Downtown Durham Update

Over a year ago I wrote a blog about the work going on in downtown Durham, NC. I specifically wrote about the absurd placement of a new fire hydrant in the middle of the street. Well now I can see, sort of, why it was put where it was. It looks like the curbing was going to be extended out further so that the place where the new hydrant was to be placed would be on the sidewalk. That's all well and good except that a year has passed and these photos show how the project is going.





I'm glad I don't pay taxes in Durham, though I suspect that there's a bit of Federal money going into this downtown revitalization project.

Socks

The other day I was helping my wife do some laundry. Of course, in our house, anytime you do a load of laundry, you always find an old load left in the dryer that you have to deal with before you can get your load through the process. Well, in this case the load in the dryer was particularly interesting. It had a bunch of my kid's underwear and other such stuff. There were also a bunch of socks. Anytime you fold laundry with socks, you always have a single or two. Well in this load, there were 12 socks and only one pair in the bunch. Here's a picture.



Who knows where their partners are. Maybe they'll show up in the next load.

New Computer

I recently got yet another computer. I didn't really need it but I didn't know it at the time. Tonights blog is about what I bought and why.

When I left Lilly a few years ago and started a new company, I needed a Windows computer because I was going to sell robotics which would require a Windows computer. I'm normally a Mac kind of guy, but for this application, well, I needed Windows. So I bought a Dell Inspiron 600m. Here's a picture of one:



Over the next year or so, the company didn't make enough money so I went back to work and left the company on a low hum. In the meantime, my lovely wife developed an affection for my Dell computer. She moved it downstairs to the living room and started playing online poker and sudoku and lots of other things while watching TV. She became very attached to it. I think I wrote about how I had to go buy another computer to use. That was the Mac mentioned in a previous blog. Of course, my daughter took over the Mac, but that's another story.

Anyhow, about a month ago, the Dell went on the blink. I came home from work and my wife told me the Dell wasn't working. So I went over and booted it up and it all worked fine. "See," I said, "I must have magic hands." About that time, just as I showed it to her, it locked up. I tried to reboot but it wouldn't happen. After a couple of hours, when it had cooled down, I tried again. It booted up fine, but after a few minutes, maybe when the fan kicked in, it locked up again. So it appeared that it would work just fine after it had cooled down, but when it warmed up, kapow!

It was this juncture that I did something stupid. We booted up and took off all the files that we needed. Then I started trying to figure out what was wrong. I decided to do some sort of disc scan to see if there were any errors. Well, a disk scan takes a long time and you can't get control of the computer back until it's done. It's not hard to figure that it could never get through the disc scan without locking up. It was during the many attempts to get through the disc scan that I was finally able to see for sure that the machine locked up just when the fan came on as I'd suspected. Hmmm! I think "So maybe if it stays cool, I can get through the disc scan." It was still sort of cool outside so I took the computer out and put it on the cold cement porch and let it sit there until it got plenty cold and booted up again. It ran a lot longer but not long enough to get through the disc scan until it locked up again.

I talked to the computer guy at work and he said that it might be a memory problem. So I came home and took out one of the memory chips. And, what do you know, it ran through the disc scan and seemed to be working OK. But with only one 256 MB, it ran really slow: 1/2 hr to boot, 15 minutes to launch the mail program, forever to surf the web. This is because, windows XP consumes all the ram and everything else has to get it's memory from disc swapping. So I got a new memory chip from work and put it in the computer and it booted up and ran fast again. Cool it's fixed. Then the fan came on and it locked up. Crap.

By this time my wife had gone into severe withdraw and showing signs of depression. So I figured it was time to replace the machine. I asked my wife if she would like a new computer for Mother's Day. She looked so happy, so I ordered one. I ordered a similar machine, though, because it's been three years since I got the last one, a similar cost a bit less. Also, I didn't buy Microsoft Office again. The bad news is that this one has the new Vista operating system. It sucks. Anyhow, here's a picture of the new machine.



In the meantime, I tried to figure out how to fix the old machine. I looked on the Dell web site and sent in a problem ticket. They said it was a bad mother board which they could fix for about twice what the computer was worth. So I got to thinking, maybe the only thing wrong with the mother board is that it can't read one of the ram slots and the electrical drain that accompanies the fan coming on exacerbates the problem and causes the lockup. This doesn't have to make sense. It only suggests a possible solution. Don't use the bad slot and jack up the memory in the good slot. It so happened that Staples had a 512 DDR notebook ram dohicky on sale for $40. So I bought one and slipped it in the good slot on the Dell and, viola, back to it's old self.

So now my wife is happy again and I got a new computer that I didn't really need but at least now I can blog at the same time my wife plays Nanosweeper and my daughter plays with her iTunes playlists.

