Am I Blue?

Oct. 9th, 2013 12:06 am
howeird: (Default)
After the latest Windows update the PC bluescreened. Had to go to safe mode/no network and do a system restore to last week. Seems to be working now. Turned off automatic updates.

Boring day at work, the only useful thing I did was write up a doc on all the new company classes I took, and email it to the team.

Lunchtime I took the non-freeway route from work to the mfg home, then back via Sizzler. Round trip was about 27 minutes. Might have been faster if I remembered that the new place is virtual north** of the current place.

Email from the rep claiming I sent CU statements for July and September, not August. I was sure I had sent all three, so captured them at work and emailed them to her.

Home pulled up the email, and sure enough I had missed the August one. Weird because it is in the folder on the desktop where I've been keeping all the paperwork.

Looked up the listing online, Redfin says it's pending sale. Yay! Sent the MLS# to Baltimore sister who works for a financial giant, and has access to that. She claims it's the one she chose for me. I didn't know she was looking at specific listings. But it's good she has come around. Her impression was "manufactured home" was a euphemism for "trailer" and "trash".  I looked at listings near Baltmore, hoping to show her she was wrong about that, but everything within 50 miles is $42k mobile dwellings, half a notch up from an RV, in that they are towed not driven.

Got the mail, no check from the broker yet. 50-50 chance it would be there today, 90% tomorrow. I'll want to walk it into the CU office when I get it. That's for the deposit and  closing costs. The mutual fund already sold and the funds are listed as available - that's for the downpayment. I won't need a check for that for a while yet.

Peninsulaires voice lesson #5 started as a clusterbleep, sort of. Whoever was supposed to conduct the warmups was not there on time, so we got a guy who had done it before, but wasn't very good at it, but after 5 minutes he had to go to rehearsals and pulled a chorus member off the risers who had no clue what to do. But there were enough officials around whose brains were pickable, so it was only half a fail.

Next up was the lesson, given by the same guy who has been doing it. Most of the time was spent reviewing the first 4 lessons, which gave him very little time to add anything new. As usual, he kept us standing way too long after each singing round. When he was done, another guy, who had been leading the singing of an actual song all these weeks (Grand Old Flag) got us up on the risers and put us all in the sections our voices matched, but unlike a real chorus, he had the bases on one end, the baritones on the other and tenors & leads in the middle. Most choruses like to go from high to low. He did a little bit better job this time of teaching the individual parts, but they are completely non-intuitive except for the lead part (which is the melody we all learned in grade school or in my case on late night TV from Jimmy Cagney). We sung it about six times, and it sounded horrible. Partly because it was in a key way too high.

I bailed at the break, not interested in seeing the highly annoying chorus sing two numbers.

From there to Safeway, I needed ice cream and frozen dinners. But first, this one had a CU ATM, so I deposited two checks.

Home, tried to fit the frozen stuff into the freezer compartment, but had to pull out the curried chicken (3 servings in separate freezer bags), and one frozen dinner, and had a second one for dinner. The Klondike bars had to be released from their boxes and stuck in any available nook and cranny.

--
Trivia: my uncle Dave was born in 1922. 91 years old.
--

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
1-on-1
???

Day of Mon

Aug. 26th, 2013 10:05 pm
howeird: (Default)
NovaBak support had no answer to my question. Some bozoid named Jack sent the canned response, and when I explained that this was not the answer, he replied that he sent me the instructions. I replied that he did not answer my question, which I restated. And that's where he left it.

Downloaded Acronis, to be installed when I get home from work.

Work - some attempts at scripting. TBC
Lunch at Carl's Jr because it's close and they have shakes and there are no Burger Kings close by
Fry's, returned the bogus Nexus cover/stand. Idiot returns person kept asking me if my iPad worked. As if I had an iPad. As if it mattered if I did.
Home, spent some patio time with David Gerrold's Voyage of the Sea Wolf and thankfully I was right, after he got the scipt-like scene setting out of the way, it's a fast-moving adventure.

Watched some of the Titans-Atlanta game, was pleased to see Tenn. win handily.

Installed Acronis, it doesn 't back up RAID 5 drives, so that's a FAIL.

Set up a backup with Norton Security Suite, but it's full backup only. FAIL.

More research needed.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
??
howeird: (sewer)
2 pm and I am exhausted.
Insomnia night - finally asleep after 3

morning stuff, not in the same order as usual because ADD/OCD/BS
The dispenser in the shower ran out of body wash but not until I had used what I needed. Shampoo and conditioner were at half
Took the body wash container out nd put it on the sink to worry about later, because there was a load of shirts in the dryer which needed to be fluffed and hung up.
Online, backup fo C: still had an hour to go
Solved many of the world's problems on Facebook. Read more of them on Twitter.
Took Moira's opera/comedy concert off my calendar because if I'm driving to Morro Bay tomorrow evening I don't want two late nights in a row before getting on a boat.
Out on the patio by 10:45, took photos of the flowers and the cats, but no hummingbirds showed up. I love this new lens, it is sharp and gets the exposures right most of the time. I knew when I bought it that it is not a macro lens, so I have to be about 3 feet from the subject  before it will focus. And it is all telephoto, 55mm minimum, which means no wide shots. Which is why I bought the 18-85mm last night. If I was still doing this for a living, I would buy a second camera body. Oh wait, I do have a D90 in one of my camera cases. Hmmm.

Fluffed the shirts, then forgot about them because the cat pee smell in the office/litterbox room was overwhelming. I had it on my whiteboard as a to-do, so I emptied both litterboxes into the trash can I'd bought for that. It required some trowel work, things were caked up. So much for "clumping" cat litter. Wiped them down with Clorox wipes, vacuumed about 5 lbs of litter from under where the machines had been, re-arranged them perpendicular to each other instead of parallel, filled them with Arm & Hammer clumping litter, and we'll see how that works. The World's Best clumping litter mostly didn't clump. maybe good for manual scooping, but not for the machine. I really don't want to pay for the Littermaid stuff, but it did clump like a boss, as they say in the hood these days. Sorry, dayz.

That was a lot of work, I ran through two sweatbands.

Washed up. Made some of my famous lime seltzer, some of which is hydrating the top of the microwave because a lime quarter leaped out of my fingers and into the glass at about 40 mph.

Turned the dryer on fluff again. Watched some football from the recliner, had a Klondike bar (mint) and when I was fully recovered, took the shirts out of the dryer and put the laundry basket on the bed. Watched more football, decided it was better as background noise, turned it to the same channel in the bedroom and went about hanging up the shirts.

The Tivo in the bedroom is a different model than the one in the livingroom, and there's a delay between the two. Amusing and annoying at the same time.

Shirts done, put a load of the heavier colored stuff into the washer.

Somehow time has managed to pass (blame Facebook and Candy Crush) without lunch. The last load is in the dryer now, I am on the patio with the laptop and two sleeping cats. Domino is on the chair next to me, it has a cushion. Kaan has stuffed himself into the cat bed on the floor by the wall. It is too small for him. I really need to get him a bigger one. Small dog size.

