All The Little Birdies Go Tweak Tweak Tweak

Finally got the cloned drive to work in the netbook. Long story short, the stupid clone program moved the blank, unformatted 4GB of space to the front of the drive and made it the boot partition. The software has a cleverly hidden, but once you find it very simple widget for deactivating any partition and activating any other. So it was just a matter of deactivating the blank section and activating the one which has Windows on it. Now it works fine.

The main purpose for this exercise was to replace the biggest moving part in my travel laptop with a non-moving part.

I have decided to put off doing the swap with the Ultrabook, which would upgrade it from 128GB solid state to 240GB. I think I will instead return the second SSD drive and buy a 360GB SSD. Amazon has a good price, maybe Microcenter will match it. Fry's won't - they don't stock that size. Come to think of it, neither does Microcenter, according to their web site, but I'm petty sure I saw it in the store.

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Had coffee with Janice at 5, then home to read for an hour. I put the harness on Domino and brought her out on the patio, but she was not happy and went inside after 5 minutes. The leash is way too short, but it's clip-on, I can get one of those reels.

Almost done with Water For Elephants. it just keeps getting better. I don't want it to end, but it's got a built-in HACF.

8:30 I took off for SJ and photog Rich C.'s birthday party. Only two of the models he invited showed, one is his girlfriend, the other brought her bad-boy boyfriend. Many pretty makup artists, but all the women were significantly othered. I had a nice chat with his GF - turns out she graduated from the UW in business admin. She started the conversation when she saw my UW alumni band t-shirt.

One fellow there had halfzheimer's. On three separate passes through the room I stopped to chat, and each time he told me the same story about jury duty. Word for word.

There was a nice spread of food, everyone brought something, though most brought wine or beer. A German photog brought a mini-keg, but he had bounced it too much coming up the 2 flights of stairs, and much of the beer ended up going down the drain. He was smart enough to open it in the sink. He starts his new job at MSFT in Redmond next week. This will raise the cumulative IQ of both places.

Bailed at about 10:30. There was not much traffic, but what there was drove either way too slowly or way too fast. And there were at least three bozos who thought it was a great idea to drive in the lane to my right, parallel with me, and match my speed. Makes me wish I had side rocket launchers.

So, what to do tomorrow? A train ride might be nice. Probably not, unless it is a short one to Sacto. The schedules are so thin that most automobile day trips take a full weekend on the train. Unless one takes the Amtrak Thruway buses, but that's not nearly as fun as a train ride. I get carsick trying to read on a bus, not on a train though. TSA has made day trips way too annoying as well. I'm not sure when I have a free weekend again. Next weekend is Songkran, 21-22 is robo games, 27th is roller derby, May 5 is free, but the following Saturday is National Train Day, so I'll be taking a trip that weekend. I'm usually more of a hermit than this.

NotsogoodSunday

Had a low blood sugar episode at 3:30 am which was fixed with the intelligent application of two scoops of thin mint cookie ice cream and an episode of The Twilight Zone. These always drain me for hours, even though I get back to sleep. I was up at 9:30, and after taking drugs and shooting up I performed the annual
biting off of the head of the hollow chocolate easter bunny. It is truly awful milk chocolate (could not find dark except for solid bunnies), so the rest will find itself melted down for banana dipping or ice cream topping.

Put the halter on Domino again, and tried to lead her to the patio, but she refused to go anywhere except behind the recliner. I took the leash off but left the halter on, put my shoes on my feet and took my Kindle out to the pool and tried to relax in the sun and read. It worked fine until a mommy with a squealing child went into the pool. The kid was having fun, but at 10,000 Hz and rock star decibels.

I went back to my patio and read some more. When I went inside, Domino was curled into a little ball inside the top of her tree. She did not wish to come out.

Locked up the patio and grabbed the copy of Ghost I'd bought at Fry's and the too-small SSD and their respective receipts. IHOP was on the way, and it was lunchtime. Late lunchtime. It turned out to be a 20 minute wait for a table, but service was fast, and the food was okay. Next stop was going to be Microcenter, but they were closed,  so I parked and had a mocha at Starbucks, sitting outside until the sun started to burn my arm. Went inside thinking to use the bathroom, get an iced tea and sit inside and write this, but it was a long wait for the former, and while I was in line for the latter I started feeling woozy so I bailed and went home. Domino was still in her tree, but when I opened the fridge door she was there. I took off the halter, which she had half gotten out of by herself. Vegged in the recliner, after a lot of walking back and forth across my lap and the coffee table, Domino settled on the left arm of the recliner. I had finished Water For Elephants at Starbucks, so I read the two articles after the book. One was the author's afterword, and the other was an old interview by Powell's.

I don't really like to hear authors talk about how they wrote a book, the way I don't like to hear an athlete say how he/she won that race, scored that goal, caught that javelin; or how an actor researched that character, found that motivation, murdered seven women with a scalpel to really be "in the moment" for that part. For me the book, the sports contest, the theater/movie performance stands alone.

After reading the afterword, with Domino still parked on the recliner arm, I went back out onto the patio, leaving the screen door open enough so Domino could come out if she wanted to. Instead, a few minutes after I was on a patio chair, she got off the arm and curled up onto the seat of the recliner. Some cats...

Still not feeling 100% after finishing the Kindle book, I pulled three pieces of whole grain & nut bread out of the freezer and toasted them in the oven. Slathered them with margarine, and filled a glass with ice cubes and seltzer. Sat down at the PC and wrote this.

The toast & seltzer helped.

It's still early. The sun is shining but the wind has picked up again. Maybe I'll go out again, maybe not. Next up on the Kindle is Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work. 10 am team meeting, 11 am engineering meeting
Ophthalmology appt at 3:30 (leave by 2:30 to have my eyes dilated in time)
I won't be able to see well enough to read for a few hours, probably will go home and sit in the dark. Costco is on the way home, and I'm out of cheese.