OK, enough of this. So long for now.

An Afternoon on Jordan Lake




So I haven't blogged for a while. And a I got a nasty comment from one of my two readers telling me that I need to start back and that I can't blame it on God. That's not exactly how he said it, but it's close. I haven't had so much to do that I haven't had time. It's more that I've always got a little something to do which I'm always putting off and so I can't blog when there's something else that needs to be done but can be put off a bit longer. I call it "procrastination as art."

I finally got most of those little somethings done and so now I can blog freely for a few days.

Today I'm going to talk about what we did yesterday. But it starts on Friday, or maybe sooner. I work for a small biotech company in Durham. Like most such organizations, we don't make any money. We do something much more interesting. We create value. Recently, we created some more value and so, to celebrate, each employee got a little gift. This past Friday afternoon, we had a small happy hour and everyone got the same gift, some flexible remuneration and a lovely group photo. They said that we shouldn't use it (the money) to pay bills but to do something nice for ourselves.

I came home and told my wife about it and, of course, she had an idea. "Why don't we go to Jordan Lake and rent a motor boat and ride around the lake?" She had already done her homework. There was this place, a marina, that rents motor boats and we could go tomorrow and it would be a lot of fun.

So I called the next morning and reserved a boat for us from 1:30 to 6:30 PM. We loaded up some drinks and snacks and took off for the lake. It was a beautiful day. It was in the mid to high 70's and there were a few fluffy white clouds in the sky. When we got there I went in and read all the rules. The rule book that you had to read had lots of pictures and at the bottom of each page it said "NO EXCEPTIONS!" "NO EXCUSES!" We paid up and off we went. Here's a picture of a boat like the one we rented.



Of course, I had to drive. We took off slowly but pretty soon we got the hang of it and sped up a bit. The first thing we did was head south under Highway 64 and started looking for something interesting to do. "Let's go up the Haw river." But instead of going up the Haw we took off a bit further to the east and went into a little nook as you can see on the map charting our progress.



There were a lot of tree stumps off to one side of the nook and so we went fairly gingerly and stayed in the middle away from the stumps. This path eventually stopped and obviously didn't lead where we had wanted to go. So we got out the big water-proof map that they give you so you don't lose their boat and realized that we went the wrong way. We turned around and took off to where we needed to go. My wife had a bit of trouble figuring out the map and kept looking for a bridge that we should go under to get to the river mouth. Eventually, we figured out that the road that she was looking for was now under water and it all made sense.

Given that I was driving most of the time, we didn't get a lot of pictures. Here's Whitney, sitting up front, enjoying the ride. She's always liked to ride in boats from the first time we put her on a boat at age 2.



And here's our intrepid river boat pilot manning the stern.



So we eventually figured out the map and went a few miles up the Haw river and then came back through the lake and up to the more northern parts where there a few more stumps and trees off to the sides. After about three hours of this, the clouds got a little thicker and it was actually cold when the sun went behind the clouds. So we headed back taking one more little side trip under a bridge before heading back to the marina. Before we left, we went back in to pay for the gas we used. I happened to look on a map on the wall and saw that our trip into the first nook was in a strictly forbidden zone,"NO EXCEPTIONS!" "NO EXCUSES!" Luckily, we didn't hit anything in there and damage the boat. That would have chewed up the rest of my little gift and a lot more.

So that's what we did yesterday. We ain't gonna do nothing much today.

Bye!

Shopping at COSTCO

My wife likes to shop at Costco. Costco is one of those big membership warehouse stores, like Sam's, except that they have liberal policies like paying their employees well and giving them good benefits and they don't try to destroy the environment and other eco-friendly things. It's "Sam's for Liberals". They're from Oregon. Figures!

Anyhow, the problem with a place like this is that they sell things in really big quantities. "What a bargain!!", my wife says as she hauls in a 25 lb. bag of rice.



And so I get around to the subject of tonight's blog. This week, I finally emptied out the last of the 25 lb. bag of rice into the little rice jar that sits on the counter for regular use. All the rice is not yet gone, but I was able to throw away the bag and free up some room in the storage closet. I went back to see when I took the picture shown above which I took soon after the rice came home. I took the picture on February 1, 2006. So it takes this rice eating family a good year to do in 25 lbs. of rice. So if anyone ever asks you how much rice our family eats in a year, you'll know that it's probably less than 25 lbs. but not by much.

Well, that all for tonight.