It's a beautiful day, I really should get outside, but the patio gives that illusion.
howeird: (Default)
Slept in. Went online and ordered leopard-pattern velour car seat covers. I may or may not actually install them. Also ordered replacements for the failing pumps in the cats' two water fountains.

Lunch was a Costco Croissant.

1-ish went to the Sunnyvale Historical Museum, a place I did not even know about. Weird because it is right behind the community theater, where I have performed and seen shows many times. The occasion was a local author's event, 40+ writers displaying, chatting about and hoping to sell their books. Theater friend Ande was there with her book about her parents. I bought a copy.

They had authors 2 and 3 to a table, most of them outside under tents on the lawn (it was a beautiful day) but some on the dront porch, and upstairs on the balcony, and Ande was upstairs in one of the display rooms which had been marked as the children's section but there were only 2 out of a dozen books up there which were in that category and 3 or 4 on the lawn tables which were.

It was a wonderful event, well-attended, and my only complaint is they made no attempt to put similar works together. So it was kind of embarrassing to be having an exciting conversation with the woman who wrote a book about her husband, who invented the space shuttle's heat tiles, while the woman with the tiny booklet of poems sat next to her with no one interested in her.

I had expected to only be there half an hour, and then go see the Tonto movie, and then coffee with Janice at 5. But I left at almost 3, and it was too late to see a movie and be out by 4:45.

So I went home via a gas station, 7-11's ATM and a slurpee and sandwich. Sat on the patio with the food & drink & started reading Ande's book.

Then to *$'s and Janice. And home again.

Dinner was pot pie.

Spent some time troubleshooting the USB 3.0 card, Win7-64 just doesn't like the drivers. Pulled the card. While the machine was open I saw I did not have enough SATA data connections to install the two additional drives I bought, so will probably buy a SATA card. Low priority because blue screen from the conflicting USB drivers last week made me system restore to prior to installing the backup software, so I need to do that 3-day backup all over again. :-(

But not right now.

News flash: Domino has also abandoned the crystal litterbox for the clumping litterbox. I'll use my Petco discount to order another one and retire both crystal ones. It was fun while it lasted.

Over on [livejournal.com profile] basfa's FB page I posted that I'm not going to boycott the Ender's Game movie just because the book's author/screenplay writer is an ardent anti-homosexual bigot. The book has nothing to do with the subject, and it has a superb cast. One BASFArian said he was boycotting so this author would not get more work in Hollywood, so I looked up the author on IMDB, and this is his 18th screenplay. Kind of too late to have an effect on that.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
BASFA (I have valuable auction items)
howeird: (Colonel Sanders)
Unlike the usual blue screen, what faced me first thing this morning told me there was an issue with a drive, and I knew it had to be for the USB 3.0 card I'd just installed. Made the mistake of letting Windows try to repair it, finally went into safe mode and disabled the two conflicting drivers (I'd pulled out a defective card and replaced it with a working one) and now everything is back. But I had to wait till I got home from work to try it out.

Well, almost, safe mode disabled Norton, I had to weak that when it came back into unsafe mode.

While I was messing with the blue screen, what looked like an 18-wheeler parked itself in front of my computer room window, and started making horrendous noises.  A closer look showed it was a chipper/mulcher service. They were done mulching and were snowblowing when I went out to my car, and had also moved so they were not blocking the carport. I'm not sure what they had done, I didn't see any trees missing. The stuff they were blowing around was landscape quality wood chips, so maybe they were just filling in the empty spaces. 


My Care and Feeding of Performers panel looked like I was the only performer on it who needed care and feeding. I may be wrong, but from what I see on the web, one is a storyteller, which does not strike me as at all a needy performance type; and the other is mostly a writer. So I was very happy when [livejournal.com profile] figmo agreed to be on that panel, and I got her added by the program chair.

I would also have liked to have [livejournal.com profile] johno and Chris, but they are burning both candles at all four ends and the middles doing con suite and other crucial constuff.


Work today was too much fun. An engineer found a bug, and between his challenging English syntax and typos, I needed Boss to translate what exactly it was I needed to test. Boss was in the bug meetings where things are hashed out in more detail than in the database. It turned out to be one of those tests which required starting a process then going into the lab and pulling the plug on the machine. Then plug it back in, wait for it to boot, and check to see what the logs showed. I had to repeat that several times to know whether it was fixed in the current build.

While doing this, I uncovered two other bugs, and one of those reminded the program manager that there was a third one - misspelled error message - to fix at the same time.

That done, it was about 1:30, I left voicemail for the sales manager at Toyota who had promised to find out by EOD yesterday where my license plates had gone, saying I was filing a police report. Police report is required when asking the DMV to replace both plates. Called Sunnyvale PD and asked, they said I could file a police report online. Went online, it said in bright red letters that missing license plates could not be reported online, and to call the same number I had just called, and ask to speak to an officer. Which I did, but there apparently is only on desk officer, and he was on his phone. I left my name & work number and ws told it woud be a while. Turned out to not be today. :-(

I went online and filled in a DMV license replacement request form, which I printed out. It needs to be mailed in with the $76 fee for whale tail vanity plates.


Fresh out of bugs to test, I opened up the HEVC tutorial (written by 3 German engineers) and made my way through it. If you have seen Sony's ads for their super-duper 4K TV sets, that's basically a stop-gap until the HEVC standard is solid.

I knew it was going to be too hot to go out to eat, so at about 3 pm I joined Automation Guy in the break room. I had brought corn dogs. My afternoon snack was a can of sardines. pre-lunch was celery dipped in Trader Joe crunchy peanut butter.

Somewhere around 10:30 am my diabetes doctor called as planned, he liked my lower A1C number, all my other blood test results were better than last time.  Looks like the key is simply to eat dinner before 9 pm and not keep a pile of Oreos by the bed.

Came  home by way of my local gas station/car wash and squirted about half a tankful - didn't want to have to stop for gas on the way to Sacto tomorrow.

The PC took a while but fired up normally. Safe mode had totally munged my icons, so I spent some time putting them back where they belonged, mostly. Caught up on email and Quicken. Put the whites in the dryer and shirts in the washer. In a minute I need to put away the whites and put the shirts in the dryer.

Had dinner out on the patio with the cats. It had cooled down to about 76° after a high of 90.

Took about 20 minutes to pack. This is a rare treat - I almost never drive to a con I'm staying at. I either fly, take the train or do the commute thing. It means I can over-pack and not worry about having to lug things around.

Just remembered - packed swimsuits and sandals.

All that's left to pack are meds and toiletries.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
UPS store - hard rives & cables have been delivered
Early dinner, finish packing
Change the litterboxes (already topped off the food & water)
7-ish, drive to Sacramento and westercon. Get there ~ 9.
howeird: (Default)
I had hoped to sleep in, on account of staying up late. What woke me was low blood sugar - at 9:30 am it was 77. Luckily there was some chocolate milk in the fridge, and that got me back up. 127 by noon. Okay, so I over-shot a little, but my target is 130, so there.

