My Reclining Years

Figured out why the recliner was so uncomfortable - I'd installed the back backwards. For some strange reason, they put the pillow-like structure on the rear of the unit. The clue was a piece of cloth with a Velcro strip which was on the seat instead of behind it. You had to be there. Fixed it when I got back from BASFA, so now I have a chair which is very comfortable to sit in, but not to eat in. I may have to learn to eat reclining.

Stayed late at work setting up a test - someone had disconnected my two satellite feeds and connected them both to the same dead feed. Took me an hour to figure it out, since we generally don't mess around with other people's gear, and I rarely look at the hardware (do the tests remotely from my desk). After that was fixed, the test I'd been trying to run most of Friday afternoon and all of today did work.

BASFA was fun, a lot of energy tonight. Maybe too much energy - very often I couoldn 't hear the person who had the floor due to the cross conversations. Auctioneer hasn't grasped the concept that pairing a valuable item with a piece of trash, especially a large piece of trash, lowers the bid amount dramatically. A CD which probably would have gone for several dollars, and a jar of home made preserves which also would have fetched a dollar or three went for 25 cents when paired with a box of videotapes. Must talk to him about this.

Uploaded my favorite places to the replacement Garmin and updated the software, except they need to give me a new product key for the 2009 maps, as those were installed on the RMAed one and they only allow one update per.
Tomorrow: Work, then nothing planned.

Bad Pun of the Month Club

Chinese food is more than the dim sum of its parts

Random Samples

Algis Budrys was reported on many blogs to have passed away yesterday, but I can find no authoritative reports of his death. CNN, NY Times, non-blog sources in Google and Yahoo search engines, Wikipedia and imdb all come up empty. If anyone can point me to a reliable non-blog source, please do.

---

Yesterday Sen. Kucinich has read articles of impeachment against Bush. BFHD. A totally useless gesture at this point in time, and points up his cowardice for not doing this to launch his campaign for President. If the media are not playing this up, it's because it's not newsworthy.

---

Republicans have blocked legislation which would have placed a windfall profit tax on the oil companies and halted some of their subsidies. Good. Punishing the oil companies with a tax is stupid. Punish them with price controls, price rollbacks and mandatory refunds to consumers instead. And clamp down on those greedy speculators - shut down to oil futures markets.

---

spacekatgal is back, recovering from what sounds like a very painful surgery. Think good thoughts her way, she'll continue to need them for a while.

---

Why is the media still covering the Szechuan earthquake? Are we that desperate for bad news?

---

I'm still curious to find out which Terry Pratchett book Robert Asprin was reading when he passed away.

---

Solved the Garmin map problem - when I registered the replacement unit online, they gave a free upgrade product code which worked with the installation DVD. Took about 90 minutes to load, but now it's done. Now my maps are only a year out of date. They still show a couple of Dennys locations which died last year.

---

If you're a Giants baseball fan, you might want to go out of your way to vote for Bengie Molina for the all stars game.

---

Lunch time.

Why I'm Voting Republican

Thanks to cmpriest for the link.

I don't like the paranoid bit about irratiated/genetically engineered food, but the rest of it is spot on.
:-)

Oh well

Santa Clara Players chose someone else to direct Alan Aykbourne's Table Manners next year.