Khudaa haafiz (good-bye in Urdu)

Marginally Cleaned Up Desk


Since I recently wrote about my computer desk and the wiry mess below it, I thought it might be worth mentioning that I have done a little work to make it a little less of a mess. My wife gave me a new power strip for Christmas. It's one that has some space between the plugs and has the plugs aligned outward. This way all those little black power converter boxes can fit on it without covering up all the other plugs. So I replaced the old two power strips with one new one. I added two little micro-shelves that you can't see to on which to hang some of the wires. I another shelf below the server shelf so I could put in the VCR that feeds the TV box. I stacked the TV box on top of the computer using some little spacer feet. I added a shelf behind the monitor to hold the speakers (Oh, I think they're new also) and the wireless router so the desk is a bit less cluttered behind the monitor. I also added a little headphone-speaker switch (the little black box next to the computer) so that I can listen to the speakers and my daughter can listen to headphones without having to go behind the computer every time we switch computer users. The best thing is that one (usually my wife) can get to the little dust bunnies that used to grow under the wires with the vacuum.


OK, so it's a pretty pathetic life if this is all one can think of to talk about but I poured out my passion last night on the lottery.

Kíhtwám ka-wápamitináwáw   (goodbye to more than one in Cree)

The North Carolina Lottery

About a year ago, North Carolina finally got a state lottery. This is supposedly for education. I hate state run lotteries. If there's something that will get me up on a soapbox fast, it's the lottery. The lottery is one of the lamest, unethical things a state can do. It's a tax on people who can't do math, people who ain't got nothing but dreams. Stupid People. It was always obvious to me and to any moron who manged to look, that a disproportionate amount of the lottery tickets were purchased by people who should have been spending the money on something else, like food and clothing for their children. So basically, the state sets up a mechanism to extract money from the very people that it will have to turn around and support in some other way based on their lower expendable income due to money spent on the stupid lottery. It's not only unethical, it's also inefficient. For all the money we get from them, we only get to keep about 30%. Half goes to the few people that win, and a bunch more goes to the corrupt organizations that run these lotteries. If we really want to screw these people, which is what we're doing, then why don't we just shoot them. It's only marginally less ethical and certainly more monetarily efficient.

For a long time, I was proud of being a North Carolinian. We didn't have no stinkin' lottery. We weren't mean and nasty like those arrogant jerks up North who like to look down on us. Lotteries are tacky and North Carolina was classy. OK, NC has it's problems, but in this instance, we were a model of class. Then all of a sudden all the stupid states in the south started feeling like they were missing out on something that all the other states were enjoying, "Screwing the Stupid People for Fun and Profit." About the only argument for a lottery in North Carolina that I can abide, is that now we get to screw over our own stupid people rather than let Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina do it for us.

The reason that I bring all this up is that the PowerBall lottery got up to $240 million and I got stupid and bought a lottery ticket. Here it is:



Last night they had a drawing and here are the numbers. Some stupid person in Missouri won.



I didn't match a single number. Now I really hate the damn lottery even more.

Görüsædæk (that's good-bye in Azerbaijani)

DOG POO !

No matter how long you live or how well adjusted you are, you never get quite used to stepping in dog poo. It just takes the shine off your day.

Today I was walking around in the woods behind the house, looking at the dead trees aimed at the house. When I walked back to the house I noticed something on the side of my shoe. It had the consistency of muddy clay but unfortunately, it wasn't the right color and it had a subtle but pungent aroma. Damn! Dog Poo! I walked back out into the woods and found what was left of the offending excretion lying in the trail. I used a stick to slick it off to the side. Then I used many of the dead rotting stumps to scape the offending stuff off my shoes. I got most of it off but my wife suggested that I leave the soiled shoes outside.

Maybe I'll go walking in the mall tomorrow to loose up the remains and return my shoes to a state of OK.

May you always have clean shoes.

Good night.

A Bit of Snow Today!


I got up this morning to go for my morning walk and, "Holy Cow!", there was snow on the ground and it was coming down like gangbusters. That was all the excuse I needed not to go for my walk.

Actually, there wasn't that much snow, only about an inch. But we haven't seen much snow around here since Global Warming really took off a few years ago. And it wasn't really coming down all that fast, but it was exciting just the same. It's been pretty warm around here lately and so the snow melted almost immediately on hitting the pavement. So I went to work as usual. School was canceled. There was a planned delayed opening and so I guess they decided to just "call it a day."

Anyhow, by about 8:30 AM the snow turned to sleet and then rain and by the afternoon, the snow was little more than a memory and we were left with only a cold rainy day. Yuk!

Well, enough for now.

Auf Wiedersehen!

American Idol

I just finished watching this years first episode of American Idol. It was a two hour special. I really like the season's early shows the best. That's when they (Randy, Paula and Simon) go around to various cities in the US and audition some of the worse "talent" that one can imagine. Where do they find those people? Unfortunately, its the most untalented and pathetic people that make for the best entertainment.