Also got my blood test numbers back, they are all better than 3 months ago, but still nothing to write home (or here) about. Got my exercise taking out the garbage from the bathroom and livingroom. And hauling my baritone and the heavy music stand to the car. And from the car down the hill to the park. And playing from 1:30 till about 3:30 with a 15-minute intermission. Talking with the baritone player I sit next to, he may be bowing out temporarily while the pain drugs for his damaged foot get balanced. He said he was having trouble finding the notes on the page, and it sounded that way too. According to an article in a long ago Stanford newspaper, he started grad school there in 1962, which would make him at least 76.

I wasn't playing very well either, but we had an easy set of tunes, not a lot of high notes, and my lip lasted until the last number before the finale. The finale is easy, so I was okay for that.

At showtime it was only 77°, and we were in the shade of our huge oak tree, and it was breezy. It had climbed to 81° by intermission, I didn't check after that. We were expecting high 90s.

Went straight from there, hungry, to Starbucks where I was meeting Janice at 5:30, the plan was to have lunch before she arrived, at the new Thai place there (Rengstorff & Middlefield) but it's closed Sundays. So I went to Starbucks and had a pair of their yummy croissant hot dogs. And a huge iced tea.

Read on the Kindle while I ate, then put that away and launched the laptop and Facebooked and Twittered. I build a dummy Twitter account to follow news and a couple of personalities, but it isn't linked to anything and I'm not accepting followers. Hope that will prevent the hackers. If it doesn't, well, I don't care if CNN, BBC or Recall Nancy Pelosi get invitations to watch gay porn.

Janice showed up on time, we had a nice chat, I told her about Uncle Bonzai, she told me about her latest assignation. I also told her, and she was shoocked, that the Kindle Paperwhite has no audio capability. I showed her mine. Most of her Kindle purchases are audio books, and she was wondering why they dikdn't download, and Kindle support didn't have a clue either. Turns out she usually puts those on her iPod, so no real harm done.

Safeway, I was almost out of TV dinners, and they had a sale on Crystal Lite and Cheez-its.

Home, put the food away, brought the baritone and the laptop inside, heated up a dinner and ate it on the patio with cats wandering around. Looked at the mail - the Kindle Paperlite holder was there, it doesn't quite work as advertised for a unit which has ads. Instead of turning the machine off when the cover closes, it displays an ad forever.

Bought NovaBackup last night, started it up backing up my 2TB mirrored RAID drive to a 3TB network drive. I ordered two more matching drives, now that they are on sale for $90 each, and the plan is to format them, change to RAID 4 or 5, and restore to what will then be a hopefully faster) 6 TB array. At a later date I may need to buy a bigger backup drive. But for now, it says this backup won't be done till late tomorrow night.

Created an email message to all the people on panels I'm moderating for [livejournal.com profile] westercon66. Only one bounced, but he has other addresses and the second one went through.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
BASFA
howeird: (Default)
Slept really well, possibly because I shut the cats out of the bedroom, punishment for pooping in the livingroom. and partly to have a door between me and the Drama. Kaan has been trying very hard lately to be friends with Domino, Domino is being a total grouch about it, growling and hissing and taking swipes. Kaan is 3x her size, but backs off instead of fighting. But 20 seconds later he's back trying to get close to Domino.

Anyway, I didn't wake up till 9:30, which meant my plan to bring the car to the installer at 10 was going to be pushed back. Got there at 11:30, they needed an hour or 2 to pull out the radio, check the camera connections, and figure out why the camera was only showing 2 views instead of 4. They pointed me at a very nice coffee shop, lots of eye candy both sides of the counter - the woman at the cash register is about 5' tall, and has a cleavage big enough to host a Westercon. She suggested an iced vanilla latte, which tasted great. I also had an apple turnover. After an hour, I ordered a refill and a banana nutella crepe. Hood crepe, but I would rather have had the mushroom/fancycheese which they were out of.

12:30, tech called, stumped about the radio controls not working, so he offered to install the aux switch, I said go ahead. Another 15 minutes and I walked back there, he was finishing up, I waited in the air conditioned 2-person waiting area. The bad news is it's a software issue with the main unit, which he did not sell me (Toyota sourced it) and he will contact them to see what they suggest. Good news is the aux switch gives all 4 views, one of them is very useful - it shows what's coming from the left and right corners behind the vehicle. It was very handy when I was trying to pull out of a very busy parking lot later. The other good news is at my request he checked the radio antenna connections, and discovered they were wrong and fixed them. Now I have a ton of AM, FM and HD stations coming in. Yay!

From there to UPS, picked up a package long-awaited from ScanCafe. I had sent 45 rolls of B&W negatives to them February 17. They received them the 19th. They said they would have the scans done and on DVD for me by April 22. More than two months is a long wait, but it was a lot of work. Finally getting them back June 8 with no real updates on their handydandy web site, not acceptable. The quality of the work was okay, but not worth the 69 cents a frame they charged. So I won't be linking to them here, and can't recommend them.

Got home, 88° outside, and OCD fool that I am, I sat in the car and programmed the radio. 6 AM and 18 FM stations. I started with the HD stations.

Went inside long enough to drop the box from ScanCafe onto a table, then grab my rental renewal form and took it to the office. Which was closed, with three people waiting. I went back home and faxed it in, including a nastygram about how I would move out at the end of the current lease except the company hasn't decided if we're moving. And probably won't for 6 months. Craigslist has many apartments in Sunnyvale for $500/mo less rent. But I don't want to move again so soon, and I don't want to move to Someplace else in Sunnyvale if the company moves to Redwood City. :-(

Programmed the new internet radio, was disappointed to find that it does not sync with the other two, or use the same android app. Probably will sell it on eBay and order another squeezebox from overstock.com. Or not. I mostly program them from the radio, and don't sync my bedroom one with the kitchen one anyway.

Opened the UPS box, and was attacked by Styrofoam peanuts. FAIL.  The object was supposed to be to keep the negatives flat, and away from static electricity. Pulled out the DVD, popped it into the PC drive and at least they did something right - the images are in folders which have the same labeling as the negative holders: year-month-roll# except they used underscores instead of dashes, which makes it harder to use a 10-key pad to type them.

I transferred all the folders to the hard drive, and then to the backup drive, and started to upload them to Flickr, when I saw that instead of naming the photos with my system, they had their own 40-character order code ending in the cumulative number of scans. So by the time I got to the 3rd roll we were up to  00107_bn_13ajwmyu9h0107_z.jpg. So I killed the ones on Flickr, and went through the tedious process of renaming every photo in every folder. If you ever have to do something like this, here's the process I used (Windows 7):
cut for techie boring )
This took me from 5:30-9:30 pm, with an hour break for dinner.

NOW I was ready to upload to Flickr, one folder at a time, as its own set. another 90 minutes or so. And finally, open each set, arrange alphabetically, and d&d a meaningful thumbnail to the title column.

And then post on FB.

Here are some samples
Read more... )

Plans for tomorrow:
Redwood City, see the final reading of Sexbot 2600
Maybe go across the street and see a movie. It's probably going to be another scorcher.
howeird: (Default)
Team meeting at work would have been 15 minutes, but the guy who can't keep quiet stretched it to an hour.

