  
• Drive to Menlo Shell and have them inspect the tread on my tires (Midas claims they need replacement, but I only have 22k miles on 80k tires)
  Done. The guy said definitely replace them and get the refund.
  
• Put a bigger tarp up over the patio so the cats can watch the world go by without getting soaked
  Done. Also put a couple of cat-sized fuzzy pads out there for them to sit on, and they liked the new stuff.
  
• Vacuum
  Done, downstairs. Will do upstairs tomorrow.
  
• Clean some windows
  Nah, tomorrow.
  
• Change the catbox and kitty water fountain
  Done
  
• Do my Perl homework
  Emailed the instructor for the login/password to get the example files, but got no answer. Will make do without them tomorrow.
  
• Read the last chapter in Out of the Silent Planet
  Later
  
• Read the last story in my sister's creative writing thesis
  Later
  
• Plug in the two hard drives, fire up the new PC and install Windows Pro x64
  Plugged in the two hard drives (which makes three in the machine) and one of them was DOA. Went online and requested an RMA, but they are closed on weekends, so this will have to wait. No biggie, I'm on call next week and this is a good project to work on when I'm stuck at home.

And if I have time:

• Transfer my data files to the new PC and maybe start installing programs.
  Can't do that till the bad drive is replaced
  
• Write down the words for a couple of Thai songs and translate them
  Nope
  
• Listen to the Tata Young concert CD which arrived today (I already watched the video)
  Nope. Watched some of the East-West Shrine Game instead. When did we lose that to Texas? It was bad enough when they moved it to SBC Park, but Texas????
  

Done but not on the list:

• Re-photographed all 150 star sapphires, using the macro 8x multiplier. In the viewfinder, everything looked fine, but when I looked at the full sized images on the PC, there's an annoying artifact I need to figure out. Each gem looks like it is sitting in a piece of grey putty. Very strange effect.
  ( Examples behind the cut )
  
  
  So I'll probably be doing this all over again, when I figure out what happened. eBay is full of photos which look just fine.
  
  
• Speaking of eBay, I wrapped up my week's worth of bidding on star rubies. Spent almost as much as I had left in my budget for sapphires, and got some good deals. Two of them better than I would have gotten in Chanthaburi, where these auctions were located.
  

---

Chatted with my baby sister, who sent me a CD of orca whale singing. She's Puget Sound's official US Navy whale listener, and had the un-Navy-like thought that maybe I could translate the WAV file into MIDI and make sheet music from it. She's an acoustics engineer, and wanted to see if there was a way to interpret the orca songs as music, instead of the dull boring thing she does now, just looking at the audio through a spectrum analyzer. I have software which can make sheet music from a MIDI file, and there's software out there to convert MP3 and WAV to MIDI, but I'm not sure how successful we will be, considering an orca's vocal range is probably larger than a music score can handle. But I figure it's worth a try.