This week they were in Minneapolis. There are a lot of people out there in the heartland that can sing good enough to get through a shower without breaking any glass. But not a lot better. They are often surrounded by people who can't sing at all and are completely tone deaf. So these shower singers get the feeling that maybe they can sing good enough to go in front of millions of people and sing. Unfortunately, the tone deaf people only encourage them if only to make them feel good and because they don't know any better. It's all done with the best of intentions and with the most disastrous of results. It's like some illiterate reading my blog and then convincing me that I can write. But I know better.

Anyhow, I enjoyed it. It's on again tomorrow night. They'll be in Seattle. But I won't be able to watch. I'll be at choir practice. Maybe I'll record it using my little device that I mentioned in my last blog.

Time for bed. Au Revoir.

What's on TV?

Some time ago I bought this little box that shoots TV onto my computer screen. It's called TVMax and it looks a lot like my little computer. You can record TV shows and do all the little things that one does with a DVR like TIVO. It can do a lot of other things, too. Actually, I bought it so that I could turn all of our old VCR tapes into electronic versions so that those precious moments wouldn't be loss when the tapes go to crap and I can no longer find a VCR to play them on.

Anyhow, I was sitting down to play on the computer tonight and was watching the tube over in the corner and I discovered that there was nothing on. Oh there were lots of things but few were really worth watching. Here's a sampler:

There was a Tom Hanks movie on channel 6.


Channel 16 was trying to sell something:


There was a football game on Channel 13:


CNN on Channel 29 was all over those lost boys in Missouri:


And there was a commercial for cheese on HGTV, Channel 76:



I liked this one the best. The black and white cows look real nice against the green grass and blue sky.

So that's what I was doing on a Saturday night, although it was Monday night before I got around to finishing this post.

Adios, Amigos!!

Christmas Letter

My wife recently wrote our Christmas letter. You know, that thing you insert into your Christmas card telling how much more exciting your life is than that of your friends. Well, I thought I'd post it, only it doesn't sound so exciting. I've decided that, as I get a little older, "exciting" ain't all it's cracked up to be. With minor edits to give anonymity to my family, here it is:

Greetings from North Carolina!

I've been procrastinating about writing this annual letter because we've had a very uneventful year - which is a blessing. This morning I asked Phil what were some of the big highlights of the year and the only thing he could come up with was: We got a new bird feeder!

Phil did change jobs this year from company A to company B (not much of a change, eh?). They are both small companies, but he's happier at his current place where his favorite former boss is now his boss again. He's still singing in the church choir and is about to start a term as elder.

I continue to volunteer at church and school. This year I kept my sewing machine humming making costumes for the school play (Hounds of Baskerville - I made a great Sherlock Holmes coat and hat!) and the youth choir musical (Seuessical - bird girls, fish, monkeys - you name it!) and am about to start all over again on the Wizard of Oz. I'm beginning to get bored and may have to find a new venture this year.

Son (or "alternative son" as he now calls himself) is now a happy sophomore at Earlham and pleasantly surprising his parents by doing better than they expected. He recently decided to do a double major - adding math to his economics degree. Unfortunately for us, that means he had to drop his plans to do a semester abroad in Vienna where we were already making plans to visit him. He sings in the Earlham chorale and has a steady girlfriend (from Seattle). He spent the entire Thanksgiving break in bed, and a week later ended up in the ER where he was diagnosed with mono. He managed to make it through exams and is now recovering at home (by sleeping days and staying up all night).

Daughter started high school this year and is loving it. She's in band (French horn) and especially likes her Japanese class. She continues to take tap dance, sing whenever she can, and always has a pencil in her hand for drawing. She cut off all her hair this year, so no more tangles!

We did not take any big trips this year. Daughter was sick most of spring break - our usual travel time, but we did manage to get in a short trip to the mountains. We had our annual July trip to the beach where we enjoyed the company of Phil's best friend from high school and his wife. We spent Thanksgiving at the beach for the 14th year in a row - always a great time for Scrabble, long walks and watching the dolphins play right off shore. We also had a beach weekend in October when we celebrated Uncle Frank's 80th birthday!

That's about all the news from our corner. We hope you and your family have a Christmas blessed with joy and peace.

And that's it.

Of course, I'll have to toss in a few pictures just to make it all worthwhile.

Big Ass Bird!!