The SNMP monitor project got done with some cutting and pasting, simple stuff, which showed that the theory my buddy had come up with was not borne out by the facts. My tool was able to show events every 10 seconds, which is accuracy he didn't have available before.

Lunchtime I went to Starbucks, kinda full on snacks I brought to work, so I had an iced tea and one of their new croissant hot dogs. Yummy. Sat outside with my Sharks hooded jacket all zipped up and hood up. Nice day except for the wind.

Back to work, finished the big automation project and sent it to Automation Guy right at the end of the day. It still has some timing issues, but they will be different on his PC/test machine.

Stopped in at Fry's, spent way too much time wandering the aisles looking for something to cover the power/reset switches on the top of my home PC. Kaan managed to turn it off again, despite the plastic sheet I'd taped across them. It was too close to them and too flexible, and he weighs a lot. When I'm at the computer he sometimes puts his paws up on there to snoop around the desk and head-butt me. I found a workable project case, the top is angled like a hood and the front looked from the outside like it was designed to be cut out for an LED display. Got it home and it took a pair of cutters and a lot of back and forth with piers to get that "panel" (which was more solid than it looked) out. And then I had to file it down some to get ride of the ragged edges. Which was difficult because I missed once with the cutters and pinched my index finger with the part on the non-cutting side. It should have swelled up in a blood blister, but cold water was apparently applied in time.

Used black gaffer's tape to keep it in place, and now I think I have a very sturdy guard, with lots of clearance for me to push the buttons, but not for Kaan.

Some online time, then to BASFA. Had not been there in ages, due to rehearsals. Tonight's rehearsal was for dance revue, and I don't dance. BASFA was fun, lots of running gags. Good to see [livejournal.com profile] figmo there, wheelchair and all.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Rehearsals. Music for an hour, then run Act I.
howeird: (Default)
But I should have started studying lines an hour or two ago. Just that some financial stuff came in which I had to deal with, and the the sucking sound of Facebook, and recording a voice message to my aunt & uncle in NYC (uncle has macular degeneration, and would rather hear my voice than read text). And then there was a reply to [livejournal.com profile] lemmozine which I had only half-finished this morning. Oh, and I had to bring the laptop in and figure out why it had failed to VPN to work last time I was at *$'s. Worked fine, which meant finishing an installation of linux, which pretended to work but didn't.

So here I am, before midnight.

Morning started with a walk to the apartment office where I waited for way too long for two reps to explain something to a new renter which one could have done by herself. Picked up two packages.  One is a remote for my camcorder, the other is a set of Bose earbuds.

Back to the apartment, it was now too late to install a VM on my work PC, so I got in the car and headed for Mountain View to be way early for my doctor's appointment, but after a block I turned around to get to the bathroom. Now I was only slightly early. Doctor gave me the exam I expected, and hindsight, she says, tells her last week I had a bladder infection, which triggered bacterial prostatitis, but now the bladder is fine and the prostate is mostly fine. Continue to take drugs, and get a blood test in a month to verify the prostate thing was transient.

Mountain View is lunch heaven, and I was feeling like wor won ton soup would go down well, so I had a huge bowl of that at Fu Lam Mum, which is also where I go for birthday lobster when I'm thinking straight. They have a super dim sum brigade, but this time I needed soup. Huge portion, I took home 5 juan tons.

The north end of MV has about 6 new eateries, including a Greek bakery on the corner which replaced a place called Neto, which was a bakery too, but seemed ashamed to pin down its ethnicity. I'm pretty sure it's the same staff, and all they did was change the sign and add a couple of Greek columns to the display behind the cash register. I bought some baklava and tiramisu, and headed to work

The project at work was to install a virtual machine on my PC with fedora linux, and install snmp bits. It took 4 tries to get fedora installed properly, the VirtualBox software from Oracle sucks the big one, and never asks for the OS. But won't run without it.

A little after 6, I bailed when it was clear I had succeeded with linux, but not with snmp.

Home, I did that stuff above, checked out the remote (it only works with my tape-based camcorder, not with the smaller lighter better memory-based one). Plugged in the earbuds and now I know why some people stay attached forever. Bose audio is excellent, it makes craptastic MP3 listenable.

Plans for tomorrow:
AM, go to the car audio place which installed the alarm and have them fix the trunk release, and install a backup camera. I had given them one to put in when the alarm went in, but it was junk and died months ago.

Work after that

Consonance by 8 pm. 

One on 1

Feb. 14th, 2013 01:32 am
howeird: (Default)
So the highlight of my day every other Wednesday is my 1-on-1 meeting with my boss. It lasts half an hour, today the last 15 minutes was mostly chatting about non-work stuff.

It was a stressful work day, most of it spent re-tooling an automation script with Automation Guy, because things changed between builds. But by the end of the day we had not only a working script but a much more efficient one.

Home after work, Kaan has a cold, he is sneezing a lot. His sneeze sounds like he is channeling his Labrador half, not cat-like at all. 

There was some stuff to do online - a friend asked if I could copy a blu ray disk of her trip to China. I don't have a blu ray burner or disks. I looked to see if they had come down enough in price to buy one. They have, but only for the single layer, slower speed ones. I decided not to buy one today.

Off to Brigadoon rehearsals, another music one, lots of work, lots of fun, so good to be singing again.

The SM claimed that the latest rehearsal schedule was on Dropbox, so I installed it on my phone and looked. Nope, only the old stuff. One of my long-time friends in the cast had heard about my web site, so I gave him the user login.

When I got home I logged into the Dropbox share with the link they gave, instead of with Dropbox, and downloaded the whole shebang. About 1.2 Gigs of stuff, including videos and audio which I had not seen before. Uploaded those to my mirror site. Also fixed the MP3 tags for the one ripped CD they put up there - their ripper named all the songs "finale". The filenames were correct, but when you played the song it displayed that.

I may also convert the mov files to mp4 if I have the time.

This weekend's project will be to make an index.html page and pretty things up a bit. Right now it's just a directory tree.

Sent email to the cast & staff with the login info. I'll have to look on GoDaddy to see if they have a way to count user logins and file transfers.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Rehearsal
howeird: (Howard Street)
[livejournal.com profile] susandennis:
Wondering if you actually tried your ATM card or just didn't notice this:


My no-name ATM card from an obscure credit union works just fine, is why I'm asking.


Interesting morning, I woke up at about 3 am and found myself pushed to the far side of the bed with Kaan stretched out across the bed instead of from head to foot. After a trip to check the plumbing, I repositioned him and took back my half of the bed. Slept till the alarm/lights went on at 7. Decided I needed more sleep so got another hour in.

After I was up and dressed and drugged, I realized I had nothing useful to do at work, so following the logic of the spheres, I removed the work-provided out of date, mostly useless Symantec Endpoint Protection software which was required to VPN into the office, and installed the latest Norton's which Comcast gives me for free.

Just for grins, I launched the VPN software to see what would happen, and lo and behold, it downloaded a new version and in 5 minutes I was connected to work. I launched email, and it told me it needed a security number, which it had left on my voicemail. At work. So I called my work phone and there it was in voicemail. Then I remote desktopped into my work PC and sent email to the boss that I would be in around 10:30 because I had installed the new IT software, which IT had not bothered to tell us about. Typical.

Wrapped that up, went to work, found some useful things to do but mostly piece-o-cake things. On my lunchtime to-do list was to rectify the situation with the car where it was showing a woefully depleted gas tank. There were only 2 pairs of cars ahead of me, about a 10 minute wait. Pulled up to the pump, and the card reader was being held together with the thin plastic tape which is used for ??? nothing I can think of. It took three passes to get it to read my membership card, then it misread my ATM card and I had to start all over. Finally turned to push the button for the type of gas I wanted, and sticker shock hit big-time. $3.899! The last time I filled up it was something like $3.489. Thanks Obama for helping make the rich even richer.

And about that 9/10 of a cent - something my dad taught me the first time he gave me a quarter and sent me to get a gallon of gas for the mower was the price they show in big numbers is almost a cent less than the price they will charge you. One would think that some time in the last 50 years Congress or the FTC would have ordered the price to be displayed in full cents. Or at least for the 9/10 to be the same size as the rest of the price.

Next stop, since I had a ton of time, drove way down to across the street from where I used to live to see if my eyes were deceiving me, or if the Carl's Jr which had been there forever was really now a Pizza Hut. Well, not quite. It is a Round Table Pizza. So I had lunch there. I like their pizzas, and liked the brand new clean place, and the friendly staff. I did not like the salad buffet which was designed for people < 4'10" tall with a 40" reach. The stuff in the salad buffet was good, except for the day-old mushrooms.

Back to work, read some specs, wrote my weekly report, and bailed at 5:30.

Since it was early, I went to the Starbucks on Mathilda near Lucky's, ordered a mint tea, and tried to do some stuff on the laptop, but the wifi was over-tapped by the dozen or so people on it, so I folded it up and went shopping. There was nothing I needed but the freezer was looking depleted (i.e. things were not falling out when I opened the door) so I got some stuff. But first I headed for the wine department and was surprised to see they had the obscure wine which I liked at the Coast Starlight wine & cheese tasting. A Riesling from Chateau Ste. Michelle. They also had its sister, the sweet Riesling, and they were on sale for $8 a piece so I bought them both.

Home, stuffed the freezer, petted the cats, finished installing stuff on the laptop which took no time at all over the 5GHz connection, and decided to make some more fondue from scratch. Smaller batch than last time. Cuisinarted two blocks of Emmenthaler, and one of Gruyere. Poured about 2/3 of the Reisling into the pot and stirred the cheese in. Last of all, a few shots of Kirsch. It needed some corn starch to thicken, but not much. I already had a big bag of cubed sourdough defrosting, and sliced in a banana too.

Very yummy meal, as I watched CNN lose all sense of newsworthiness by devoting full time to showing their people out in the snow in NYC and Boston. I guess in Atlanta snow is much more important than a trained counterinsurgent sharpshooter evading the LAPD; a 15-year-old Middle Eastern girl, who had been shot in the head, speaking in clear concise English that she was not deterred from promoting female literacy; or Buster Posey admitting he and Tim Lincecum were friends.

So I switched to the Weather Channel, where they were matter-of-factly forecasting snow for South Dakota.

Earlier today I entered 5 of my Lincoln misquotes in a juried art show at the Ark Art Gallery. The theme is text in art. It's a stretch, but who knows?

In other art news my Boskone art show photos made it to Boston. Glad I didn't send them by ground.

Plans for tomorrow:

Maybe go to the set shop to work for a couple of hours. Maybe.
5 pm coffee w/Janice. I hope to hear about her adventures as a Red Cross volunteer in NJ.
Cheetah's? I need 1's and I need to break a $100 bill.
It also may be time for a massage. I've been having cramps in my calves in the mornings lately. Pretty normal for me in the winter.

Part Two

Nov. 22nd, 2012 01:07 am
howeird: (Default)
Went home after work, had just enough time to put return address labels on the calendar envelopes, and see that I need to update my address mailmerge spreadsheet and doc.

Drove to Mountain View, usually this is a half hour drive at 6:15 pm, but there was little traffic and I only hit about 5% of the red lights. I was there at 6:30 for a 7 pm date.

This was a date with a purpose. And old usenet friend (we met online in 1989, and have been friends ever since). I had told her I liked the chicken-fried steak at Denny's and she said I had to try it at Chili's. We both ordered it, and in 15 minutes the waiter brought something which looked great, but when I cut into it, it was a chicken  breast. FAIL. He tried to make excises, but my answer was "steak is steak, whether you call it country-fried or chicken-fried". Idiot. Both of use went through the menu, and what he had brought us was not even on it. FAIL x 2.

In another 10 minutes he brought us replacement dishes, and yes, that was steak-like substance in there, but it was a rush job, the breading was all bubbly and had been cooked in burnt oil. Mine was all gristle, I only ate half of it before giving up. The corn on the cob on a stick was also very chewy. Mashed potatoes were good, the gravy was thin and looked a lot like Ranch dressing, though it tasted like gravy.

It was my friend's treat, for my birthday last week, and she paid with a gift card, so I didn't complain. On top of the slow and stupid service, the place is LOUD.

Home, redid my address data and labels, watched an episode of The Mentalist  (now I am only 4 behind) and stuffed envelopes.

Which is when I noticed there was none for my UK cousins, who are second on my data list. Word messed up and started the merge at #3.

While I was at it I subtracted one person who is entitled  postcards from my trips but not a calendar, and added a newly found Peace Corps pal, redid the doc and printed 5 pages of labels.

So now all the ones I plan on mailing are ready to go, but the PO is closed tomorrow and I'll be out of town till Sunday night. So Monday. Which is fine, nobody needs one before late December.

Plans for tomorrow:
Sleep in
T-day dinner at lunch time at the brother of a long time QA friend and fellow iconoclast. Brother lives in the same complex as my usenet friend, next building over.
Pack for my trip
howeird: (Default)

When I got home late Friday night after the show, I uninstalled the Comcast freebie version of Norton Anti-virus, and installed the company's freebie enterprise version. After I uninstalled the first one, a little note showed up embedded in the lower right hand corner of the screen saying the build number, and it was not a genuine Microsoft product. Outlook gave the same error when I opened it, and closed the program. The instructions on how to troubleshoot this on Microsoft's support site all led to a page saying "pay $115 for a genuine copy".  I finally gave up at about 2 am.

First thing in the morning, which was about 9:30, I called MSFT customer service, and a fellow named Reuben with a horribly thick Hispanic accent asked all the right questions and few of the wrong ones, and after hitting the same dead ends I had hit, we did an RDP session and he did some things on his end with my product ID and license key, which let him activate the copy and fix whatever glitch was causing the problem. It took 45 minutes, but it solved both the Windows and Outlook issues.