I was wandering around in the woods behind the house a few days ago when, all of a sudden, this very large creature rose from the ground. It was a big ass Owl. He landed on a branch and stared right at me. He looked pissed. So I ran into the house and got my trusty digital camera. I took 3 pictures of the sucker, but only one was unblurry enough to make out the owl. It's times like this when I think I need a camera with a good zoom lens, maybe one of those expensive SLR digitals. Anyhow, here he is.



It's hard to tell from the picture how big this guy is but I would estimate him to be about 14-18 inches tall, or maybe bigger, sitting up on that branch. Anyhow, I tried to get closer and he flew away.

I think he lives back in woods behind the house. Often, if I'm outside at night, I can hear a pretty loud hooting not far from the house, just into the woods. He's helping the cats rid the area of rodents. He's a good neighbor and I like him, even if he don't like me.

I'm gonna go look in Wikipedia and see if I can find out more about him.

Bye for now.

OK, I'm back. Wikipedia was not very helpful in figuring out what kind of owl it was so I went downstairs and got out our Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Birds. It's a Barred Owl. If you search Barred Owl in Wikipedia, you get better information. There's even an audio clip of the barred owl. However, the audio doesn't sound like the sound that I hear in the woods at night. Maybe it's something different, like Sasquatch, maybe.

OK, bye for good this time.

OK, I'm back again. The idea of having Sasquatch in the back yard got me a bit concerned so I did a bit more digging. I looked up "owl sounds" in Google and found, can you believe this, all the damn owl sounds you could ever imagine. There were 4 different ones for the Barred owl. The first two sounded like the one from Wikipedia, but the third, the "hoo-wah" sound, was like the sound I hear in the woods at night. So it is my friend, the barred owl and not sasquatch after all.

Now I can sleep soundly. Bye, and I'm serious this time.

A Simple Test of Google's Picture Thing

I recently signed up for the Google Picassa picture thing that lets you put pictures on the web so that other people can see them. I'm sure Google is doing this so that they can plaster ads next to your pictures and rake in more revenue. I tend to like the stuff Google does because they tend to make it simple to use and they have the motto "Don't be evil". So I have, for better or worse, decided to trust them with a lot of stuff.

I'm now going to test the utility of their photo warehousing for putting things in a blog. I have a picture of some of my sand art. I'm no longer a sand castle builder, there are way too many people out there that do it better than me. I am now a sand artist. OK here goes...

Crap! It doesn't work. Now I'll have to post it the old-fashion way since you're all excited about seeing my sand art. OK here goes again...



Crap! It came in sideways. How did that happen? Let's try again. OK here goes again...

Crap! It came in sideways again. I won' bother to show it to you again. OK, one more try.


There, I finally got it right. It appears that if you rotate a photo and save it, what you really save is the photo in the original orientation and an instruction to rotate it. When you open it again, some document will read the instruction and some will ignore it. Apparently, all the programs I use read the instruction and Google Upload does not. So I had to actually display the picture with the correct orientation and do a screen capture to get what I wanted. I bet the image quality suffered but I'm not going to do anymore work here to find out.

So what started out as a simple blog to test something, turned into a lot more work. But, who cares? I'm on vacation. You got to see some really nice sand art and I killed an hour.

So that's it for today.

Merry Christmas.

My Morning Walk

I haven't written in this old blog in a while so I figured it's about time to try again. Tonight I'm going to talk about my morning walks. I started a new job back in April at a little company in downtown Durham. Here's a picture of the building. This has nothing to do with my story of my walk but I like to post pictures.



Anyhow, when I started working there, it became obvious that this crowd was a bit more into physical activity than some groups I've been associated with. My boss runs marathons, one guy rides his bike to work on occasion. Lots of people run. So I decided that I needed to get some exercise. I hate to run. I never liked it even when I ran track in high school. But I like a good walk. But walking doesn't give you enough of a workout in a short enough time. So I figured maybe a good hill or two might do the trick. I've been doing this since sometime in June of this year.

So here's my morning routine. The damn alarm clock goes off at 6:15 AM. I still hate to get up in the morning but now I do it pretty quickly anyhow. There's nobody to talk to so it doesn't matter if I'm grumpy. I sit up and put on the underwear and socks lying on the floor from the night before. I stand up and put on some shorts or new exercise pants that my wife recently bought me, depending on the weather. Then I put on a t-shirt followed by a fleece shirt if it's cool. Finally, I put on some old tennis shoes and make my way down stairs. Oh yeah, somewhere in the first few minutes I manage to pee. Anyhow, once downstairs I usually feed the cats and, if it's cold, put on a jacket and cap and head out the door. This is usually around 6:22 AM.

Here's an aerial photo of my walk. My guess is that its about 1.4 miles long.