So knowing that my machine was not going to shut itself off or something, I attacked the 2013 calendar project. I had about 40 photos, and could only use 13. It was not quite that bad, because some were sets or pairs of photos out of which I knew I could only use one. Like which one of the 3 Thailand eagles photos, the the two angles of the same roller derby girl, or the two angles of the longboat in front of the limestone island. In the end, I narrowed it down to only two of the Pangnga Bay photos. I could have done a whole calendar of that one trip. One of my sisters decided "no snakes" which took away three photos. And the picture of the shuttle piggybacked on the 747 was definitely the cover.

The routine for these calendars is the image needs to be signed (I have a macro for that) resized to 3300x2200 pixels and wrapped into the middle of a 3450x2700 pixel frame (I created a new macro for that). Then a caption is added to the bottom of each frame, which has to be done by hand.

I uploaded all the photos to Costco, and used their reshuffling feature to move the ones I liked most into the first 13 slots. Somewhere along the way I decided not to use any of the close-up portraits. I also wanted a mix of locations, not just Thailand. Ironically three of the winners were shot at the Thai temple in Fremont. I created a calendar from the top 13, added some Jewish holidays and put my Flickr URL at or near the last day of each month, and dropped it into my cart. They should be done in a week, but I won't start sending them out till next month.

While I was doing that I also did laundry, and even put it all away.

I watched the end of the Stanford game, took some boxes to the dumpster which is way overflowing. They need to collect twice as often as they do.

The music and text for Brigadoon callbacks finally arrived late afternoon. The song is too high for me, the text I can do but it will take some work to nail down a Scottish accent.

On my to-do list was get litterbox refills and nail clippers at Petco, some bullion cubes and Klondike bars from Safeway, but first go to the container store on Santana Row for something to replace the linen closets which I don't have in this apartment. That turned out to be a disaster. It took half an hour to get close enough to see they were not letting anyone else into the parking garage, and traffic was at a crawl. SJ Police only had one officer on hand, he was making traffic breaks on one of the main roads so people who could not find parking in the garage could exit onto the street. They needed two or three more at the main intersection, and maybe one of those portable electronic signs a couple of blocks away warning people off.

Petco was a win. They now have a newly remodeled SPCA adoption center in the back, so I took a look, and hung around in the adult cat room. There was one gorgeous cat I really liked, except he seems to have the same hands-off personality as Domino. And I don't think I really want another cat.

They only had one litterbox refill, and the price went from $16 to $23. Online it's $13.50 each for a 6-pack. They had about a dozen brands and models of clippers, I bought the house brand which looked like what I lost in the move.

Did not find the Safeway, GPS couldn't figure out which across the street it was. So I headed toward home, thinking I would stop off at a massage place I saw on the way there. I did, nice newly remodeled place, pretty lobby, new massage tables. Average massage. Went next door to the Country Inn for dinner. Very slow service, the soup and main dish had obviously sat out for a while before the waitress picked them up. Okay ribs, veggies were 95% broccoli and cauliflower  :-( rice was short grained and cold on top, lukewarm underneath. Dessert was a winner, and arrived quickly - huge-ass Napoleon, with real pastry top & bottom and a ton of custard in between. Only the one layer, but I'll suffer.

On the way home, a block away is a Lowe's, I stopped in and found a light assemble-it-yourself plastic rack similar to the one I have for T-shirts, and bought one. It is now set up in the bedroom, with much duct tape (silver on the back, white on the front) where I put my foot through the base shelf whilst pushing the stand-offs in place. Now I need to get the stuff off the floor in the office & livingroom onto the rack. Maybe tomorrow.

Plans for tomorrow:

Watch football
Look at my lines
Load up the rack & break down the boxes it frees up
Callbacks
Watch football, maybe at Hooters


Home, watched Oregon clobber Cal and UCLA walk all over Wazoo, who made a good run at the end for a comeback. 

Made myself some chocolate milk, and discovered Domino likes lactose-free milk.
 

howeird: (Default)

Work was somewhat busy, 9 am team meeting so the Belgium guys could be on the call, but one left early. Maybe still in vacation mode.

Did some automation, and also had my brain picked about Windows Transfer and one of our new automation apps which meeds to be run as Administrator on Windows 7, but not on XP. The story is that after I got a new laptop to replace the one which kept blue-screening on me, boss realized the almost everyone else was still using a 2007 XP model, and approved the whole team to upgrade. The new machines are much better for the kind of work we do, and since I was the first one to upgrade, I'm the go-to person for any growing pains. There really aren't many.

Lunchtime I went to Fry's to buy stuff for two home projects. Number 1 was to get back the full speed of my Internet connection by moving the router into the office, and running a long Ethernet cable from the cable modem in the livingroom. I bought a 50-foot roll and a 100-foot roll, and two 6-foot pieces of cable "concealer" - those humps which run across the floor so you don't trip over the wire. You might trip over the hump, but you won't pull the cable out. 

Number 2 was buying a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) and that was something of an adventure. First of all, Fry's moved them from the first aisle by the entrance to way deep into the store, but not near the PC cases and power supplies where I expected them. One of their minions led me to them, and hung around for a long time not being able to answer any of my questions but still hoping to get a commission. After he finally bailed, I found the one I'd seen online on sale, and as I was wheeling it out a very smarmy guy in a suit, who had been told by the minion that there was a commission to be made, tried to "help" me, but I was already gone. I'm all in favor of letting someone get a commission if they actually help me, but that never happens at Fry's, and the commission thing means a delay while they write it up at their local station and another delay as the cashier has to process the extra piece of paper. No thanks.

What made the choice difficult is they only carry two brands, they were out of stock of all the models of one brand, and the other brand had three kinds to choose from, with inconsistent features. Geek TMI here )



Home after work, watched the 49ers clobber Arizona, which makes the second time this month a SF team has trounced a Cardinals team. :-)

More geeky TMI )
So now everything is how I want it, I think. I am not 100% sure the backup outlets are the ones I guessed. After I finish this I will run a test.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work (lots of new automation procedures to write. Okay, two.)
Home
Shower
Pack some toiletries and a dose of insulin, and my Kindle. And a T-shirt and shorts which will do for PJs
Drive to the sleep clinic near El Camino Hospital in Mountan view for an overnight sleep study.
 


Chrome Foo

Jul. 5th, 2012 11:28 pm
howeird: (Default)

The home PC came up this evening with Firefox and MSIE both showing blank (black on black or white on white). It had something to do with removing a registry entry for the Arial font, but more to do with uninstalling Google Chrome, which had mangled my fonts to the point where everything was bold italics. All by itself.

I had to do a system restore to recover, which did not do too much damage. It restored Chrome just enough to error out with an "unable to find database" message. Good. Removed the icon. Changed all my default Arial fonts to Arial Unicode MS which is a bit too bold but better than all italics.


Work started off fine, I found a new feature to automate, automation guy said go for it. As soon as I went for it, I found out that a couple of things I needed to do the GUI recorder program could not capture. And the "try...catch" routine took me two hours to get right. And I'm not sure if it was working when I left after 7 tonight.

Lunchtime I went to Patelco CU to get my ATM card PIN changed to what I wanted. And I withdrew enough from TechCU to cover getting checks printed for Patelco. I won't use those checks, I need them to make a template to print my own. I'm still not sure I will switch, Patelco is definitely a step down from Tech. I may look into Keypoint too. Later.

Survived lunch at Hometown Buffet, where I am suddenly a Senior. Last time I checked one had to be 65, now it is 60. Many places have lowered their senior age, Sizzler has, Denny's and Coco's are 55.

 Radio Shack and Office Something did not have SD card holders, but Office had a nice travel bag which will hold most of my non-insulin meds.

Home after work, getting things staged for tomorrow. First thing is to bring Domino to the kennel. Her carrier is in the middle of the livingroom surrounded by food, treats and a brush which she thinks is her best toy. Then to work, there is usually a gang outing at lunch on Fridays. Home, finish packing and have my butt on the curb in front of the apartment office by 9 pm.

The cheaper wallet turned out to not hack it, the one from Penny's worked better once I took out the cards I won't be needing on my trip, and added Thai money behind the divider. And pulled out $40 in $1 bills.

Earlier, I had found all my Thai coins, which all are still good, and put the 1- and 5-baht coins in one change purse, and the smaller denominations in another. I think the smaller ones add up to about 10 baht. Those are all on the bed with passport & health card. Skytrain card is in my wallet. I am not sure if it is good or has any value left on it from 2008.

Email from the reunion organizer with her Thailand cell phone number, and a reprieve. The Friends of Thailand dinners will be informal dress. The shindig at the US Ambassador's and the Thai foreign ministry are suit & tie. I'm only planning to attend the latter's morning session.

Plans for tomorrow:
Domino --> Kennel
Me --> work
Attend to last-minute things (turn off the air conditioner...)
Pack last-minute stuff
Wait for the airport shuttle
Fly to Bangkok. Technically that's the day after tomorrow.


 

Sunday

Jun. 24th, 2012 11:17 pm
howeird: (Default)
Did I mention that in my OCD moment yesterday of organizing the piles of stuff in the box in the bedroom I found a Palm TX and a charging/sync cradle and a USB sync/charge cable for it?

Last night I plugged the latter in and was able to set the date, but when I hit a button it went dead. I played with it some more today, but the cradle is missing its power adapter and the USB cable has a broken Palm connector. I ordered a connector online ($3) which may arrive in time for me to play before vacation.  That little guy worked really well for its time.

Had a bit of a low blood sugar at 1 am, but it wasn't low enough to worry about. I drank some High C, which I probably shouldn't have since it is red. Not too concerned, the no-red thing was not supposed to start till tomorrow.

The Gatorade diet is working fine. It's really a clear liquid diet, and may include:

 * water
 * broth
 * bouillon
 * consommé
 * white grape juice
 * apple juice
 * 7-up
 * Sprite
 * KoolAid
 * Gatorade
 * Jello
 * popsicles.  

No alcohol and no purple or red drinks.

Gatorade is way high in sodium, so I have been switching off with iced tea. Since I'm not getting any other calories, I'm going for the non-diet stuff.

Played online for a bit, played with the cat, then hauled my baritone out to the car and drove to the concert, an hour early. Got my favorite parking spot. It was probably still free 30 minutes later. Turnout was good, but down from last year, except this time we had some captive audiences - people who were there for picnics and BBQ parties and the playground. It was a relatively easy set of music, most of the high notes were in the first half. We were done by 3:30, which is a little early but it didn't feel that way.

Next stop was Starbucks down the end of Miramonte, where there used to be a Blockbuster. Two hours early for my coffee klatch with Janice, but there were seats by the AC outlets, and if there's one thing I do well it's waste time on the internet. Janice was on time as usual, I packed up the PC and we moved outdoors. Part of the deal was to go over logistics for Tuesday, she'll be my ride there and back. She's retired, but that just means she's busier than ever. This will give her time to read.

Safeway, got some jello, Sprite and more Gatorade for tonight and tomorrow.  And popsicles.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Home & start drinking the colon gunk.

howeird: (Default)
I had to use a lot of that today. Last night the relay in the bedroom suddenly lost its connection to the internet. Which meant no internet radio.Tried connecting to the one in the livingroom, no dice. I power cycled the router, and everything came back on. For about 5 minutes, then dead again. It was late, screw it, I'll see if it recovers overnight.

6 am, woke up for no apparent reason, looked at my cell phone, it showed a 100% signal from the bedroom relay, but the icon was grey not blue. No internet connection. Slogged to the router on the other side of the apartment, Domino yelling at me as she always does, power cycled the router, but this time no WAN light. Tried again, for longer, and it came back on. In about 5 minutes the relays were showing green lights too. Whenever this happens, I have to power cycle all the webcams, and re-sync anything else on the wi-fi net. Except TiVo, which is now hard-wired to the livingroom relay (I gave up on their N adapters).

Tried to get back to bed, but it was too late.

At work I had nothing to do, so I created some video clips for some tests which I will need to run in a couple of months, and loaded those onto the shared server.

Went with two of the gang to SmokeEaters for half-priced wings. I love their wings, love the price, but they slopped so much sauce on them I could hardly pick them up. Finally put half of them in a box. I'll wash the goop off at home, and have them with dinner.

This place is way the heck out in Cupertino, way farther than I'd have gone on my own.

After work I went straight to the Starbucks next to Lucky's, because I have some shopping to do. Ice cream, bananas, rubber bands, maybe apples, maybe bottled iced tea (for the doctor visit next week I need to not drink anything purple or red, which is mostly what colors of Crystal Lite I have.).

Last night I printed invitations on card stock for the Thai ambassador's party, the foreign affairs ministry gathering and the Peace Corps HQ visit. The latter was by far the most ornate and least useful. A passport ought to get me in that door.

Plans for tomorrow:
Kaiser for travel vaccinations. Must remember to bring my yellow health cards
Work
1-on-1 with boss
??
howeird: (Default)
Up till almost 4 am, almost plotzed at work at 4 pm but was woken up by needing to do some brain-engaged writing.
Lunchtime, picked up a pair of Netgear plug-n-play wifi-N repeaters. Fast food for lunch because, well, time.
Home, installed the repeaters but they did not seem to be repeating. Open box units, probably were set up for someone else's network. Screw it, I needed to crash.

Tried to get to sleep, Domino did her spynx thing next to me. That was about 6:30, last look at the clock I remember was 7:30. Woke up at a little before 11. Got dressed, drove to Denny's for dinner. Excellent service for a change. No wi-fi there, so finished reading Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself and switched to Slave Girl of Gor when I was done.