We live on a decent hill so I get to start out on a pretty steep downhill. That's good since I'm rarely awake enough to climb up a hill. I just stumble along for the first few hundred feet. This time of year the sun hasn't come up yet and it's still pretty dark. I like that except it can be a little scary at times. This morning as I was passing the woods on the way down the first hill, a loud snort followed by a lot of rustling in the woods startled me a bit. I quickly realized it was probably deer. The deer get up early. Yesterday, as I was leaving the house, five of the suckers were peacefully munching on the neighbor's shrubberies. I smiled, waved and went on my way. Anyhow, I venture down the hill till I get to North Lakeshore Drive and walk along it for a short piece and then head up the big hill. When I first started walking, this hill would have me seriously puffing by the time I got to the top. It's gotten a bit easier but I still warm up a bit going up the hill and still look longingly at the peak on the way up. Then it's a short downhill followed by long gentle incline and then another little drop and I'm about half-way through.

So now I hit the second heart-smart hill. It's not quite as long as the first but I know it's there. At the peak, I take a long slow downhill back down to the lake and a flat walk back to my street. My street is nice and steep so that gets my heart going once more before I get back to the house around 6:45 AM. In the meantime, the sun's come up and the coffee has brewed and I get to kick back with a poptart and some coffee and surf the net for the days news for a half hour before I'm off to the shower, shave and out the door to work.

I don't walk on weekends.

So that's it for now.

Sometime soon I plan to talk about razors. I recently got a promo razor in the mail that has 6 blades. That should be worth a story.

Ultimatum Gone Awry!

I was looking through some of my old photos and saw this ad. I guess I thought it was funny enough to save. So I guess it's funny enough to share.



Hmmm! As I looked further down the list. I found another interesting advertisement related to cats. I think this is pretty cool, too.

So enough for today and enough on cats for a while.

Cats Need Water Too

Where does your cat get water? Some cats have water bowls. Actually, a lot of cats have water bowls, but only a few drink out of them. Most cats drink out of the toilet or, when they are otuside, they drink from the bird bath. But my cat Lucy will only drink from the sink. If she's thirsty and she sees you loitering around the sink, she'll leap up on the table and then across to the counter and the walk up behind the sink. She's gotten too fat to leap directly from the foor to the counter. Then she just looks at you like you know exactly what she wants. Which, of course, you do. So you start a slow stream of water and she leans over lapping until she's had her fill. This is usually followed by a short period of cat sneezing. She then jumps down and is on her way.

Office Guys

Good evening. I just wanted to update you all on where my friends, the office guys, have gone. They no longer stand on my macs at home but have moved to where office guys ought to be. They're at my office standing on my big IBM computer. Here's a picture.




Maybe I'll get a better, less washed out picture later. But for now...

The Wonders of Wireless


I was looking under my computer the other day and noticed that, although it has 2 forms of wireless communication, it still has a boat load of wires. Here, look for yourself.



See, that's a lot of wires. So I decided to figure out what all those wires were doing, you know, sort of map it out. Oh, I knew what each wire was for when I added it to the heap, but after a while, it's gotten to be a bit of a mess. So I sat down on the old Mac (see previous post), launched a CAD program, drew out each wire. Here's my diagram. You can click on it to see a bigger version.



You'll notice from looking at the legend on the right, that not only are there a lot of wires, there are a lot of different things being carried on those wires, in lots of different ways and with different protocols.

First there's the power. The power is AC, 110V at 60 Hz coming out of the wall. From there, it goes to the surge protector into which lots of things are plugged, including a power strip. Most of the things that are plugged in are those nasty little transformer boxes that Martha Stewart was complaining about at the last SONY shareholders meeting. These convert the AC (alternating current) into DC (direct current) and drop the voltage down to about 12 V in the process. Everything, except the monitor, has a little box.

Next comes the USB 2.0 wires. USB 2.0 is a protocol for plugging things into your computer. It's a very common protocol and is used to connect the printer and the TV (yes, my computer has a TV) to the computer. A USB 2.0 line runs to the monitor which acts as a hub for even more USB things including the mouse and the camera and ipods when needed. When USB 2.0 came along, it replaced the much slower USB 1.0 and allowed USB to be used for many more things.

Next is the cable TV line. The cable presents all sorts of goodies over one line and the devices on the end suck out the part they need. We get TV, internet and phone over the cable in our house. Time-Warner gets a big check every month. So the cable comes into a splitter. One line goes to the TV tuner, which sucks out the TV signal. The other line goes to the cable modem which sucks out the internet and the phone and sends them separate ways. The internet protocol is called TCP/IP. Guess what IP stands for? The phone protocol is called VOIP or voice over IP, which, I think is a subset of TCP/IP. The TV signal is just a big nasty analog signal which the TV tuner splits out into the various channels.