Back home, found the setup guide for the repeaters which was missing from the boxes. One by one reset them, paired them with the router, fired up the Ultrabook because my main PC does not have wireless and setup needed a PC which would connect to the repeater by wireless. The wizard is a little out of order, but in about 15 minutes I had them both set up with unique SSID names, and the same login and password, and was able to connect to each of them. Tivo, unfortunately, at 1 am locked me out of network setup because there's a software upgrade coming at 2 am. Stupid, it only takes 5 minutes to change the network settings, and the update might fail with the current setup. I did get the blueray player set up, and played an Amazon Prime video, it was a much better connection. Put one in the bedroom, and hooked up the squeezebox radio to it. Much better signal, but it showed that the intermittent play from Thailand's Fung Fung Fung station is not due to my network. Bummer. I get other stations from Thailand which are more reliable, but they have too many loud commercials. One thing about Thai radio commercials is they either sound like ads for a relaxing spa treatment or they sound like ads for a monster truck rally. Often the ones which sound like ads for monster truck rallies are ads for a relaxing spa treatment. :-(  

Spent a lot of $ today. Also bought a replacement connector for my camera's GPS unit (they have improved it by making a flex curled cord instead of the straight one which keeps popping out). Cord was $12, express shipping from HK $30. Non-express would take a month. Bought an iPod 6th gen on eBay, now that two 5th gens have crapped out intermittently on the car audio system. I'm blaming the battery. Also bought a battery replacement kit for the 5th gen. Both of those will probably go on eBay "for parts".  Also plopped some change into my Discover card to keep me below the limit. It's a low limit, but 0% interest. If I keep rotating money through it, I get cash back. My Chase card started charging interest (it had a 0 balance but a late submission from Kaiser for $10 cost $11.09) so I put that card away.

Bought some Safeway Select 78% chocolate the other day, and it's pretty good. I'd say 7 out of 10.

Plans for later today:
Use my free Starbucks drink card, and take my netbook there for upgrades
Maybe hit Baycon. Maybe. I've had enough of Fanime, and just don't get steampunk so no clockwork alchemy
If I didn't have a concert Sunday I'd have taken the train to Sacto for the jazz.
howeird: (Default)
Thanks to a comment made by [livejournal.com profile] quadrivium over on the Book of Face, I had loaded onto my Kindle the classic novel Slave Girl of Gor by John Norman. It is, perhaps, the most poorly written romance novel of the 20th century. Or maybe not, since I have not read many of them. Three, I think. It is Not Safe For Work, so I read it before I go to sleep (at home, not at work). To balance this out, for times when I am wearing clothing, I also have on the Kindle Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself by Harriet Ann Jacobs. They balance each other in an odd way, the first being fiction about a girl born free, kidnapped into slavery and getting more and more into it, and the second being about a girl born a slave, trying to get out of it.

Reading the latter book was mostly how I spent my evening, outside in the sunny side of the apartment's picnic area waiting for an eclipse. I was stupid and did not go to Fry's as planned to get safety glasses or something similar, and since the cell phone was between my eyes and the sun I was able to take pictures, but without a filter all I got was a bright ball of sun, as if nothing was happening. At about 6:15 it started to get a little darker, but the big clue was when the wind picked up dramatically and the temperature dropped. It never got that dark - maybe 25% darker.

This morning I slept in, Domino joined me for some of that, and spent most of the morning loading about a hundred updates onto the ASUS laptop. I managed to sync Firefox with my main PC, except they lied about it syncing passwords - I had to do those all over again.

I'm not 100% sure I will be keeping this machine. The Toshiba fingerprint login is much more reliable than ASUS's face image login. ASUS has placed the delete key next to the power button, and they are the same size & shape. And the "home" and "end" keys are function keys so it takes two hands to use them. The touchpad is HUGE and I keep brushing it by mistake.

It is faster than the Toshiba, and has a sharper display, but not by much.

While I was installing, friends in Baltimore Skyped me, and we chatted for about half an hour. My old theater buddy George and his parents (who were visiting from Ashland, Oregon). He and his parents are all long-time friends, we did The Wizard of Oz together in Fremont, CA in 1986. George and I were in at least three other musicals before that. He has given up theater for a wife and two boys. So it goes. Domino jumped up on my lap during the chat. George used to have about 6 cats, but gave that up too when he moved east.

Plans for tomorrow:
work - 10 am meeting
BASFA, probably
howeird: (Default)
Busy day at work.  The CTO gave a presentation on a new device which has been on the wish list for at least 4 years, it was very thorough but easy to understand, and he did a masterful job of showing how the timing is now right to get the intro version on the market ASAP and then ease our way into the full blown dream machine.

Lunchtime I went to the apartment and picked up the new laptop, and shared turkey bologna and Kraft Singles with Domino. Two of the few things she will eat out of my hand.

Back at work, Something Went Wrong with the machine which lets us stream video clips. I have two tests waiting for that to get fixed. Received a new set of dates for two of my projects.

Home, set up the two laptops on one of my spare routers via ethernet cables, turned off wi-fi, and ran Windows Easy Transfer. Both machines are Windows 7, and it was very easy to start, but with about 350 MB transferred, it wanted the "old" computer's password.  I haven't used the password since I first got the machine, because it has a fingerprint reader. I tried all my usual passwords, but nothing. I canceled that part, and left it to grab the remaining 5GB while I took off for the RetroDome and The Game Show Show.

Nutshell: this is the same gang which destroyed You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown last year. A double-wide married couple, he is trained as an opera singer, she is more  of a ballroom dancer/musicals soprano. I thought I was going to see a series of TV game shows simulated on stage, but what I got was a 2-act 3-hour musical similar to the 1940's Radio Hour, mostly backstage soap opera set in a TV game show. It doesn't deserve a full review, so here's the mini:

Leading man has an opera-trained voice and has no idea how to relax and just sing. Leading lady was once a wonderful dancer, but that was 60 lbs. ago. All the people in the show except for The Woman Who Plays All The Small Parts were too old for the show. Audio was way too loud (everyone was wearing a face mike, and there were also hand-helds, stand mikes and desk mikes. Most of it sounded strident.

I almost walked out a couple of minutes into the second act, when spolier ) they went all macho man sexist anti-career woman as their message. If I was the leading lady I'd have clocked the sponsor and stomped out.

The set was well done except for the wheel of fortune being too high for any contestant to reach. They did do three snippets of game show with audience members ;participating. The Match Game section was a hoot. They totally misused [livejournal.com profile] kevin_standlee's mike.

Lots of forgettable music, childish lyrics and most of them went on forever.

The cast was very energetic, and they could all nail all the numbers with one more week of rehearsal. And they could stand to cut four numbers and add another game, and pay more attention to when the applause sign should be tuned on.

Not worth the discounted subscriber price.


I was expecting the show to be over by 10:30, but it was 10:53 when I was out the door, and had just enough time to grab some enteric aspirin and dishwashing liquid from Target across the way which closes at 11.

Then some grocery shopping across the street.

Back home, the PC transfer was done, but it was not complete because of those files which needed the old computer's password. I did the trick on the old computer of adding another administrator account, with one of my more usual passwords, and using that to reset the "howeird" account password. But when I tried the transfer again, it still wanted the original password.

So I am running the system-to-factory-settings routine on the ASUS, will set its howeird account to the same password as the new one on the Toshiba, and try again. Let it run overnight.

Plans for tomorrow:
10 am manicure & haircut
lunch at one of the restaurants near the nails place
Home/nap

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howard stateman

September 2022

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