OK, next in line is the FireWire cable that connects to an old 80G external hard drive. FireWire was introduced by Apple a number of years ago for fast data transfer. It made streaming of video straight from your didital camcorder to your computer possible. SONY uses it with its camcorders and calls it something else (iSight?). Nerds call it IEEE 1394. It almost made it big until USB 2.0, which is almost as fast, came along. It's slowly going away, but you have to admit, "FireWire" is a cool name.

Next in line is Ethernet. The cable modem takes the cable signal and sucks out the internet and sends it to the wireless router with an ethernet wire. The protocol is still TCP/IP. The router then sends the internet out over more ethernet wires to the old Mac, the new Mac, and the 40G Snap Server. The router also sends the internet out in other ways which I'll mention later. All the wires and wireless communication on this side of the cable modem is handled by the router and is called a LAN, or Local Area Network.

No modern electronic equipment would be complete without shipping around some sound and so there is an analog audio signal going to the headphones and one going from the old analog camcorder to the digitizing box which also happens to be the TV tuner mentioned earlier. I need to buy some better speakers for this setup. Of course that would mean more wires.

You have to get the lovely graphics out of the computer to the monitor and there is a cable to do that. I think it's called DVI or something. It has a complex looking plug with lots of thingys in it. It runs from the computer to the monitor and is, by far, the fattest wire of the bunch.

I mentioned earlier that we get our telephone out of the cable line. The cable modem converts the digital info from the cable into analog and sends it into a box connected to our old analog phone system. There's a little splitter box so that I can run a phone connection back to our printer, which also happens to be a FAX machine and therefore needs a phone line.

The reason that I started talking about all this is that I was stuck by the irony of having so many wires in the face of wireless technology. Well, this is the other thing that the router does. Using a protocol called 802.11g, it send out information embedding the TCP/IP protocol in radio waves. That way, my wife can sit downstairs and get to the internet (and play on-line poker) without having to run an ethernet cable down the stairs, through the kitchen and into the family room. My son can also connect when he comes home from college without wires. This 802.11g is better known as WiFi. It's the stuff you can also get at StarBucks. Ain't wireless great!!

USB 2.0 is a great way to do wires, but for some types of short range communication, there is another wireless protocol called BlueTooth. BlueTooth is actually the name of some sea god, but it's been stolen to describe this short range protocol used for peripherals. My keyboard communicates with the computer via BlueTooth. I also had a BlueTooth mouse but it weighed so much that I switched it out for a cheap lightweight multibuttoned USB mouse. Bluetooth is slowly taking over USB for some peripherals. You'll see phones advertised on TV as having BlueTooth that let you suck calendars and addresses and phone numbers and songs off your computer without having to find the right wire.

And last on my list is the analog video signal coming from the old camcorder to the digitizer in the TV box. This is so I can convert all my old camcorder movies to digital to save for posterity. When I get through digitizing the 8mm tapes, I'll move on to the even older VCR camcorder tapes.

So there you have it -- The wires in my life and why they are all important to me. Thanks for paying attention.

Finally, here's a dynamic picture of my wires so you can watch each one being added. I think you have to click on it to see it in action.

Boring Life

I sometimes think that maybe I have a boring life. Just to drive the point home, I'm going to describe my Saturday morning. Of course, I'll throw in the usual historical perspective to set the mood.

It was pretty dry around here from July through August, so the grass in the yard pretty much quit growing and in many places, especially the shady spots, it just died and turned to dirt. At lease it looks like it turned to dirt, since there's no grass there. However, starting in September, with the arrival of the pretty wimpy hurricane, Ernesto, we've gotten a fair amount of rain. Maybe 6 or 7 inches already this month. Consequently, the grass that had barely survived sprung back into action. I mowed the front lawn last Saturday and it needed it pretty bad again this week. Here's what it looked like before I started:



That's a lot of grass for just one week. So I got out my trusty mower. This lawn mower is pretty amazing. When I needed a new lawn mower about 16 years ago, I looked in Consumer Reports and they rated a cheap no-frills Sears mower as a "Best Buy". I think it cost about $110 dollars. So I bought it. I was intent on taking care of my new mower so I looked in the manual to see how to do it right. They said you should drain the oil every winter and replace it in the spring when you start using it again. I did that for the first year. Since then it's gotten zero maintenance. I mean none, nadda, zip. Oh I would occasionally put some oil in it when it got low, but I haven't even done that for a couple of years. I'm scared to look at the oil level. I don't think it would be detectable. For the last few years, I think the only form of lubrication that it gets is the heavy parts of the gasoline that squeak past the piston rings. Given its age and the wear on the rings, that may be substantial. But it just keeps running. I pull it out of the garage, pump the gas thingy a few times, pull the cord a couple of times and off we go. I guess it's about 123 years old in mower years. Here she is:


It takes about 35 minutes to mow the entire lawn. I did the front first and then moved to the back. While I was working on the back, my lovely wife came out and started a job she's wanted to do for years, edging the sidewalk and driveway. That means cutting the grass cleanly away from the concrete with a little trench looking thing between the two. She saw how my sister had done it when we were at their house a few weeks ago. My sister's yard looks real nice. I think they work on it a lot. I mentioned that we would have a nice yard too but that our children take up so much of our time. My much ignored high school age daughter thought that was funny. My son, who is off at college, would have laughed too if he had been there. The thing is, yards are a competitive sport in North Raleigh and Cary. In Chapel Hill the tendency is more to let things "go natural." My wife would have none of such nonsense. Respectable people have little trenches between their grass and concrete and we are respectable people and so, for the next few hours, we were involved in putting little trenches between our grass and concrete. We eventually got the job done and although it looks a little ragged, I think it will heal with a bit of wind and rain and look real nice. Here's the finished product:



So job done, I went into the house, took an ibuprofen, and chilled with some ice water while surfing the web.

Till next time.

Same as Usual

On the way home from picking up my daughter at the annual youth choir kickoff pizza party, I noticed an interesting sign posted by one of those mini-storage places in Carrboro. You know, those places where serial killers hide bodies.

Anyhow, it was getting dark but I stopped and got a snapshot. Good sense of humor for a somewhat dry business. I guess there's no reason to drop by again tommorrow after all,

New Blogger

Today I just switched over to the new version of Google's blogging thingy. I'll do a few Blogs and let you know how it works. So far it looks about the same.

Bye!

The Blue Chairs

A long time ago, maybe 14 years or so, my wife bought a couple of very Blue Plastic Beach Chairs. Every time we went to the beach, I packed up those lovely Blue Chairs. Here's a picture of my lovely wife sitting in one of the two Blue Beach Chairs. This was taken in the summer of 1994.



Anyhow, starting sometime in the nineties, we began staying in the same beach house each year. And each year I would pack up the Blue Chairs and take them to the beach. Problem was, my wife hated the Blue Beach Chairs. They were too low, they didn't have arms, they got hot out in the sun and they were a little heavy. They were made of a lot of very fine Blue Plastic. About eight years ago we decided to get rid of the Blue Chairs, so we just left them down at the beach house. For the next few years they were always there when we came back. Their devotion to us didn't endear them to my wife. She still hated them. About four years ago, when we returned again in the summer, the Blue Chairs were gone. For me, that vacation just wasn't the same. We didn't actually take them down to the beach with us, but knowing that they were there always provided a sense of continuity for me.

This year we went back to the beach again as usual. The pain of losing the Blue Chairs was ebbing but I still felt it some extent. One day, as we were sitting out on the beach, building sand castles, catching some rays and waves and downing some brewskies, my cousin shouted out, "It's the Blue Chairs". We all turned around and looked and, I'll be damned, there were the Blue Chairs out sitting under an umbrella, enjoying the sun, just like the good old days. Turns out they had only moved over one house. I spoke with the renters who had brought them down to the beach, explained my special attachment to the Blue Chairs and asked if I could take a picture. They clearly thought I was crazy but indulged me anyhow. And here they are, twelve years later. They're aging much better than any of us.



And that's the end of my story of the Blue Chairs.

Bye for now.

NC Boys Choir's Chamber Choir Reunion

A few years ago, when my son was still in high school, we sang in the Chamber Choir associated with the NC Boys Choir. The Chamber Choir was composed of some high school kids who had sung in the main choir as kids, some dads, and a few friends who liked to sing. At our Christmas 2004 concert in Henderson NC, I was able to persuade the high school kids in the choir to pose while showing off one of the neat features of our new choir robes. I posted that picture on this blog some time ago.



Last night, thanks to organizing by Adrian Randall, the high school guys, most of whom are now in college, got together at BoJangles. I was invited along as the honorary "Old Man". We all ate a "Chicken Supreme Meal" which has 3 week's worth of the RDA for grease and calories and drank Sweet Tea which is 57.3% sugar.

Afterwards, I took a picture of the group.



Bye!

Pictures from Sunset Beach

Hi Blog readers. Not much to say right now. We went to Sunset Beach last week and had a great time. For now I'll just post the pictures that I took. Sorry, but they're a little heavy on the sand castles and I didn't bother to rotate a couple of them.

Enjoy. See you later.

Pictures from the Beach 2006